Ethics Scenario #91: Harristown City Museum

91.  Allyson is a curator of the Harristown City Museum, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. She is an art lover, and is frustrated that the museum lacks the capacity to exhibit hundreds of interesting pieces of art that languish in the basement storage room. She has just moved into a new apartment, and decides to borrow some of these pieces to furnish the walls of her apartment. She types a memo outlining which pieces she is borrowing, signs it, and places it in the file that is used by the museum to keep track of any loans of museum-owned works of art to its peer institutions. She also dutifully enters this into a computer database that electronically stores this information. She fully intends to return these items when she tires of them, or if she is no longer employed by the museum.

a. Is Allyson’s behavior ethical?