A quick update ...

It would be most helpful if the new library were built in Houston. Houston's got extra population now, thanks to the emptying of New Orleans, and they could probably use the work. In addition, Houston is really big so no one need go there unless he wants to. (If that won't work, how about Abilene? Where the feed lots and oil business could remind us our favorite things in this century?)

Michael:

Thanks for writing and for your passionate and learned response. I certainly agree that ultimately, historians will have their say, despite the Bushes' best efforts at keeping them at bay. But that certitude really only adds to my problems with academics trying to reject a library on political grounds. I believe in libraries, even badly intended ones. I realize it's the accompanying conservative think tank/Project to Protect the Bush Reputation that sticks in peoples' craw, rightly so, but it's all one package, and I have an instinctive reluctance to opposing archives and information.

Finally, I think making a public stand against this administration's policies, as righteous as that may be, is not QUITE up there on the inspiring-moral-stand rankings with Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham jail. I think you over-stretched with that analogy. Liberals in Texas may feel downtrodden, but actually, it only seems like 400 years of oppression.

Two points: not only will there be tourists, but every day there will be busloads of schoolkids emptying out to visit the library, including lots of seniors taking government classes. We did a road trip to the LBJ Library from Houston when I was a senior. Me and my buddies played hooky to go drink beer (the drinking age was 18 then) for a little while--look forward to that, Highland Park residents. Is there a 7-11 nearby where visiting teens can buy their tallboys?

Second, will the guardians of Bush's legacy prevent future Robert Caro's from setting up camp in the library (as the real Caro has done at the LBJ library)? I hope not! Bush needs his Caro!

I beg to differ with Jerome on this issue. First of all, we had something like this happen on a much smaller scale where I work, at the University of Texas at Austin. They decided to name the new Molecular Biology Building after Jim Bob Moffett, owner of Freeport McMoRan, a company guilty of horrible human rights abuses and environmental damage in West Papua. The movement to prevent the naming of the building after Moffett was really student-led, I felt, and the faculty response was inadequate, and the building ended up bearing Moffett's name.

I don't agree with Jerome that arguments made against placing the Bush library, or naming school buildings after wealthy benefactors who happen to use authoritarian regimes to terrorize labor movements in developing countries, are stupid. As Jerome points out, the administration of George W. Bush has done more than any presidency since Richard Nixon's to close off access to public documents to historians, journalists and activists. Early in his administration W. acted to seal key records of his father's presidency and the archives of the younger Bush's term as Texas governor.

The plans for the Bush library seem to go well beyond the propaganda efforts of other presidential libraries. The library will include The Bush Institute, a partisan think-tank, where fellows would be appointed by a director reporting directly to the private Bush foundation, not to SMU or to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), a non-partisan agency charged with running the various presidential libraries.

Other presidential libraries, such as Jimmy Carter's and the Hoover Institute at Stanford, support causes that are tied to the commemorated president's ideology. Nothing new there. What is new with this library, however, is that while, for instance, the Hoover Institute promotes a general conservative worldview, the Bush Institute would have a much more narrow aim, rationalizing W.'s failed administration.

This raises a legitimate question for colleges and universities like SMU. Should institutions of higher learning house a pseudo-scholarly think tank where the perspectives and conclusions are pre-determined and aims not at expanding knowledge but at rehabilitating the reputation of an incompetent leader?

Sometimes it is important simply state a point, whether victory on the important issue at hand is immediate. Methodist ministers, historians, and other scholars had the options to put up or shut up.

The protest marks a way for scholars and students to begin a conversation on Bush, on the power of the presidency, on Congress' surrender of its war-making powers, and on how public monuments distort or fabricate history. This is not stupid or futile, but a necessary first step in truth telling.

The efforts by the SMU faculty bring to mind Martin Luther King Jr.'s bold denunciation of moral silence in his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail." In his letter, King said that white Christian ministers in the South acquiesced to segregation and racial violence by their quiet and inaction. Certainly the issues faced by King were not analogous to that before SMU in gravity or scope.

Nevertheless, a lesson is to be learned from the late civil rights leader. The SMU faculty realized that silent acceptance of the library would have been interpreted to mean that the SMU education community concurred with the Bush administration, its policies, and its record of deception, distortion and secrecy.

