W, The Library: The Update
February 27th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
It’s been a quiet month or so since members of the faculty at Southern Methodist University decided that, maybe, just maybe, it’s not a good idea to let the Current Occupant set up a propaganda mill on campus.
So how is that fight going? “Pretty much everyone seems to have lost interest now that the semester is fully underway,” our sources at the school said this week.
To be expected, I guess, when the faculty doesn’t have a direct seat at the negotiating table with Bush’s site-selection committee. Only SMU president Gerald Turner, a staunch supporter of the library, enjoys that privilege.
But that’s not to say that there isn’t important, riveting, slow-motion drama playing out inside the bureaucracy. Okay, maybe not riveting, but the Faculty Senate is taking what steps it can internally to curb the possible damage Bush’s institute could do.
Last week a Senate committee recommended formal hiring practices that require employees who work for both the Bush Institute and SMU to be hired by a specific department and to go through the same screening process as any applicant to that department. The guidelines explicitly “disallow appointments that are University-wide,” said a memo penned by faculty member Tom Tunks. In other words, the committee doesn’t want to someday see Karl Rove collecting paychecks via the SMU Centennial Chair of Truthiness.
Earlier this week, the Senate also called on Bush to relinquish control over his presidential papers. Nearly everyone agrees that the university stands to gain from housing W.’s archives. But those benefits could be negated by Executive Order 13233, which, in effect, gave Bush license to scrub his own record. Aligning with Society of American Archivists, the American Library Association, and the SMU History department, the Senate “calls on President Turner to ask President George W. Bush to rescind Executive Order 13233.” That’s the kind of forceful rhetoric a Democratic congressman would love, but it’s really about all the faculty can do at this point to prevent the library from becoming the George W. Bush Presidential [REDACTED].
Watch for the library to hit the news again this week, with Congressional hearings scheduled on the Presidential Records Act and transparency in funding presidential libraries. The useful Bush Library Blog will be on the case for the blow-by-blow.
