UPDATED
Resignation letter criticizes Trump, Kochs, Ollie North
Two historians recently quit the University of Virginia’s Miller Center over that school’s appointment of former Trump administration official Marc Short, claiming that the appointment “violates the values of the Center.”
“When we see things to be wrong, we must speak out and take a stand,” Melvyn Leffler and William Hitchcock said in a publicly-released letter, as reported by NBC29.
The letter, addressed to Director of the Miller Center William Antholis, states that “Democracy in the United States today is in peril” and that “it violates the practices of the Miller Center to hire such a notoriously partisan political appointee as a paid distinguished fellow, and to do so without any open discussion – prior to his appointment – with the faculty and staff.”
Stating that Short has been “a partisan activist during his entire professional career,” the professors criticize his past work with politician Oliver North, with the Koch Brothers Freedom Partners fund, and with the current White House.
The letter, much of which is based in partisan opinion, is not without error. It claims, for instance, that following the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville last year, “President Trump failed to repudiate the alt-right and its street thugs.” In fact, President Trump explicitly condemned the racists and violent white supremacists who descended upon Charlottesville last summer.
“As teachers, we have often told our students that the defense of democracy and its basic ideals – respect for truth, inquiry, reason, decency, civility, and humanity – requires constant vigilance and active engagement,” the professors state. “…When we see things we believe to be wrong, we must speak out and take a stand. We do so now by tendering our resignations from the Miller Center.”
Antholis, the president of the Miller Center, has publicly defended his decision to hire Short.
“It is particularly important that, at a moment of intense political polarization, we try to better understand one another’s viewpoints and, if possible, work to bridge our political divide,” Antholis wrote on the Miller Center’s website.
Read the news report on the resignations here.
CORRECTION: The headline of this post originally stated that the professors had quit UVA. Their resignation, however, was only from the Miller Center, not the university itself. The post has been updated to reflect this.
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