Some 170 professors at Southern Methodist University have signed a petition asking for a full-faculty vote on whether it would be acceptable for the campus to be the site of a partisan Bush Institute, faculty leaders announced on Thursday. The institute would be part of a proposed George W. Bush Presidential Library complex, for which Southern Methodist is the final contender as host institution.

“Nobody is objecting to the presidential library, which we hope will come to SMU,” David A. Freidel, a university distinguished professor of anthropology and former Faculty Senate president said in a news release. The institute, however, is objectionable, he said, because its director would report to a private Bush foundation and not the university or the National Archives and Records Administration, which would be in charge of the library. Mr. Freidel called that arrangement “an unprecedented departure for SMU in that it lends our university’s name and credibility to a partisan institute over which we would not actually exercise oversight.”

The petition asks the Faculty Senate to hold a referendum of the entire faculty by next Wednesday “on the acceptability of the Bush Institute as distinct from the proposed library and museum.” Such a distinction, however, may be moot. SMU’s president, R. Gerald Turner, told professors on Wednesday that “the library complex is an all or nothing venture,” The Daily Campus, Southern Methodist’s student newspaper, reported. “The institute cannot be cut from the deal if SMU is to receive the Bush library complex,” Mr. Turner said.

How partisan the institute would be has been a concern among faculty members for months. A group of Methodist ministers has also opposed associating the university with President Bush, but for reasons other than academic freedom.