Putting a President’s Library in Its Proper Place

Sen. Lawton Chiles (D-Fla.) once called them “monuments to the Pharaohs.” Others defend them as valuable and accessible sources of scholarly research.

Presidential libraries must await judgment by future historians on their scholarly merits; meanwhile they have become commemorative vehicles for the modern presidency, the farewell equivalents of inaugural balls. Yet presidential libraries are having no easy time these days. Their price tags, environmental impacts and ideological baggage have become new sources of controversy for both heads of state and heads of campuses.

Consider the imbroglio over the proposed Ronald Reagan presidential library. It was, until April, to be at Stanford University. Then the Reagan Presidential Foundation abruptly withdrew its proposal in the wake of mounting criticism at Palo Alto. The Stanford-Reagan story had become another case of tension in the modern American relationship between politics and academia, with a little environmentalism and economics mixed in.

It began with a cordial suggestion, in a 1981 letter from W. Glenn Campbell, director of the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford. He invited Reagan “to have your Presidential Library on the Stanford campus in close proximity to the Hoover Institution.”

The idea was apparently appealing to Reagan--a combined library and public-affairs center (presumably with an agenda friendly to conservative thought) under control of the semi-autonomous Hoover Institution. The idea was not so appealing inside the university.

In 1983 a faculty committee (one of several appointed in the course of events) acknowledged that while a Reagan library could be a “valuable academic resource,” a public-affairs center outside university control was unacceptable. The faculty senate and the Stanford Board of Trustees voted unanimously to endorse this position and communicated it to Edwin Meese III, then counselor to the President. Meese replied that this was “tantamount to making the President ‘an offer he cannot accept.”

But accept it he did in a later compromise worked out by Meese; the library (and museum space) were to be separated from the public affairs center. The center would be nearby but off campus and operate independently.

Then the other forces mobilized.

Enter the students: The Student Committee Against Reagan University (SCAReU) argued that “The university should not become a partisan showcase to glorify ex-Presidents, whether liberal or conservative.” The committee threatened to sue the university for violating a stipulation in the school charter that “The University shall forever be kept out of politics.” A rival student group, supporting the library, was also formed.

Enter environmentalists and local residents: After a 1985 site selection by the trustees in the Stanford foothills, debate moved to the Santa Clara County Planning Commission where, in 1986, the affirmative vote was 4-2.

Enter fund-raisers: Total estimated cost for library, public-affairs center and related endowments was $100 million. An opening dinner in late 1985 was followed with appeals signed by Malcolm Forbes and James Stewart. Stewart wrote of the need to “preserve for future generations the vision of our nation that Ronald Reagan has so eloquently and tirelessly worked to secure.”

Enter the architect: Hugh Stubbins ignited a furor when he unveiled a drawing (not to scale) showing the structure looming above the campus. Adding insult to insensitivity, he criticized the beloved Stanford sandstone as “very ugly.”

Re-enter Campbell: He only fueled growing faculty indignation with a report claiming that the decision to locate the library at Stanford allowed the university to “boast” of its “Reagan connection.”

Denouement. Last month, a three-hour meeting of the faculty senate argued all the issues--environmental, aesthetic, ideological, governmental--and passed a resolution (26-4) that the trustees should either reduce the size of the facility or move it farther from campus. Then students passed a referendum requesting an alternative library site on Stanford lands. Finally, on April 23, the Reagan Presidential Foundation announced withdrawal of plans to build at Stanford.

Such placement battles are not unique. John F. Kennedy had intended a library at Harvard, his alma mater; 15 years, dozens of environmental arguments and $21 million later, it opened in a less fashionable location alongside the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts. Protesters have staged sit-ins on the proposed route of the four-lane parkway leading to the Carter Library near Emory University in Atlanta. Several campuses, including Duke and UC Irvine, turned away the Nixon library before it seemed to settle in San Clemente; now, new controversies surround that site.

Presidential libraries belong to modern times, begun in 1939 with the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library--a modest building of 30,000 square feet costing a nominal $369,000. With their prodigious growth (now more than 100,000 square feet housing more than 25 million pages) and grandeur, the institutions have also grown in ambition and cost.

Each of the last six Presidents has wanted his library at a prestigious campus, as if responding to some unrequited drive for academic validation of a political career. The consequent controversies make clear that Presidents need campuses more than campuses need Presidents.

On occasion, universities can be wooed. The attractions of scholarly resources and enhanced programs in public affairs are widely acknowledged. Less obvious but as seductive are the associations with political power and the fund-raising potentials from connections with a former President.

But Stanford professors suggest that the wooing isn’t working any more. Education Prof. Robert N. Bush expressed relief at the Reagan withdrawal, saying that the idea of a presidential library supported by the taxpayers as a memorial “has probably already outlived its usefulness.” Political scientist John F. Manley, who does research at presidential libraries, thinks they are basically a bad idea: “From a scholarly point of view, it would be better to have all presidential papers in the Library of Congress or other central location where they are easily accessible.” Ron Rebholz, professor of English, pointed to the irony of dispersing presidential resources, then striving to link them up again through a computer network (Presnet).

And the expense? More than $100 million in private funds were spent on the construction of the eight existing presidential libraries (Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford and Carter), their associated museums and public-affairs centers. When completed, libraries are turned over to the National Archives; then the public pays--an annual federal expense of more than $16 million in operating costs.

As free-market economists like to remind us, there is no free lunch. The enormous competition today for the philanthropic dollar means that a dollar given here is a dollar less given there. The funds for presidential libraries, though private, may diminish support for, say, a needed new public library in a large urban area. Needs collide. Clearly, there is a value in recognizing past Presidents; there is little enough opportunity in this society to celebrate what goes on in the political sphere. And archival materials are essential to research (although 25 million pages per President may present more heft than history).

The simple answer would be to separate functions: Create a central home for presidential archives in Washington (as proposed by Sen. Chiles in 1980) and build hometown museums for commemoration. Distinguishing celebration from scholarship could improve the health of both worlds--and save money in between.

Stanford’s laborious and awkward struggle over placing--or not placing--the Reagan library may yet turn out to have precedential wisdom. Mark one up for academic politics.