July 24, 2007

Baylor U.'s Hopes for Bush Library Become Entangled in Lawsuit Against SMU

Two months ago, there were hints that officials at Baylor University might still harbor faint hopes of housing the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, even though all indications were that the library would go to Southern Methodist University, which was named in December as the sole finalist for the library. Moreover, in May, 12 architectural firms were invited to submit designs for a building on SMU’s campus.

But no formal agreement between SMU and the Bush Presidential Library Foundation has been announced, and some parts of the library proposal have not been popular on the SMU campus. So Baylor might be forgiven for clinging to hopes, however slight, of winning the library after all.

Now, like a sixth grader caught scribbling “BU + GWB” in a notebook, Baylor officials will apparently be forced to confess their daydreams in public. A Texas judge on Monday instructed the university to answer questions about whether it believes its library proposal is a dead letter, the Dallas Morning News reported today.

The unusual ruling arose in a lawsuit filed against SMU by Gary Vodicka, a Dallas resident who asserts that the university improperly used eminent domain to buy and destroy the condominium complex where he lived in order to clear land for the library.

Mr. Vodicka would like SMU to turn over records of its library-planning process. Baylor is not a party to his lawsuit, but it was dragged into the quarrel because Mr. Vodicka believes that if Baylor’s library proposal is truly dead, then SMU has no legitimate reason to keep its library plans confidential.

For its part, SMU says that its plans should remain secret even if no other universities are in the running. At a hearing on Monday, the judge ordered Baylor to answer Mr. Vodicka’s questions, and said that he would rule by August 17 on Mr. Vodicka’s request for SMU’s records. —David Glenn

Comments

1. How can 1 person stop such a grand opportunity for any institution like SMU? Does greed always prevail in TX and especially for people who think they are more special than others? Build the library now at SMU.

   — Scott Healy    Jul 24, 03:26 PM    #

2. Why not just build the library in Dubai next to Halliburton’s headquarters?

   — OJS    Jul 24, 04:24 PM    #

3. Why not attach the Bush library to the American embassy in Baghdad? It is the largest American embassy in the world with plenty of space for Bush’s war speeches. After all, Iraq war is his main legacy.

   — Mathew    Jul 24, 05:23 PM    #

4. I have been on both campuses, but I like the SMU site better. In fact, I drove my two daughters around the SMU campus one week ago. It is nestled in a beautiful, up-scale Dallas residential neighborhood. That area, however, is quite busy, and the Library would draw much more traffic. I hope the city officials of HP make appropriate infrastructural changes to accommodate increased traffic. I will visit the Library when it is finished.

   — Yigi    Jul 25, 08:18 AM    #

5. But the point is that SMU wants to keep its plans secret even though the campus is the sole finalist. IN most public appointments in Texas when a sole finalist is announced that is the person that will be offered the position unless someone comes forward with a counterproposal in 10 days. I beleive SMU has passed the 10 days and therefore should release the data as requested in the lawsuit.

   — JBJones    Jul 25, 10:25 AM    #

6. A George Bush LIBRARY.... how ironic!

   — GW    Jul 25, 10:39 AM    #

7. Talk about an oxymoron – GW Bush’s name attached to a library! And the limits that I understand have been proposed with regard to information access in the “library” do not match the free unfettered access that the word “library” usually implies.

   — anonymous    Jul 25, 01:34 PM    #

8. This “Dallas resident” is just an out-of-work attorney trying to harass SMU into paying him more for his dump of a condo. The Bush Library will be a beautiful replacement for that old housing and I hope that SMU gets a restraining order to keep this jerk off campus forever.

   — RSB    Jul 25, 02:58 PM    #

9. Why not have a two-part library? SMU can store those books that have been colored in, and Baylor can maintain the others.

   — Hnaef    Jul 25, 05:02 PM    #

10. Southern Halliburton University
    ORIGINAL RESEARCH
    Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D.
    June 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.

    Convincing the United Methodist Church to stain its good name and a major university to give away its academic respectability by linking itself with a president that much of the world views as an authoritarian bully who has authorized and advocated for torture and international kidnapping is one nifty trick

    Bush is the most unpopular and isolated president since Richard Nixon. Inside his bubble, the President is being told by the Secretary of State (Rice, 2004) that he is another Winston Churchill or Harry Truman — unpopular now, but he will be vindicated by history for his heroic effort to bring democracy to the Middle East at the point of a gun (even if it requires a total re-write). To re-write history on the scale Bush needs will necessitate the complete control of a disinformation institute, and if it uses the legitimacy of a respected university and the good name of a major Protestant tradition, all the better (imagine the American Enterprise Institute with a giant cross on the front door, and you get the picture).

    Importantly, Rove and friends will be able to continue to conceal the most damaging information about this administration in its bubble using Bush’s Executive Order 13233, signed into law shortly after 9/11, which insures that the president and his heirs are able to deny access in perpetuity to government records they select (Gillman, 2007). Emily Sheketoff, Executive Director of the American Library Association, observed that the executive order “completely goes against the spirit of the essence of a library” (Gillman, 2007). Steve Aftergood, Director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said “If the Bush folks are going to play games with the records, no self-respecting academic institution should cooperate” (Gillman, 2007). Professor Benjamin Hufbauer at the University of Louisville, a recognized authority on presidential libraries, believes that dictating which papers can be seen at the library reduces it to “just a museum of political propaganda” (Jascik, 2007).

    — ANDREW WEAVER    Jul 27, 09:57 AM    #

11. I thought the Crawford Elementary School was the front-runner. It has most all the books Bush has read. And Laura will be allowed to smoke in the teachers’ lounge.

    — KVC    Jul 30, 09:59 AM    #

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