Academia weighs in on Bush Library surrender by SMU

I mean, what else can you call Southern Methodist’s agreement to host “My Pet Goat” the George W. Bush Presidential Library than a surrender? Well, Inside Higher Ed agrees.

Specific problems the journal cites include
• Lack of direct university control and oversight;
• The library expressly being built as a shrine to Bush as well as a library;
• The Bush executive order giving presidents more control over their papers guts academic freedom at the library.

Some experts — at SMU and beyond — think the university has agreed to terms that undercut the ideal of presidential library centers as places to promote scholarship. Benjamin Hufbauer, an associate professor of art history at the University of Louisville and author of Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory (University Press of Kansas), said that 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.

“Academics everywhere should be concerned about this. Clearly this goes against the idea of dispassionate inquiry, of looking at things on the basis of fact and merit. If it’s ideological, that’s opposed to the mission of a university,” Hufbauer said.

SMU has significant ties to the Bush administration. Laura Bush is an alumna and trustee. Richard B. Cheney was a trustee before being elected vice president. And the president plans to move to Dallas when his term expires next year.

Whether protesting faculty can do anything more is unlikely. But at least some of them aren’t close to throwing in the towel.

A major problem is that this isn’t just a presidential library. The “shrine to Bush” part is actually an institute that will be totally outside of university control. BushCo told SMU, and other university suitors, that the library and institute had to be taken as a package.

SMU was too bedazzled to say “Eff off.” That said, a number of presidential libraries, beyond the disgraced Nixon’s, aren’t associated with particular universities. Truman’s and Reagan’s come immediately to mind.