The Brooklyn Museum is progressive. Why is the left attacking it?

Those goals have become increasingly ambitious, if not unattainable, for those who seek to uphold the country’s liberal humanist traditions. From that perspective, it’s all too easy to imagine a talent crisis in the coming years, if not tomorrow—a pool of people inspired to lead academic and cultural institutions shrinking until it no longer exists, amid the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts and chaos that each new week seems to bring. Just days ago, Collegiate, the 396-year-old Upper West Side school, announced the resignation of its head, David Lourie, after just four years, after an internal report found “troubling issues of religious and cultural bias.”

The average tenure of a private school principal has fallen from 10 years in 2012 to seven years in 2020. The National Association of Independent Schools predicted that one in five principals who started in the 2021-22 school year would be gone within three years. For any nonprofit, such instability comes with problems with staff retention, enrollment, membership dues and fundraising. And all of this is happening against a backdrop of rising anti-intellectualism and a financial free fall that has led to the closure of at least 16 four-year colleges since early last year. The most recent of these was Wells College in Aurora, New York, which cited “an overall negative sentiment toward higher education” as one of the many insurmountable challenges it faces after 156 years.

Occupying a Beaux-Arts building on Eastern Parkway since 1897, the Brooklyn Museum is the second-largest museum in New York City. It is a particularly unusual target of progressive activists. It promotes art that conservatives loathe and has a long and celebrated history of championing racially and ethnically diverse painters, sculptors and videographers who often worked on the fringes of society. Fundamental to its image is the 1999 exhibition “Sensation,” which brought the museum into a dispute with Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the Catholic Church, which joined in their anger over Chris Ofili’s “The Blessed Virgin Mary” and other artworks that ran counter to conventional taste and depicted a black woman as the Mother of God surrounded by images from pornographic magazines. The city threatened to cut off funding to the museum, and Mr. Giuliani tried to evict it from its premises.

Arnold Lehman, the museum’s director at the time, ran it for another 16 years, retiring in 2015 because it was a crowd-puller, and his successor Pasternak has continued it in that vein. One of last year’s exhibitions, “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” was designed to appeal specifically to post-#MeToo left-wing preferences. It didn’t—not because it was seen as not radical enough, but because it was widely viewed as intellectually shallow and politically knee-jerk.

After the 34 protesters were arrested outside the museum earlier this month, the institution’s response was hardly one of vengeance. A museum spokesperson acknowledged a “devastating” use of force by police in an interview with the art site Hyperallergic, but stressed that the administration had not called them — the officers had the authority to come because the museum is city property. The museum promised not to press charges and hoped to work with law enforcement on de-escalation efforts in the future. But this was no appeasement. Protesters continued anyway, painting the words “Blood on your hands” on the path to Ms. Pasternak’s building.