While Jerome correctly states that the arguments forwarded by the library opponents are unlikely to stop the library from opening, the SMU community has, indeed, put up rather than shut and they have scored one important advantage in the media war over the facility.

I am guessing that the Bushes, unaware of how Democratic Dallas has become in recent years, thought that they could open the library at a safely conservative, Republican-dominated campus and score easy propaganda points, especially with the aid of their eager mouthpiece, the Dallas Morning News.

The SMU protestors have denied the Bushes another cheap moment of spin. For at least the foreseeable future, the adjective "controversial" will be permanently affixed to the Bush library in newspaper coverage, and a media that compulsively rolled over for Bush before Katrina will now be forced to summarize the objections of dissenters to the library opening.

The actions of the SMU liberals guarantee, as was the case when the LBJ library opened in Austin, that the library opening will bring hordes of demonstrators. Rather than beginning the historical rehabilitation of Bush 43, the launching of his library and its so-called think tank will loudly re-amplify how divisive and ugly the Bush years have been.

And, of course, there is the slim chance that the SMU protestors might succeed. In 1981, Nixon tried to place his library at his law school alma mater Duke University and pressure from faculty members led the university to, by one vote, end negotiations with the ex-president. "It was obvious this was going to be a memorial to glorify the career of Richard Nixon rather than be a repository of his papers," said Lawrence Evans, a retired Duke physics professor. The Nixon library was exiled to Yorba Linda.

Other similar movements on college campuses succeeded against the similar long odds faced by SMU's faculty. At places like Columbia University, Berkeley, and all points in between, dissenting faculty and students have stopped military recruiting on campuses, university investment in apartheid-era South Africa, and forced schools to distance themselves from criminal corporations like Dow Chemical.

These efforts were not symbolic, empty moments of political correctness. The various boycotts against South Africa, for instance, played a critical role in hastening the end of apartheid.

A final point should be made. Should the Bush Library and its Bush Institute open at SMU, it will represent a pyrrhic victory for W. and his henchmen. First off all, most people rarely go to the libraries of presidents they don't already like. The Bush library will be preaching to an already right-wing choir.

Likewise, the books and papers churned out by the Institute are hardly likely to have any impact on the larger world of academia and will have circulation primarily among the semi-literates who think Ann Coulter is funny.

Also, presidential libraries really are windows into the honored subjects' personality. I developed a habit of visiting presidential libraries when I lived in California and found that each was more revealing of the subject matter than the ex-president probably wanted.

The text in the Nixon library is as paranoid, defensive and rationalizing as Nixon was. My favorite places at the Nixon library are where the text on the wall points out that Bobby Kennedy authorized wiretaps too and that the foul language he used on the Watergate tapes included words frequently heard in newsrooms. Even dead, Nixon comes off as uncomfortable, suspicion, and tirelessly jealous of the Kennedys.

Similarly, the women guides at the Regan library reminded me of the original "Stepford Wives" movie, and at the Eisenhower library in Kansas, it is obvious that Ike was much more proud of his military career than his presidential tenure. The LBJ library tries to minimize Vietnam and bends over trying to please everyone. Regardless of what heavy-handed attempts presidents make to turn their libraries into a "do over" of their White House years, these facilities, in an unintentional way, actually capture the minds and personalities of these figures, neuroses and weaknesses included.

Based on this, one can count on the Bush library to be vapid in tone and reeking of the anti-intellectualism and hatred of dissent that have marked these past six years. With the exception of the Carter Library, which became a base from which that former president planned his campaigns to monitor elections across the globe, fight AIDS and build shelters for the homeless, I can't think of a single presidential library that has successfully reshaped how scholars felt about particular presidents.

Bush wants his library to short-circuit the scholarly process, to attempt to cut off at the pass left-leaning academics intent on studying the years 2001-2009. By the nature of their profession, however, independent historians, political scientists and journalists will get the final word.

Dead on, Jerome! The only question about the proposed library -- for those of us who don't have to live in its shadow -- is just how likely is this most secretive of administrations to deposit papers of any historic worth in its archives? Those who natter on about its right-wingedness -- or its architecture, for heaven's sake! -- miss the point. What historian would give up one of his opposable thumbs for a REAL look at the Bush papers?