The Texas Observer

Last month, Southern Methodist University was named the sole finalist for George W. Bush’s presidential library, cementing the conventional wisdom that the library would go to First Lady Laura Bush’s alma mater. Over the last month, however, the faculty at SMU has become increasingly worried that a proposed “Bush Institute” could harm the academic reputation of the school. Last week, the faculty council submitted a list of roughly 50 questions about the library to University President R. Gerald Turner.

Excerpted below the jump, the questions reveal that the faculty is still very concerned that the “proposed Bush Institute would effectively become a propaganda mill for the President,” as the president of the faculty senate put it in a December letter.

The controversy started about two months ago after a New York Daily News article quoted an anonymous source saying the institute would be a think tank, as opposed to a new school within SMU, similar to the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. According to our sources, early on the general mood about the library on campus was “ambivalent.” Not anymore:

- What guarantees will there be in writing regarding the relationship between SMU and the Presidential library and institute?

- Should SMU have some kind of oversight of the institute, or would that oversight identify us as being too closely associated with the institute? Will that perceived association occur anyway, no matter how separate the institute is from SMU?

- Is it best for the institute to be totally separate from SMU?

- Can the institute be designed in such way that it would embody at least in some ways the original vision of a school of public service?

- Can the institute be non-ideological? (*chuckle* – ed.)

- How would the institute affect the intellectual integrity of SMU?

- Since universities with presidential libraries tend to be larger and/or more widely known than SMU, what will be the impact of the library and institute on SMU and its reputation?

It should be noted that these questions represent a broad sample of opinions on campus. The faculty council’s letter from which they are excerpted said “there was strong agreement in the group that, whatever we decide to do, our fundamental role as faculty is to insure that the university holds to fundamental principles of academic freedom and that the best interests of the university are protected.”

Fundamentally, the faculty wants to remain neutral on the library and open to all options — except, it appears, turning SMU into Heritage Foundation South.

by Matthew C. Wright

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 5:24 pm and is filed under George W. Bush. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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