Is the Museum of Science dumbing down?

A friend of mine was one of the many people recently laid off from the MOS, and the story among the insiders is that the new president of the museum is "trying to destroy it from within" by encouraging more and more of these relatively science-free but highly popular travelling exhibits and putting less resources into the traditional mission of the museum.

I understand the concerns about the general mission of MOS but my question is what makes money and brings people in? I dont know much about these new exhibits because I have not been to them (I dont like Star Wars, LOrd of the Rings or baseball very much lol) but I can only assume they bring in gobs of people and money. My hope, and maybe the hope of those behind these shameless ploys, is that people will visit the rest of MOS before and/or after they look at the baseball stuff.

I myself still have a fun time at the "normal" parts of MOS, and especially like volunteering to go with the local community groups I work with to go and help chaperone youth programs that go there. The kids really get a kick out of the science exhibits and I get an excuse to go check out the dinosaur exhibits for the billionth time.

I still think its sad that my old friend, the old T Rex, has been banished to the outdoors because he is obsolete. Oh well , at least they kept it around.

This isn't dumbing down, it's smart marketing.

Nobody goes to the MoS with the intention of walking into the traveling exhibit, spending all of the hour or so that you need to see everything in it, then turning around and walking right back out the door. And since there's nothing wrong with the science presented in the entire rest of the building, you're hooking people in with something semi-scientific and then having them peruse the rest of the science that you display every day.

Jordan's Furniture has an animatronic Mardi Gras and an IMAX in Natick, but I don't really see many complaints (except from Bob's Knock-off Furniture) about the "dumbing down" of the home furnishing experience.

Besides, for every big name semi-science exhibit you can name, I can probably name a big name super-science exhibit that came through in recent memory. Body Worlds 2 and CSI: The Experience come easiest to mind.

Finally, the money has to come from somewhere. The exhibit just as could have easily been called "Atheletes! See how baseball players perform the biology necessary to play ball!" and excluded all of the BHoF memorabilia, but then who would pay for it to come here? Cooperstown gets its name on the exhibit and more people are interested in coming out to see Schilling's bloody sock and the rest of the museum than if it was called "Atheletes!". It's a win-win in today's funding climate.