SMU Faculty Want “W” Library Returned

Over at the Texas Monthly WEBSITE, we hear that the president of the board of trustees at Southern Methodist University, First Lady Laura Bush’s alma mater, received a letter from faculty, administrators, and staff of SMU’s Perkins School of Theology urging the board to "reconsider and to rescind SMU’s pursuit of the presidential library" for President George W. Bush.

Admirably resisting jokes about how many books this library might contain, the letter-writers object to the W Library because of Bush’s policies, seeing the library as symobolizing SMU’s endorsement of "attitudes and actions widely deemed as ethically egregious: degradation of habeas corpus, outright denial of global warming, flagrant disregard for international treaties, alienation of long-term U.S. allies, environmental predation, shameful disrespect for gay persons and their rights, a pre-emptive war based on false and misleading premises, and a host of other erosions of respect for the global human community and for this good Earth on which our flourishing depends…antithetical to the teaching, scholarship, and ethical thinking that best represents Southern Methodist University."

The letter also cited THIS STORY IN THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS which details the fundraising plans to build the costliest presidential library of all time (though this, I would imagine, is a record that will be broken by each successive president), and more importantly the idea that the library’s goal would be to chat up the Bush legacy the President is confident future historians will see as more successful than it appears right now: "to spread the gospel of a presidency that for now gets poor marks from many scholars and a majority of Americans."

Of course, as President Clinton LEARNED when the majesterial Peter Jennings interviewed him at his presidential library opening in November 2004, presidents don’t get to control how history judges them, impressive museums or not. Certain stains can’t be washed out.