Thursday
14Aug2008
silber way - by craig bayer
Thursday, August 14, 2008 at 07:58PM
Boston University—with the help of the city of Boston, has named a street after former BU president John R. Silber called “John Silber Way”. Apparently it was done with the public blessing of the city’s mayor Thomas Menino. Some people may be pleased by this development, some may be amused, some may be disgusted.
I personally think the gesture was a little excessive. Granted, after coming to BU in 1971, Silber balanced the budget, increased the endowment and apparently improved the university’s reputation in the eyes of many people, but he also frustrated and chased away many quality professors and students by turning BU into his little neoconservative fiefdom and alienated some of BU’s neighbors by expanding the university campus as far and wide as he could.
A great number of members of the faulty were afraid to speak out against Silber’s internal policies and external politics for fear of being denied tenure or pay raises or in the case of one Marxist professor, a classroom! Radical Students feared being expelled , framed for crimes or denied financial aid. They also resented that the BU controlled student activities money.
Granted, Silber faced threats and serious abuse from some radicals over the years. I, myself referred to him in print as the “one-armed bandit”,(something I, as a mentally disabled person now regret), but hatred for radicals(“short-pants communists, as Silber contemptuously referred to us) is no excuse to shut down a college campus. He suspended a student for hanging a “BU Divest” from South Africa banner from his dorm room window. He had a number of protesters arrested for merely setting up camp in front of the student center. Silber’s excuse: like Martin Luther King instructed and was forced to practice, they had to face the consequences of breaking the law.
Besides, not all of us Silber critics were hopeless Silber haters. I went to a number of events where he spoke and though I do not believe and trust every word he said, I was impressed with his poise and intelligence. Durign the latter part of my stay at BU, I wrote an editorial basically saying that Silber was too brilliant to run a university the way he did, that he himself should be a radical considering his smarts and background. But Silber hardly changed over the years.
On the issue of Apartheid , he was against BU divesting its funds in South Africa. And if by chance there were a revolution in South Africa, Silber wanted conservative chief Buthelezi to take over, not Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress. In Central America, Silber supported the Reagan Administration’s not entirely secret war against the leftist Nicaraguan Sandinistas. In El Salvador, where he monitored the elections, Silber supported the repressive though middle of the road regime of Duarte, not the leftist rebels. In spite of these facts, he considered himself a Democrat.
Indeed, the ultimate insult to his fellow Democrats was when he said that Mike Dukakis did not have what it takes to win the presidency because like many liberals, “he’d rather be right than be President.”
Silber, of course had a right to his own opinions, but as head of a university, such opinions wee infuriating. What student or faculty member wanted his own university to support oppression?
Nevertheless, I must say that in a partially unintended way, Silber was positive influence on me. He forced me to think, he forced me to think politically( and radicalized me), he forced me to deal with the reality that people would stand in your way if you tried to impose—or simply live out your value system. I was apolitical when I arrived on BU’s campus, but when I heard the ugly stories about him from students and staff about his contempt for true academic and political freedom, my culturally American and artistic and youthful instincts were offended. But there’s plenty of Silbers out there. I have found many people as bad(some of my former bosses) or worse than him(Dick Cheney), so Silber prepared me for the real world. The business of BU was business—just as Calvin Coolidge said that the business of America is business. BU tried to teach me this, and I should have listened.
In any case, my final gesture toward Silber occurred during my graduation ceremony. I yelled to him and his provost Jon Westling, “Tenure my professor!” So many professors we had loved had left BU because of its internal and tenure policies, so I felt obliged to publicly pressure the administration to tenure my favorite English professor. Westling, at least, heard me: he looked right at me, apparently surprised at the sophistication of my heckle.
I think they may have known exactly who I was talking about and decided to listen, for once, because not long after, my favorite professor was tenured….
I personally think the gesture was a little excessive. Granted, after coming to BU in 1971, Silber balanced the budget, increased the endowment and apparently improved the university’s reputation in the eyes of many people, but he also frustrated and chased away many quality professors and students by turning BU into his little neoconservative fiefdom and alienated some of BU’s neighbors by expanding the university campus as far and wide as he could.
A great number of members of the faulty were afraid to speak out against Silber’s internal policies and external politics for fear of being denied tenure or pay raises or in the case of one Marxist professor, a classroom! Radical Students feared being expelled , framed for crimes or denied financial aid. They also resented that the BU controlled student activities money.
Granted, Silber faced threats and serious abuse from some radicals over the years. I, myself referred to him in print as the “one-armed bandit”,(something I, as a mentally disabled person now regret), but hatred for radicals(“short-pants communists, as Silber contemptuously referred to us) is no excuse to shut down a college campus. He suspended a student for hanging a “BU Divest” from South Africa banner from his dorm room window. He had a number of protesters arrested for merely setting up camp in front of the student center. Silber’s excuse: like Martin Luther King instructed and was forced to practice, they had to face the consequences of breaking the law.
Besides, not all of us Silber critics were hopeless Silber haters. I went to a number of events where he spoke and though I do not believe and trust every word he said, I was impressed with his poise and intelligence. Durign the latter part of my stay at BU, I wrote an editorial basically saying that Silber was too brilliant to run a university the way he did, that he himself should be a radical considering his smarts and background. But Silber hardly changed over the years.
On the issue of Apartheid , he was against BU divesting its funds in South Africa. And if by chance there were a revolution in South Africa, Silber wanted conservative chief Buthelezi to take over, not Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress. In Central America, Silber supported the Reagan Administration’s not entirely secret war against the leftist Nicaraguan Sandinistas. In El Salvador, where he monitored the elections, Silber supported the repressive though middle of the road regime of Duarte, not the leftist rebels. In spite of these facts, he considered himself a Democrat.
Indeed, the ultimate insult to his fellow Democrats was when he said that Mike Dukakis did not have what it takes to win the presidency because like many liberals, “he’d rather be right than be President.”
Silber, of course had a right to his own opinions, but as head of a university, such opinions wee infuriating. What student or faculty member wanted his own university to support oppression?
Nevertheless, I must say that in a partially unintended way, Silber was positive influence on me. He forced me to think, he forced me to think politically( and radicalized me), he forced me to deal with the reality that people would stand in your way if you tried to impose—or simply live out your value system. I was apolitical when I arrived on BU’s campus, but when I heard the ugly stories about him from students and staff about his contempt for true academic and political freedom, my culturally American and artistic and youthful instincts were offended. But there’s plenty of Silbers out there. I have found many people as bad(some of my former bosses) or worse than him(Dick Cheney), so Silber prepared me for the real world. The business of BU was business—just as Calvin Coolidge said that the business of America is business. BU tried to teach me this, and I should have listened.
In any case, my final gesture toward Silber occurred during my graduation ceremony. I yelled to him and his provost Jon Westling, “Tenure my professor!” So many professors we had loved had left BU because of its internal and tenure policies, so I felt obliged to publicly pressure the administration to tenure my favorite English professor. Westling, at least, heard me: he looked right at me, apparently surprised at the sophistication of my heckle.
I think they may have known exactly who I was talking about and decided to listen, for once, because not long after, my favorite professor was tenured….
ed. note: Craig Bayer is a freelance writer and activist.
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