The Bushites have cut a deal with SMU [Southern Methodist University] executives to locate his presidential library on this private campus in one of Dallas’s wealthiest neighborhoods. They’ve targeted some Arab oil kingdoms, corporate chieftains, and wealthy heiresses to be the “megadonors” they need to raise half-a-billion bucks to establish George’s ex-presidential palace.[...]
[R]ather than placing the full archive of the administration’s papers in the SMU complex so historians and others have access, Bush is to have a heavily-censored, anti-academic library. None other that Karl Rove will help with the censoring, making sure that historians only peruse documents that cast the Bush-Cheney regime in a glowing light.
Second, the policy institutes at other presidential libraries are scholarly units of their host universities. The work done in them is judged by normal academic standards, deans are chosen by university presidents, etc. George W’s think tank, however, is to be academically-unattached to SMU and will unabashedly push a partisan, ideological agenda. It will hire conservative acolytes and, as an insider told the New York Daily News, “give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President’s policies.”
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D.
ReplyDeleteJune 4, 2007
Southern Halliburton University
Moving the Bush Bubble to the Big D
In her final column before her untimely death, Molly Ivins wrote:
"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders."
Dr. Benjamin Johnson, a history professor at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, where President Bush is proposing to build his $500 million library and neoconservative institute (DeFrank, 2006; Berkowitz, 2007), recently attended the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Several colleagues there reported that Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, has been traveling around the country examining research facilities, discussing how to select Bush Institute fellows, and meeting with library directors (Johnson, 2007a).
According to Dr. Johnson, one well-respected colleague said, "Rove seems to know exactly what the square footage is of the building that will be at SMU and where it will be located on campus." Rove also expressed displeasure that some SMU faculty and United Methodist bishops were protesting the proposed partisan institute (Korosec, 2007; Silva, 2007) over which Bush and company will have total control (Johnson, 2007b). This hands-on involvement of a top-level White House operative like Rove demonstrates the importance of the proposed library and think tank at SMU to Bush insiders.
http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=196