Amy Meyers

I've been extremely fortunate on many fronts. One is that I received an extraordinary education, particularly at the University of Chicago, where I was an undergraduate, and at Yale as a graduate student, and my professors became mentors for life. So I have always had, even to this day, brilliant and supportive people who have generously been there to ensure that I had the best, richest conversations to take the programs that I've been interested in developing forward. That mentorship that grew out of my educational experience continued through my life, and that was very important. I also have had the very best of colleagues. As a curator, when I was at the Huntington Library Art Museum and Botanical Gardens for many, many years, I worked with very special people in all of those settings - the library, the museum, and the gardens - to develop programs across the whole of the institution in Los Angeles for a very diverse public. So colleagues were very important. At Yale, both within the Yale Center for British Art itself and across the university's many collections - the Yale University Art Gallery, the Libraries, the Natural History Museum, the Peabody - and then across the whole of the faculty, I had the richest and most productive community that had a vested interest in the institution I was running and were there to help and to support the programming. And this was also international, because I was the CEO of one of Yale's study centers in London at the same time, the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art in London. So the international connection back to the UK gave me access to a very broad international community of scholars and students who also were there to promote the work of our institutions.

I think generosity, and that your time is not your own. It is to be shared. And that really should be something that drives you every day, and be natural, because you want to be generous with your time to help your colleagues and the students with whom you're working, to share your knowledge, but also to learn from others, and that takes a kind of openness. I think that generosity and openness are quite critical. I mean, you can develop all the expertise in the world, but if you don't share your time with people, and you don't share that expertise openly, and you're not open to both criticism and to learning from others, you will go nowhere, and you will not be effective. I think that teaching is really fundamental - always to be the best teacher you can, but also being open to being taught. No matter what level you may find yourself, no matter how far you yourself may go, always being open to learning is really important at the same time that you're teaching. And you don't have to be in a university to be teaching and being taught. It can be anywhere in life.

I would say, make sure you're following your passion, that you're being driven by your passion. That's a luxury not all people have - the luxury of choosing what they want to do in life. But if you have that luxury, or can create it for yourself, then make sure that you really are invested in something that's deeply meaningful to you, and that you choose a career where you really feel you can make a major contribution to society. Make sure that you have an understanding of the power of art, both to teach us about where we come from as human beings and where we stand today, and that you have an understanding of how it can empower people within our cultures. And that goes across all human cultures. Be open to learning and generous with your time for teaching.

The values that I believe should drive people in leadership positions are generosity, a belief in the humanities and a support of it, and a belief in the power and importance of the arts in human society across the board. I would say a profound respect for all people of all backgrounds and of all histories, and an openness to exchange of ideas, and a belief that that exchange is what drives the best developments in culture.