D.C. as metaphor

Washington DC feels a lot like a college campus... the biggest damn campus in the world.
There's a Quad (also known as the National Mall). There's campus buildings (Federal Building, Department of the Interior, Federal Reserve, etc.) but the only things that are likely to happen there are the undergraduate classes on the classics. Sure, the Department of the Interior has offices on Constitution Ave., but that's just because they have to be somewhere. The real business of the DoI is out in the rest of the nation. Or at least, it had better be...

If something is going on in DC, the REALLY cutting-edge stuff happens on the fringes of campus, in the multi-disciplinary research - something like the Beckman Institute at UIUC or if you're a Republican in DC coming up with innovations in politics, maybe the K-Street Project