Mark Silva, The Chicago Tribune, April 8, 2007
DALLAS –For Southern Methodist University, the alma mater of First Lady Laura Bush and a proud, nearly century-old institution, the prospect of housing the George W. Bush Presidential Library would seemingly be an honor.
Yet the possible advent of the Bush library — and especially an ideological think tank planned as part of it — has split the SMU faculty, feeding a debate that simmers beneath the serenity of the leafy campus. At an institution dedicated to scholarly achievement and academic freedom, many fear the work of the Bush Institute would forever associate SMU with a right-wing political agenda.
The vision of a Bush-backed think tank at a campus owned by the United Methodist Church has exposed emotional rifts within a church already dividedover the war in Iraq. Bishops and other clergy critical of the pre-emptive war and the administration’s treatment of enemy combatants are protesting what they view as a memorial to Bush, a Methodist whose policies they say are “antithetical” to their teachings.
Rev. C. Joseph Sprague, a recently retired Chicago-area Methodist bishop, calls the war and other Bush policies “antithetical to the Methodist movement.” Sprague summed up the sentiment of several bishops protesting the Bush Institute.
“I am hesitant to see Southern Methodist University welcoming the institute of a Methodist who has been so contrary to the teachings of the Methodist Church,” he said. “It will do nothing but perpetuate the kind of neocon thinking of this administration which has taken both this nation and the world in the wrong direction.”