John Silber

John Silber, the former president and chancellor of Boston University and the 1990 Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts, was born on August 15, 1926 San Antonio, Texas. He took his undergraduate degree at Trinity University in Texas in 1947, then spent the following academic year at Yale Divinity School before matriculating for a semester at the University of Texas Law School. Silber eventually returned to Yale University to earn his doctorate in philosophy, writing his dissertation on Immanuel Kant. He also studied the philosophy of education. He remained at Yale as a philosophy teacher for five years before taking a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin. As a scholar, he distinguished himself by serving as the editor of "Kant-Studien", an international journal for Kant scholarship. As the chair of UT-Austin's Department of Philosophy from 1961 to 1967, he earned a reputation as a liberal for his support of desegregation. Silber served as the first chairman of the Texas Society to Abolish Capital Punishment and was involved in the creation of Operation Head Start, one of the educational programs enacted as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. In 1967, Silber was named Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), but was terminated three years later. Silber claims that it was the splitting of CAS into separate colleges of liberal arts and natural science that caused his departure, though many in the higher education community at the time thought UT-Austin sacked him because of his liberalism. He became the President of Boston University in 1971 after being recommended by a faculty-student search committee. Silber's tenure at B.U. was earmarked by controversy from the very beginning of his tenure. A liberal in Texas is not necessarily a liberal in Boston, and Silber turned out to be vastly less progressive than B.U.'s faculty and student body. A conservative on many issues, Silber was pro-military and pro-military intervention, at one time calling in the police to break up the takeover of a Marine Corps. recruiting station at the university. Silber also was openly supportive of ROTC, a hot-button issue at the time of the Vietnam War. Seemingly intolerant of criticism, Silber targeted the most prominent progressives in the political science department, Howard Zinn, who had become well-known as a Civil Rights activist in the 1960s and, as an anti-Vietnam War activist. Zinn would become Silber's nemesis at B.U. By the end of the decade, Silber's heavy-handed tactics as an administrator had alienated a majority of the core faculty, who openly opposed Silber during the 1970s and '80s over issues of university governance. Silber vetoed tenure recommendations of various departments to eliminate what he considered faddish scholarship, and he allegedly used the denial of merit raises to faculty critics, most famously to Zinn, B.U.'s most well-known faculty member after Nobel-Prize winner Elie Wiesel (the latter having been recruited by Silber). When Zinn and four other faculty members refused to return to the classroom during a general strike at B.U. in October 1979, Silber unsucessfully tried to terminate them. The National Labor Relations Board became yet another organization investigating the disturbances at B.U. (though the university was later cleared of unfair labor practices during the first Reagan Administration). The controversies during Silber's tenure, in part, contributed to the low alumni giving rate at the university. However, during Silber's tenure, Boston University attained greater status, ranking consistently as one of the top "National Universities" in the United States. He was directly responsible for the hiring of not less than four Nobel Prize winners in science. However, a generation after taking over the top spot at BU, he had not mellowed. His was not a personality that promoted harmony on a northeastern liberal arts campus, in the 20th or the 21st Centuries. During his tenure as B.U. president, Silber became the symbol of the corporativization of the university to many critics. Silber likened the education of students to turning out automobiles on an assembly line, not a beguiling metaphor for students and their parents, who were paying some of the highest tuition fees in the nation after Silber took over. Hailed as "Ronald Reagan's Favorite Democrat" during the 1980s for his staunch support of Reagan's Central American policy, Silber won the 1990 Democratic nomination to succeed the out-going Governor Michael Dukakis but lost the general election to former U.S. Attorney Willaim Weld. Interestingly, Weld was considered the true liberal during the contest and Silber a throwback to the conservative policies of Governor Edward J. King, who had defeated Dukakis in the 1978 Democratic primary (and was, in turn, defeated by Dukakis in 1982). In 1996, Silber stepped down as president of Boston University and assumed the position of chancellor after Governor Weld, his former electoral foe, appointed him to serve as head of the Massachusetts Board of Education. After his term expired, he resumed the chancellorship of B.U., a post which his critics contend kept him the real power at B.U. The shift in post allowed Silber to continue enjoying a high salary and perks bestowed on him by the university. With an annual salary that reached $800,000, Silber had ranked as one of the highest paid college presidents in the nation, and his remuneration as chancellor reported was on the north side of half-a-million dollars, annually.