The universe is a harsh, unyielding, and ultimately beautiful place. When Drexel University announced this week that it would shutter the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia after nearly two centuries of continuous operation, the public outcry was immediate. Critics pointed to the loss of a historic institution, the tragedy of locking away legendary Tyrannosaurus rex specimens, and the educational void left in the community. But as I sat in my study, reflecting on the higher costs and attendance struggles cited by the administration, I did not feel sorrow. I felt a profound, spine-tingling sense of awe.
In a very real sense, the museum's death is the most authentic exhibit it has ever hosted. We spend our childhoods wandering beneath the towering ribs of apex predators, marveling at how such magnificent beasts could simply vanish from the Earth. We ask ourselves what it must have been like to witness the end of an era. Now, thanks to a staggering operating deficit and a multi-million-dollar shortfall in endowment yields, we do not have to imagine it. We are living it. The museum is experiencing exactly what its star attractions went through sixty-six million years ago: a sudden, catastrophic shift in its environment to which it simply could not adapt.
I mentioned this beautiful symmetry over drinks on Tuesday with a senior vice president of asset management at Drexel. As he swirled his scotch, he walked me through the stark realities of declining foot traffic and skyrocketing maintenance costs for the aging facility. I listened, enraptured, as he described the fiscal pressures squeezing the institution. It was like hearing Charles Darwin himself describe the finches of the Galápagos. The habitat had changed. The nutrient flow of wealthy philanthropic donors had dried up. The organism—in this case, a beloved public center for scientific literacy—had grown too slow, too bloated, and too dependent on an outdated survival strategy known as serving the public good.
We simply lack the necessary metabolic rate to sustain a two-hundred-year-old educational organism when there is no return on investment.
The museum is famous for its towering T. rex, a magnificent specimen that has stood watch over the main hall for decades. Some argue that locking this fossil away in a dark university storage vault is a crime against humanity's shared heritage. But I see it differently. For millions of years, that creature lay buried in the dark, crushed beneath the immense weight of the earth. By returning its bones to an unlit, climate-controlled basement because Drexel's accounting department decided the lighting bill was statistically insignificant to their core institutional strategy, we are bringing the fossil full circle. We are restoring its natural habitat.
And who are we to interfere with natural selection? The public, so quick to sign petitions and post angry complaints on social media, has fundamentally failed to understand the laws of nature. If working-class families truly wanted their children to learn about the Cretaceous period, they should have evolved the capacity to pay a ninety-dollar admission fee, or perhaps mutated a genetic predisposition for massive unrestricted alumni giving. To subsidize a failing museum with university funds would be an affront to the scientific method itself. It would be artificially propping up a weak lineage, defying the magnificent cruelty of the cosmos that culls the unprofitable so that the financially viable may thrive.
We must look at the closure not as an ending, but as an ecological succession. When a massive tree falls in the forest, it clears the canopy, allowing sunlight to reach the forest floor so that new life might spring forth. When a historic natural sciences academy is boarded up and its assets liquidated, it clears a prime zoning footprint in Center City Philadelphia. What will rise in its place? A vibrant luxury retail corridor? A glorious high-rise condominium complex with a ground-floor juice bar? We cannot know for certain, but we must trust the invisible hand of the market just as we trust the slow march of geologic time.
Please stop telling my grieving staff that our mass layoff is a majestic return to the cosmic carbon cycle.
Lin, like the dinosaurs she studies, is tragically bound by her own narrow perspective, unable to perceive the breathtaking majesty of her own obsolescence. The universe demands that we let go of the things that no longer turn a profit. As the Academy's great wooden doors are locked for the final time, I will not be mourning. I will be looking up at the sky, marveling at the beautiful, indifferent asteroid of administrative austerity, hurtling toward us in perfect, mathematical silence.