My big problem lies elsewhere. I’m instinctively suspicious of, and resistant to, “carding” procedures, meaning any admission policy based on presenting personal identification, which is what the Met is asking for from New York State residents who want to keep paying what they wish.

This potentially discriminates against a population of residents who either don’t have legal identification or are reluctant to show the identification they have. And it plays directly into the hands of the anti-immigrant sentiment that is now poisoning this country. I cannot remember a time when a museum’s unqualified demonstration of “doors open to all” would carry more positive — I would say necessary — political weight. This is my single biggest reservation about the Met’s admission-by-I.D. policy.

And even for legally documented citizens I see potential problems. The Met says it will not turn people away even if they don’t present an I.D., though it will remind them to bring an I.D. on a return visit. I don’t know what kind of guidelines will be in place for delivering such “warnings,” but I can easily imagine a young person who may have no I.D. feeling discouraged from returning to the museum.

SMITH And young people are very important. For example, the Met will allow students from New Jersey and Connecticut to pay as they wish. Why shouldn’t that apply to students everywhere? People want to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States; a more visually literate society produces more people able to design things for factories to make. Museums directly inspire and cultivate talent and creativity. To exclude people from them is a loss that can be measured in economics, and happiness. The “pursuit of happiness” wasn’t mentioned in the Declaration of Independence because it sounds good. It is an important aspect of a nation’s health, on all fronts.

So I worry that the Met’s plan is classist, and nativist. It divides people into categories — rich and poor, native and foreign — which is exactly what this country does not need right now. I think this is tied to the abstract way wealth is accrued these days. In the last Gilded Age the rich had a much more literal sense of the suffering their fortunes were built on and a greater need to give back.

COTTER In the pre-integration 1950s and early 1960s, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama admitted black visitors only on Tuesdays. Technically, “everybody” could enter the museum, but only if they adhered to the admission policy. And that policy effectively discouraged an entire population from ever considering the museum anything but alien territory. I am very wary of potential psychological deterrents of this kind, not only as they impact the visitor population, but also as they affect the continuing viability of the Met itself, and other institutions that present themselves as being culturally comprehensive. They need, on every level, from the reception of visitors at the door to the experience of history delivered in the galleries, to make us know this is “our history, our place.”

SMITH The Met says it is the only major museum in the world with a “pure” pay-as-you-wish policy. Their attitude is that all other museums charge one way or another, including for special exhibitions, as if to say: This is inevitable, and now we will too. Actually it should be just the opposite. Pay as you wish is a principle that should be upheld and defended, a point of great pride. The city should be equally proud of it. No one else has this, although they should. It indicates a kind of attitude, like having the Statue of Liberty in our harbor. It is, symbolically speaking, a beacon.