Two noted history professors say they University of Virginia’s prestigious Miller Center because they couldn’t stomach the idea of working side-by-side with Marc Short, the former White House legislative director who’s been given a paid senior fellowship there.
In a blistering opinion piece in The Washington Post, William Hitchcock and Melvyn Leffler write: “To treat Marc Short as a trusted colleague in the pursuit of objective analysis would be a surrender to the forces of unreason and obfuscation that have fed the Trump presidency.”
On Monday, the professor said they were quitting the public policy center for the hiring and blasted Short for not distancing himself from Trump’s response to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.
In their Tuesday opinion piece, they say: “Rather than curry favor with administration officials like Short, we should be applying the standards of rigorous and impartial analysis to them …
“We refuse to reward and honor people who have spent their time in public service working only to elide the truth, to bend facts to serve partisan purposes, to mock the free press and to scorn the very act of free thinking.”
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