“A partisan think tank located at any school, college, or university is contradictory to education as approached within a free and democratic society,” the open letter intones. “It would put the values of open inquiry and academic freedom at risk not only for SMU but also for all academic institutions.”  About 120 of SMU’s approximately 1,000 professors have signed the open letter.

In the fevered nightmares of these left-wing faculty, the proposed Bush institute, which will function as a thinktank for scholars, will inject neo-conservative contagions into the wider SMU campus.  Even geographic proximity threatens these worried professors, who insist that the institute must “not be built on the SMU campus or contiguous with the library and museum.” So infectious are the viral type ideologies that will emanate from the think tank that it must be “geographically separate,” the academics declare, lest they be forced to cross paths with conservatives.  Such a calamity might incite mass fainting, hyperventilating, and the need for trauma counselors by the leftist faculty, who prefer to remain in their own hermetically sealed ideological bubble.

So naturally, these professors want to strangle the Bush institute proposal, though the SMU administration has stressed that the institute and library are inseparable. Rather than acknowledge their own lack of intellectual interest in alternative ideologies, the professors allege that the thinktank will impose a police-state conformity, much as they imagine the Bush Administration’s Justice Department has upon the nation. 

According to the angry open letter, “President Bush publicly has stated that his institute will address and promote policy initiatives begun during his White House years.” Of course, this is a frightening concept. “Because the director of the institute would, therefore, necessarily need to hire fellows on the basis of their willingness to support a partisan research agenda, open inquiry and academic integrity could very well be compromised, no matter how competent the researchers and scholars might be.”

The SMU professors fret that the institute will be “among the platforms from which George W. Bush continues his public and political life,” and “political dynamics ineluctably will shape the work of the institute.”  This contrasts with the supposed non-partisan, and ideology-free comportment of the protesting professors. They demand that the Bush Foundation must be “legally barred from interpreting the institute as SMU-based, or as related to Southern Methodist University in any official way.”

This open letter from Bushophobes is coolly rational compared to the loopy logic and sloppy allegations of the letter’s organizer, Dr. Susanne Johnson of SMU’s Perkins School of Theology. In an op-ed for the SMU campus newspaper, Johnson insisted: “My critique is academic in nature, not political.”  In her own letter to fellow faculty soliciting their signatures, Johnson observed that the “politically partisan institute” could not possibly be appropriate at a “liberal arts university in a free and democratic society.” 

Johnson’s evidence?  She noted that in 2004, the Union of Concerned Scientists charged that the Bush administration “manipulates science.” Obviously, Johnson concludes, “such a practice would put the credibility of SMU's science programs at risk.” The Union of Concerned Scientists, which now specializes in Global Warming alarmism, made a name for itself during the final years of the Cold War by spreading Carl Sagan’s discredited “nuclear winter” theories and demanding a U.S. nuclear freeze to accommodate the old Soviet Union. These activist scientists were especially “concerned” about President Reagan’s proposed missile defense program, which they insisted simultaneously would never work while also inexplicably provoking the Soviets into a space arms race.  Instead, of course, the U.S. missile defense idea actually helped push the Soviet Union into collapse. Evidently it is this kind of “science” that Johnson is afraid will be threatened by the Bush Institute.

More ominously and hilariously, Johnson warned that the Bush Institute will “put at risk the credibility of our school of theology.” She explained that the Washington-based Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), for which I work, will “hand-pick and position scholars in the Bush institute in efforts to shape the ethos and direction of its work.” Her evidence? She does not provide any, but she complained that “George Bush turns to IRD founders and leaders for theological advice, rather than to United Methodist bishops.”      

To prove that IRD is outrageous, she cited the incendiary headlines of IRD’s supposed website, which purportedly refer to feminist theologians as “witches,” condemn church conferences as “homo-fests,” and describe the United Methodist Church’s advertising slogan as “Open Minds, Open Hearts, and Open Legs.”  Johnson even conducted an exhaustive analysis of the 2,500 article headlines she found on the purported IRD website, and discovered that 850 of them, or one third, have provocative sexual overtones.

Despite Johnson’s ostensibly careful and scholarly investigation of the supposed IRD website, which she referred to as www.ucmpage.org, she failed to discover that this website has no affiliation at all with IRD, whose website is www.ird-renew.org. The website that Johnson imagined was IRD’s is clearly marked as the personal blog of an ex-Methodist minister in Georgia who has no organizational affiliation, who writes his own flamboyant headlines, and who links to a variety of sources, most of which are not IRD, and which includes the official news service of the United Methodist Church.

Johnson also penned an op-ed about all this for the SMU campus newspaper, where she once again cited the supposedly outrageous headlines of the IRD website as reflective of the larger danger posed by the Bush institute. Pompously, she wrote: “We serve the SMU and wider community best by backing up our claims with publicly verifiable, documented evidence and with input from recognized, authoritative experts in specific areas of inquiry.” She even referenced her own reliance on “scholarly expertise and qualifications” and her preference for engaging issues on an “academic, scholarly basis, not personally [criticizing] each another on an ad hominem one.”

After all, Johnson wrote, “theology is an academic discipline with rules of engagement, methodologies and received traditions.” Theologians, like herself, have “a responsibility to bring the tools and qualifications of their professional, scholarly expertise to bear on academic and curricular concerns shared by the wider SMU faculty.” Trained theologians, like herself, are “qualified to conduct critical appraisal, for example, of theological claims iterated by George W. Bush when used as rationale for policy initiatives.”

All this verbiage about “scholarly” precision and “critical appraisal” came from a professor of Christian education at SMU who could not even correctly identify the website of the sinister organization that supposedly partners with the Bush Administration. Clearly, Professor Johnson believes that her particular style of advocacy masquerading as “scholarship” will be threatened by the very “partisan” Bush Institute.