Piotr Redlinski for The New York TimesDoctoral students at the American Museum of Natural History include Edward Stanley (with lizards), Dawn Roje (with flatfish) and Phil Barden (with ants, collected by sucking on tube). 
Beyond the noisy throngs marveling at the dinosaurs, the dioramas and the immense blue whale, up on the fifth floor where visitors are not allowed, the American Museum of Natural History takes on an entirely different character.
Pedro Peloso (with frog). The neatly labeled metal lockers that line the hallway are much like the stacks of a research library, except that instead of books there are many of the museum’s millions of specimens, from ants in amber to dry-mounted birds. Signs point the way to invertebrates, entomology, ornithology. Here, it is the quiet home of the Richard Gilder Graduate School, whose 13 students are earning doctorates in the specialized field of comparative biology, teasing out what fossils from the Gobi Desert and leeches and frogs have to reveal about the evolutionary tree of life. The museum is the first in the nation accredited to offer a doctorate in its own name.
But around the country, all kinds of museums are venturing deeper into the world of education, finding new ways to use their collections in research and teacher training, and bringing in more students, in person and virtually. Many have entered into partnerships with local universities. Last year, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry introduced a master’s in science education with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Getty Conservation Institute is in partnership with the University of California, Los Angeles, in a master’s in conservation of ethnographic and archeological materials. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York joins with Parsons, the New School for Design, in a master’s in the history of decorative arts and design.
And it may not be long before others try to follow the Natural History Museum’s lead in offering their own degree. “We’ve had inquiries from quite a few other museums, and they’re watching what we’re doing with interest,” says John Flynn, the paleontologist who is dean of the Gilder Graduate School, in its third year and accredited since 2009. “Many museums already have a lot of what you need — the collections, the curators, the libraries, the tradition of research.”
The Museum of Natural History, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, also has built online graduate courses in science that are used, for credit, by eight colleges and universities, and this month was approved to participate in a state-financed pilot program in which it will develop and offer a master’s in teaching for earth science.
“There’s been a redefinition of the schoolhouse, as the roles of different institutions are being blurred,” says Ellen V. Futter, the president of the museum.
All told, about 100 graduate students, including visiting students from the museum’s longtime partner universities and postdoctoral fellows, roam the fifth floor. Gilder itself accepts only four or five students a year, an eclectic group of American and international scholars, some straight from college, some with master’s degrees and years of work experience as a veterinary technician or a high school biology teacher.
On a sunny morning this spring, the four first-years — and two visiting students from other New York grad schools — gathered for their “Evolution” seminar in a cozy classroom that reflects the museum’s Victorian character. It has a fireplace, bay window with window seats, and huge mounted caribou head with elaborately arching antlers. “Evolution” is one of only three required classes. (The others are “Grantsmanship, Ethics and Communications,” in which students write grant proposals — and sometimes get money — and “Systematics and Biogeography,” which deals with the relationships among species and organization of life, past and present.)
For an hour and a half, Jin Meng, a paleontology curator who team-teaches the class, talked about the morphological differences between New World and Old World monkeys, the history of the research and fossil finds, and how delicately Darwin had to approach the new concept of human evolution.
In many ways, it could have been a graduate seminar at any research university. But the Natural History Museum’s program has some real differences. It is four years instead of the usual five. And most students go on extended field trips around the globe.
Tamar Lewin is an education reporter for The Times.
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