Opponents of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, a library and museum complex that is scheduled to be built at Southern Methodist University, met defeat today in their long-shot effort to withdraw the United Methodist Church’s permission for the project, according to reports by The Dallas Morning News and the Associated Press.

Delegates who are gathered in Dallas for the quadrennial meeting of the church’s South Central Jurisdiction, which owns SMU, turned away two petitions aimed at the project. One would have withdrawn permission for the entire presidential center. The other would have granted permission for the presidential library and museum, but not for a policy institute that is planned for the complex.

Even if those petitions had passed, it is not certain what their impact would have been. The university insists that it won full and final approval for the library project from a different church body in 2007.

The planned policy institute has been viewed suspiciously by some faculty members at SMU, in part because it will not fall under the university’s academic-governance structure. Similar think tanks at other university-based presidential libraries are more integrated with their academic hosts. The agreement between SMU and the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation contains provisions (beginning on Page 97) that allow the university to name one or two members of the policy institute’s Board of Directors, but the foundation has the power to veto those nominations.

The delegates did approve a petition today that urges the institute to respect the university’s identity. That petition — a draft of which was published on a Methodist blog — instructs the university to report back to the church in 2012 on how well the library foundation and the policy institute are complying with “the covenants of agreements protecting the integrity of Southern Methodist University.” —David Glenn