The Academic Freedom Agenda
By JAMES TRAUB
Published: March 10, 2009
WHEN A MARINE HELICOPTER bore George W. Bush away from the Capitol the afternoon of Jan. 20, the American people turned their attention, and desperate hopes, to his successor. Bush, meanwhile, moved into a new home in Dallas and took up the work of his post-presidency. He had often said that he viewed the Freedom Agenda — his campaign to promote democracy around the world, and above all in the Middle East — as the great legacy of his time in office. And now, even as Obama and his foreign-policy team edge away from the language of democracy promotion, which they fear that the Freedom Agenda has rendered toxic, Bush has begun to shape what he has called the Freedom Institute, a policy center to be housed alongside his presidential library and museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University. The institute is scheduled to begin operating in the fall; the former president and members of the George W. Bush Foundation are now scouting for an executive director.
Bush left office with the lowest poll ratings recorded in 60 years of presidents, but he is still regarded with reverence and fondness in Dallas, where he lived for many years before becoming president. One ZIP code in Highland Park, the neighborhood adjacent to S.M.U., gave more money per capita to Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign than any other ZIP code in the nation. The day after Obama’s inauguration, the lawns of Highland Park’s neoeverything palazzi were festooned with signs reading, “Welcome Home, George and Laura,” and bearing an image of the flag of Texas. And S.M.U., long a finishing school for the children of Dallas money, is the closest thing to a Bushworld alma mater: George didn’t go, but Laura did, and she still sits on the board, along with Ray Hunt, of the oil fortune, and a great many other Bush loyalists and benefactors. Board members and administrators began angling to host the presidential complex, which they saw as a terrific boon to S.M.U.’s rising reputation, virtually from the day George Bush was elected. According to Jeanne Phillips, a board member and senior vice-president for international relations at Hunt Consolidated, not only her colleagues but also people all over Dallas thought, “Our guy is president!”
But George Bush is not everyone’s guy on the S.M.U. campus. Indeed,
the prospect of being identified in perpetuity with the Freedom Agenda freezes the blood of some of the university’s leading academics. Everything about the planned institute reminds them of what they detested about the Bush administration. It will proselytize rather than explore: a letter sent to universities bidding for the Bush center stipulated that the institute would, among other things, “further the domestic and international goals of the Bush administration.” And it will hold itself apart from S.M.U.’s own world of academic inquiry, reporting to the Bush Foundation itself rather than to the university president or provost, as academic institutes — even presidential ones — normally do.
To critics, then,
the institute sounds like a walled preserve within which the strange ideological growths of the Bush era will proliferate — with S.M.U.’s good name affording them intellectual legitimacy. “You can be sure that there will be a book on the privatization of Social Security,” predicts Thomas Knock, a professor of American history, “or on creationism, or on the doctrine of pre-emptive war.” He and others are half-convinced that Bush will appoint his friend Karl Rove as the first executive director.KAREN HUGHES, President Bush’s longtime aide and confidante, told me that Bush started kicking around ideas for some kind of think tank soon after he was re-elected in November 2004. “We knew it would focus on freedom and responsibility,” she said, for Bush saw these as his twin themes, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks persuaded him that weak and authoritarian states, like Afghanistan, posed a grave threat to American security. It’s easy to see why, at the time she and the president began their post-presidency conversations, Bush and those around him would have felt that their commitment to democracy promotion would constitute a lasting legacy. In late 2004 and early 2005, Iraqis dipped their index fingers in purple ink and bravely cast their ballots; the people of Lebanon took to the streets to protest the assassination of the popular leader Rafik Hariri; and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt agreed to allow the first contested presidential race in that country’s history. Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident and Israeli political leader, praised Bush at an Oval Office meeting as “a real dissident” who believed in democratizing the Middle East. And in his second inaugural speech, Bush grandly declared that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands” — the central axiom of the Freedom Agenda.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/magazine/15Bush-t.html?hp
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