Ideologies

A Reagan library for Stanford

Establishing a presidential library on a college campus has become almost as difficult as winning an election. Although private committees usually raise funds for the construction and the Federal Government takes care of maintenance, potential host campuses and communities have rejected the libraries on all sorts of grounds. Cambridge, Mass., effectively blocked a Kennedy library at Harvard because the city feared too much traffic. After heated debate, Duke University in North Carolina decided it did not want to erect a memorial to its law school alumnus Richard Nixon (the library is being built in San Clemente, Calif.). Nowhere have battle lines been more sharply drawn than at California's Stanford University, where after months of controversy and negotiation, the trustees last week approved a Ronald Reagan library and museum.

The proposal for a Reagan library got caught in a crossfire between the largely liberal Stanford faculty and the predominantly conservative Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, a semi-independent research facility of 70 fellows located on the Palo Alto campus. The Institution was founded in 1919 with $50,000 from Stanford Alumnus Herbert Hoover. Its charter: to study the forces of modern economic and political change. Since 1959, when Economist Glenn Campbell was appointed director and the institution enlarged its mission to "protect the American way of life," it has developed a reputation as one of the nation's leading conservative think tanks. In 1975 Reagan gave his California gubernatorial papers to Hoover and became an honorary fellow. No fewer than 40 experts connected with Hoover, including Economists Milton Friedman and Martin Anderson, have served with the Reagan Administration. Thus it was only natural for Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese to consider Stanford and the Hoover Institution as a possible site for a Reagan library.

What really set off ideological alarms at Stanford, however, was the inclusion not only of a library and museum but of a public policy center to be administered by Hoover. Last spring, 84 of Stanford's 1,200-member faculty and 1,500 of its 12,000 students signed a petition demanding an inquiry into the relationship between Hoover and Stanford. Said Political Science Professor John Manley: "The problem with the Hoover Institution is that it engages in political activities that call into question the neutrality of the university." Two months ago, the Stanford faculty senate voted unanimously in favor of requiring the proposed center to operate under "normal academic governance" (meaning that appointments would be approved by Stanford's regular academic committees). Hoover fellows made an acronym of that phrase and turned it into a taunt: "Nag, nag, nag."

Once Meese agreed to separate the policy center from the rest of the proposal, Stanford President Donald Kennedy and the trustees felt free to approve the library and museum. But the dispute is not over. Next month the trustees will return to the issue of the policy center, a matter bound to strain further the relationship between Stanford and Hoover. Says William Kimball, president of the university's board of trustees: "There's a lack of understanding on both sides." But speaking for the board, he adds, "What we really wanted was the museum and the library, and we got them."