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In a response to the letter from the Waxahachie Chamber of Commerce, Secretary Adams succinctly responded with what must be the Smithsonian position on the matter of dispersion until the Board of Regents is able to further clarify and approve a broader-based role for the Institution:
     
I have been personally supportive of the Superconducting Super Collider Project since its inception. I think it will make an important contribution to maintaining our country's position in the vanguard of world science. Its scale may not be immediately apparent to the casual visitor because so much of it is underground, but it will assuredly become a mecca for high-energy physicists and the source of a stream of research findings that will significantly shape our understanding of some of the most basic and universal of all scientific laws.

That the presence of such a facility should be associated in some appropriate way with a museum is also a proposition that I find personally compelling. The SSC represents the culmination of a long and distinguished series of attempts to probe the nature and structure of matter and energy. Both the new knowledge that has been gained and the story of the research itself constitute highly worthwhile subjects for exhibitions. They would help to make the rationale for this work intelligible to a broad public.

You are probably as familiar as I with the shortcomings of the U.S. pre-college educational system, particularly with respect to science and technology. This has been widely recognized as a national concern, and many efforts are under way to address the problem. If a museum goes forward at what will become the largest single facility of its kind anywhere that is devoted to a single, major theme of basic scientific research, one would hope that it might become the locus of an educational effort as well. Our world leadership in most fields of scientific research is, after all, still unquestioned. Hence the case deserves to be made that this leadership needs to be undergirded by a continuing flow of young scientific talent.

Having affirmed all of the above, however, I must now express strong reservations about some of the assumptions that seem to be implicit in your letter. We at the Smithsonian are indeed beginning to discuss new ways to share our collections and our experience in museum programs with institutions and localities around the country. The Smithsonian's original charter, after all, commits it to "the increase and diffusion of knowledge" (italics added). But any such