On Presidents’ Day, C-SPAN conducted its second Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, which asked 65 presidential historians to rank all former presidents.The list wasn’t exactly scientific — it was compiled according to 10 loose and subjective “attributes of leadership” — but it was relevant nonetheless.Former President George W. Bush was ranked 36th out of 42. Those ranked behind him were — in descending order — Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding, William Henry Harrison, Franklin D. Pierce, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan. As Bush fades from the public consciousness, does this mean he’ll receive a fairer critique?So is Bush another Johnson, or is he the next Harry Truman? We asked some notable voices on campus, and this is what we found.Paul Paskoff, history professorGeorge W. Bush will likely rank near the bottom of the list of former presidents, though he won’t displace Buchanan from his well-deserved dubious distinction of having been the most incompetent and ruinous chief executive in our history. Bush may, in fact, go lower than Hoover, who is remembered by most Americans for having presided over the collapse of the Great Bull Market of the 1920s and the rapid sinking of the American economy into the depths of the Great Depression. But rankings of George W. Bush, made so soon after his departure from the Oval Office, inevitably suffer from the problem of historical near-sightedness. That is, we can’t be certain today how our descendants will regard Bush because we can’t now know the events that will transpire over the next 25, 50 and 100 years and influence their opinions. Those events will be the prism through which Bush’s historical reputation is refracted. But, just so you don’t think I’m being mealy-mouthed and waffling, I’d rank George W. Bush among the five worst presidents we’ve had, and I don’t think posterity will be much kinder to him.- –Regina Lawrence, political communication chairObviously, historians will play a key role in how Bush is remembered and ranked. Not being a historian myself (I study media and politics), I would say his future reputation will also depend upon the news media. How the media make sense of Bush’s key policies — the war on Iraq, secret surveillance, torture, Guantanamo, No Child Left Behind, Katrina, etc. — will also influence how Bush is remembered. Bush’s future reputation will rest on how the initiatives of and problems begun by his administration are understood in the future, and for the general public, that primarily means how the news media talk about those things. Some of those issues may be open to more positive news framing in the future, but some, like Katrina, will probably never be re-framed as “successes.”A lot will also depend on how the Republican Party treats Bush in the future. They are unlikely to lionize him, as they have Ronald Reagan, and right now, most Republicans seem to be running from his legacy rather than burnishing it. These are the key sources that will shape how Bush himself is talked about by the news media in the future.- –Gaines Foster, history department chairI am a bit embarrassed that historians participate in such rankings, since we try to understand the complexity of the past, not turn it into a contest.  As for the most recent President Bush — as for almost all of his predecessors, some later historians will condemn him and others rehabilitate him. That’s what historians do. And how far in either direction that process goes will depend in part on what happens in the future. But presiding over one of the nation’s worst economic downturns and failing to complete his foreign policy goals hardly bodes well for an outstanding historical reputation.- – – -Contact The Daily Reveille’s opinion staff at [email protected]