Education: Lessons from Oak Ridge

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For such students, the institute offers equipment no other campus could afford. It has use of the largest of the national atomic energy laboratories, the biggest gaseous diffusion plant (for the separation of uranium isotopes), and is in the world center of the production and study of tracer atoms. Its museum, complete with artificial lightning and Geiger counters, is host to hundreds of students a year. Its special exhibits travel by truck to schools and fairs from Florida to Oregon.

But in one sense, the institute teaches more than lessons in science. It is also the proof of an often neglected thesis: that what universities cannot afford alone, they can often get by getting together. The plainest lesson of the institute is simple economics.