The brave professor and the brave newspaper
Two days ago we featured the views of a brave University of Chicago professor, Charles Lipson, who objected to considering his campus as home for an Obama presidential museum, which inevitably would become a promotional organ for the president and his policies. Now, professor Lipson has been supported by the editorial page of the Chicago Sun-Times:
...we have to agree with University of Chicago political science Professor Charles Lipson, who is sounding the alarm on this issue, that an Obama presidential center would be out of place at a university that prides itself on disinterested scholarship.
"To me it's not a left or right issue," Lipson told us. "I don't think I'd have different position if this were the Reagan library."
Presidential libraries are funded and managed by the federal Office of Presidential Libraries. A representative for the office says it does its best to present materials "as accurately as possible, not favoring one side or another." But anybody who has visited a few of the system's 13 libraries knows that a certain home-team bias usually creeps in, especially in the museum exhibits.
Moreover, many of the activities of the libraries - speeches and panel discussions and the like - are funded by their individual foundations, which is where the homers move right up front. As Lipson pointed out in a story Sunday by Chicago Sun-Times reporter Abdon Pallasch, the Reagan library in California tends to schedule conservative speakers and serves as a launching pad for Republican ideas, whereas the Kennedy and Carter libraries in Boston and Atlanta attract liberal speakers and serve as launching pads for Democratic ideas.
Hat tip: Joseph Morris