| February 27, 2008 | by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, and Benjamin Armbruster Contact Us | Tell-a-Friend | Archives | Permalink |
A Library Worthy Of The Bush Legacy
In Nov. 2006, President Bush launched "an eye-popping, half-billion-dollar drive" to raise funds for his presidential library. That campaign finally paid off last week when officials at Southern Methodist University (SMU) announced that the Dallas-based university will be home to Bush's $200 million library -- despite protests from faculty, administrators, and staff. The library facility will also contain an institute that will sponsor programs designed to "promote the vision of the president" and "celebrate" Bush's presidency. University of Louisville Professor Benjamin Hufbauer, an art historian who has studied presidential libraries, said the model agreed to at SMU was "totally different" from the approaches at other universities with presidential libraries. The institute that is part of the complex "has a partisan agenda -- that's very significant," he said, adding, "academics everywhere should be concerned about this" because it "goes against the idea of dispassionate inquiry." Dr. Susanne Johnson, an associate professor at SMU, explained, "The whole purpose of a library is for unfettered, unbiased, critically reflective academic inquiry into the administration of a given presidency. It's not to cheer-lead for a particular president. It's not to be groupies."
BUSH'S THINK TANK: When asked about his post-presidency plans in January 2006, Bush said, "I'd like to leave behind a legacy -- or a think tank, a place for people to talk about freedom and liberty and the [Alexis] DeTocqueville model of what DeTocqueville saw in America." (Ironically, the French philosopher DeTocqueville wrote, "I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.") A Bush insider confessed that the mission of the institute will be to hire conservative scholars and "give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President's policies." Bush's institute has rankled the university's faculty because it will be independent of SMU's academic governance. In the run-up to the formal agreement between SMU and the Bush foundation, critics "suggested making the institute completely separate from SMU or bringing it under SMU's control." The final agreement "does neither," however, because "Bush's representatives had made clear to SMU" that the library and the institute were "to be a package."
THE MARK OF ROVE: Compounding fears that the institute will trade academic scholarship for partisan praise of Bush, Mark Langdale -- president of the Bush library foundation -- said recently that former Bush political advisor Karl Rove is advising the project in "an informal capacity." Langdale said Rove is "a critical resource about what happened in the administration, and he has a lot of good ideas about programming and positioning." Rove has already set out on a course to whitewash Bush's legacy, arguing in recent months that it was Congress -- not the President -- who rushed into the Iraq war. Many aspects of the "programming and positioning" that the Bush library will feature have raised serious concerns. For one, the institute has made an arrangement with SMU to ensure that the academic faculty will not serve as a counterbalance against the partisan mission of the library. Additionally, SMU's sole representative on the institute's board will be solely chosen by Bush's foundation. Dr. Johnson said that clause "abdicates all power" to the Bush foundation, allowing it to "cherry-pick representatives from SMU to fit their ideological purposes" while reducing faculty representation "to something that's meaningless."
A CENSORED LIBRARY: An executive order Bush signed in 2001, "which gives presidents and their families more control over presidential papers, could result in material being censored" from the library. The order gives Bush -- as well as former presidents -- "the right to veto requests to open any presidential records" and to take "an indefinite amount of time to ponder any requests." One historian called Bush's order a "disaster for history." Referring to the executive order, Rev. William McElvaney -- professor emeritus at SMU's theology school -- asked, "What self-respecting university would accept a censored library?" "From the very get-go its purpose is to rationalize and promote programs and policies of a certain presidency rather than do a strictly analytical, critical assessment of it," Dr. Johnson said. "It's going to create an ethos where the students who are more progressive in terms of religion and politics will feel even further silenced and invisible than they already feel." She added, "We all know very well that this institute -- which has no lines of accountability to the faculty -- is about getting some scholars lined up to put window dressing on the presidency of George Bush.
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