Now that Illinois has lost the chance to house the Superconducting Super Collider, it is time for this university’s top administrators to stop focusing their attention on how building the SSC in Texas is going to hurt NIU. Instead, these administrators should concentrate their energy on seeing NIU improve—without the benefit of a new multi-billion dollar federal research facility in its backyard.

That is assuming the SSC ever gets funded by Congress. The expensive competition to be home of the SSC, and the subsequent choice of Texas, has left many states’ congressmen with bitter feelings about the whole program.

Assuming the SSC appropriations do make it through Congress, it will not be operational until about the year 2,000. Granted, the SSC might draw some faculty away for periods of time to do research, but such absences are not uncommon for a university.

But until the SSC is operational, NIU is still the only university which has undergraduates working at Fermilab. Odds are those students still will be able to do work there even after the SSC goes operational.

Was the administration actually thinking that the world’s newest, largest atom-smasher, located within commuting distance to NIU, was going to miraculously give this university its place in the sun? Let’s hope not.

The world’s largest atom-smasher—the Tevatron—is already at Fermilab, and that fact does not seem to be helping this university too much now.

There are many other scientific fields this university could and should be concentrating its efforts for development and improvement on.

Obviously, NIU will not be helped by the decision to build the SSC in Texas, but this university certainly will not be any worse off because of it.