In his 1998 book, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 , the historian Steven Conn argues that during this period, it is museums that were seen as the key contributors to new knowledge and research, not universities. This conclusion seems to echo the thinking behind the Smithson debate of 50 years earlier. And Conn attributes part of the vitality of the "Museum Movement" to a strong conviction that museums would be key producers of new knowledge in our rapidly industrializing and urbanizing nation. By the late 1920s, Conn argues, the situation had changed, largely because the scientific and natural history fields that had earlier depended on specimens of various kinds (that had to be collected and housed and preserved in museums) had evolved in ways that made such specimens much less central to research, and thus the stand-alone museums lost their central importance. Interestingly, Conn sees the situation differently in terms of art museums-and I think he is correct. He asserts that original art objects did not lose their relevance in the same way, and that the academic teaching of art and art history continued to rely on original objects much more than these other disciplines. Turning back to the university context in the late 19th century, however, it's easy to see why universities would feel that museums were important to their teaching and research mission, in light of Conn's thesis. For example, at the University of Chicago's founding in 1892, museums were recognized as essential components of a university