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THE SECRETARY'S CLOSING STATEMENT

I am happy to make some closing remarks, but I hope they will not necessarily be considered as conclusive and if anybody has comments I hope they will bring them up. Coming to this meeting reminds me of some feelings I had about ten years ago when I took the job of running the Smithsonian. Being Secretary, I thought, would be a little bit like running one of those Hungarian horse acts. I always say Hungarian because I think of the Hungarians as being good at it. A man starts off in a circus ring standing on one large horse, on which he is bouncing along. By the end of the act he is riding about eighteen horses.

Similarly, it is hard to maintain one's intellectual balance and consistency when thinking about the various kinds of disciplines and activities that are involved in an organization like the Smithsonian. It has always been my hope that the Smithsonian would be different from a university, and would develop a more coherent approach. I hoped that we could realize that we were involved in a common intellectual pursuit and that our diverse disciplines were related. This is an extremely difficult concept to communicate because it runs counter to our individual training nowadays in universities where specialties and special training are the rule. It is always difficult to approach things synthetically and to attempt to bring disciplinary threads together and think of them as having a common relationship.

We are, of course, a family in an administrative sense, and yet we are a whole separate series of disciplines; we are "fragmented parts to make a whole" as Joshua Taylor describes the Institution. I keep hoping that as time goes on we will all begin to perceive a common understanding of traits that unite us intellectually, and not simply in an administrative fashion. This will strengthen the purposes of the Institution. Scientists seem to be thinking broadly about getting together, thinking of common themes, and a kind of commonality of purpose. But in