Untitled Document
“Think tank” is not a concept you would
associate with George W — and, sure enough, there won’t be much
thinking done in the Bush library and think tank to be built at Southern
Methodist University. The Bushites have cut a deal with SMU executives to
locate his presidential library on this private campus in one of
Dallas’ wealthiest neighborhoods. They’ve targeted some Arab
oil kingdoms, corporate chieftains, and wealthy heiresses as the
“megadonors” they need to raise half-a-billion bucks to
establish George’s ex-presidential palace.
This one is to be markedly different than the usual
complex of library, museum, and policy institute that other presidents have
built. First (and unsurprisingly), rather than placing the full archive of
the administration’s papers in the SMU complex so that historians and
others have access, Bush is to have a heavily censored, anti-academic
library. None other than 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, and so on. 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.”
Stretching for money and celebrity, SMU trustees are
not bringing not a reputable library to campus but another of Bush’s
self-serving frauds. As one SMU professor put it, “The whole purpose
of a library is for critically reflective academic inquiry. . . .
It’s not to be groupies.”
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist, and author.
This article appears in Mar 20-26, 2008.
