Shots in the Dark
Wednesday, 07 March
How Harvard Hates History
by The New York Times reports that historians are fighting President Bush to gain access to presidential papers after he signed a law restricting said access.
In December 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta and, in the words of a Soviet spokesman, “buried the cold war at the bottom of the Mediterranean.”
The Russian transcript of that momentous summit was published in Moscow in 1993. Fourteen years later American historians are still waiting for their own government to release a transcript.
Fourteen years! Why, that's outrageous.
Except...oh....wait...that's actually 36 years fewer than it would take to gain access to papers of the Harvard Corporation. And Harvard is a university, which theoretically believes in scholarship, free speech, access to archival materials, and so on and so on...
Well, Harvard now has an historian as president. Perhaps Drew Faust will change the Corporation's noxious 50-year-rule?
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