LJ Talks to Benjamin Johnson
-- Library Journal, 05/01/2007
 Photo credit: H.S. Jackson/SMU |
LJAN: You started the Bush Library Blog and members of the Methodist Church distributed an online petition. Does this say something about how technology is enabling discussion and debate?
BJ: I moderate and started the blog not only to forward my own views on the subject, but also to expedite a wider discussion, which I think neither the SMU administration nor the elected leadership of the Faculty Senate has wanted. A blog is a comparatively low-labor, wide-distribution way of doing this, and I can't imagine any way offline of accomplishing this. The blog is read by several hundred people a day, sometimes more like 1000, from across the U.S. and multiple other nations, by academics, interested lay people, journalists, congressional staffers, and others. So in some modest sense my experience bears out some of the claims made by Internet boosters about how these new technologies enable communications and networks of information that conventional print sources would not.
How much is the library issue on the minds of faculty, students, and administrators at SMU?
Well, [it's] surely more on the minds of faculty and administrators than students. Our president, R. Gerald Turner, has been after this for years, since Bush was elected, and prominent members of our board are deeply invested. So clearly it's a priority for them. In terms of faculty, the History department has been deeply concerned with this all semester, with a substantial portion spending large amounts of time and energy on this. I suspect that we and Political Science are more invested in it than any other department, which makes sense given that the Library and Institute touch more on our work than on that of other disciplines. But many faculty members from other departments have told me that they consider this the most interesting and dramatic time in their tenure at SMU, so I think that the faculty as a whole is indeed invested in this debate.
In your opinion, is the Bush Library to SMU a done deal? Do faculty members who oppose the library and/or the policy institute have any real ability to block either?
I have absolutely no idea, though the delay in announcing the cementing of a final deal—SMU was named the final finalist in late December—does make me wonder if the deal has run into some kind of hitch. I don't know whether Bush and his circles care about the debate, view it as an embarrassment, or pay any attention at all. In any event, I think that we've done SMU a service by raising the questions that we have, and ensuring that those who have paid attention know that SMU is not a place uniformly populated by slavish devotees of Bush. The faculty of any fine university would have raised the questions that we did.
What are your own thoughts on the Library and the Policy Institute coming to SMU?
In general, I'm agnostic on the library. Certainly interesting and important studies of the Bush administration and its policies on such subjects as global climate change and Iraq would be written from its holdings. But it is no substitute for an excellent, broad-based general research library system, which we sorely lack.
I'm very much opposed to the policy institute, which I see as turning over the public face of SMU to an unaccountable partisan institute run by the cronies of one of the most divisive, controversial, and unpopular presidencies in American history. As I and other critics have detailed on the blog and in other venues, the arrangement that SMU appears to be contemplating with the Bush Institute is unprecedented for a mainstream U.S. university. You can go to the blog and see the page “reasons for opposition.”
Decades from now, historians will surely find the debate captured here useful. Have you thought about arrangements for archiving the blog?
I'm glad that you think that historians will find it useful, I certainly hope so. I have spoken with SMU’s archivist and plan to preserve the archive. The technical details are somewhat perplexing. We may save it to a CD, but future generations of computers might not have the software to read it, so we’ll also print out every page.
Overall, do you think the discussion generated on the blog has benefited the campus community, perhaps even the nation?
Yes, I fervently believe so. Introspection and debate, which would have been minimal without the efforts of the critics of the Bush Library, Museum, and Institute, are basic values to an academic community. I’m particularly proud of the way that the debate on campus seems to have impacted larger policy debates over such matters as Executive Order 13233, which the House of Representatives has voted to repeal in legislation that was moribund before the SMU debate. I also think that even if the Library and Institute do come to SMU, it is in our best interest to be known not only as the university that hosts them, but also the university where many opposed this and where many harbor deep doubts and suspicion of George W. Bush and his circles.
