John Robert Silber (born August 15, 1926) in San Antonio, Texas. An American academic and politician, John Silber was controversial in his tenure as president of Boston University. On a conservative platform, he unsuccessfully ran as the Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts in the 1990 election and lost to the moderate Republican William Weld.

Though he was trained in philosophy and taught philosophy in Texas, the two books he has written are both outside the field of philosophy. One, Straight Shooting, is part memoir and part political prescription; the second, Architecture of the Absurd is a 128-page denunciation of the work of some contemporary architects.

Family, education and early academic career

John Silber was the second son of Paul G. Silber, a German immigrant architect, and Jewell Joslin Silber, an elementary school teacher. His father's business collapsed. during the Great Depression.

At Trinity University in San Antonio, John Silber met Kathryn Underwood, daughter of farmers in Normanna, Texas. The couple married in 1947 and had eight children, one son and six daughters, and they adopted another son. Their first-born son, David, and daughter, Rachel, were born before 1955. Five more daughters were born in the next 11 years. Silber's living children are Rachel Devlin and Martha Hathaway of Newton, Massachusetts, Judith Ballan of New York City, Alexandra Silber Mock of Carlsbad, California, Ruth Belmonte of State College, Pennsylvania, and Caroline Lavender of Atlanta, Georgia, and adopted son, Charles Hiett of Hot Springs, Arkansas. Their first-born son, David Silber, died of AIDS at age 41 at their home in December 1994.

Silber received his M.A. in 1952 and worked as a teaching assistant while pursuing a doctoral degree. Peter H. Hare, Philosophy Professor Emeritus, at SUNY State University of New York at Buffalo remembers Silber as a teaching assistant at Yale in the mid-1950s while Hare was still an undergraduate. Hare wrote, "George Schrader was the lecturer in the introductory course where John Silber was the TA leading my discussion section. Silber, a rabid Kantian, was the person with whom I had my first heated philosophical arguments as an adult."

Silber's first faculty job was at University of Texas at Austin where he chaired the Philosophy department from 1962-1967. Larry Hickman, Director, Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale recalls his time as a student in philosophy at UT. "The department chairs during those years, John Silber and Irwin C. Lieb, were busy using Texas oil money to collect the very best faculty and graduate students they could find."

While at UT Silber founded the Texas society to abolish capital punishment.

In 1967, Silber became Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UT. Three years later, in a widely publicized firing, Silber was removed as Dean in 1970 by the strong-willed UT Regents Chairman Frank Craig Erwin, Jr..

Although Erwin was supported by most of the legislature, he had a tempestuous relationship with many members of the university faculty.

His hands-on style of leadership led to conflicts with those professors who considered the academy to be their jurisdiction.

The conflict culminated with the firing in July 1970 of Dean John Silber of the College of Arts and Sciences, who had led the opposition to a proposed splitting of his college into two.

The dismissal was perceived by many as politically motivated, since Silber's growing popularity was often considered a threat to the regents' control of the university.

After the dismissal, several notable professors fled the university.

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Silber left UT in 1971.

Boston University

Silber became the seventh president of Boston University in 1971, and in 1996 became chancellor after stepping down as president. With an annual salary that reached $800,000, Silber ranked as one of the highest paid college presidents in the country. That same year he was appointed by William Weld to serve as head of the Massachusetts Board of Education.

Under Silber, Boston University increased in size and stature but questions about his leadership style caused splits among faculty and alumni. In 1976, Silber survived an attempted ouster that was supported by ten deans. He remained president until 1989, when he took a leave of absence to run for governor of Massachusetts as a Democrat. He returned to BU after losing to William Weld.

Controversies

Disbanded BU's football team

Citing financial losses, Silber disbanded the Boston University football team. The underlying reason was to avoid giving sports scholarships to women as mandated by Title IX which requires gender equity in the distribution of scholarship funds. Silber was quoted by Sports Illustrated as saying the University of Paris doesn't have a football team while the magazine noted that B.U. is not the Sorbonne.

Silber was accused of denying tenure to a faculty member for not being in agreement with Silber's views. The resulting lawsuit was thrown out of court and not appealed.

"Sale" of honorary degrees and seats in professional schools

In the early 1980s, he courted conservative German publisher Axel Springer, the founder and owner of the Axel Springer AG publishing company and publisher of the tabloid newspaper Bild. The most popular newspaper in all of Europe, the conservative Bild was at the forefront of the Cold War-era cultural wars against the Soviet Union and collectivist ideology. Springer, a target of the student radicals of the 1960s who had been denounced by such German intellectuals as Heinrich Böll, was awarded an honorary doctorate from B.U. in 1981..

At the time of Springer's investiture, the primary (independent) student newspaper at B.U., the Daily Free Press, as well as the unofficial student newspaper that had proved a gadfly during the Silber administration (whose staff members were featured on Mike Wallace's January 1980 60 Minutes piece on Silber), the b.u. exposure, obtained and published university documentation about the marketing of honorary degrees. A list of potential honorees had been drawn up, based not on their merit but on their likely propensity to seek public honors and their ability or willingness to pay for it. Prominently mentioned in the documents was independent movie producer Joseph E. Levine, who had been born in Boston. Staff were instructed to make feelers to Levine, with the ultimate award to be on a sliding-scale system depending on his generosity to the university. A seven-figure donation to B.U. would garner the ultimate accolade, an honorary doctorate. (Levine never was awarded a degree from B.U.)

In March 1978, the b.u. exposure also broke the story of the "sale" of seats in the university's law and medical schools. The exposure story revealed that the university had accepted "advanced payments from Law and Medical School applicants as a precondition to admission".

Attack on Faculty

The Springer doctorate came after a decade long battle that Silber had waged against leftists on the B.U. faculty, which had included vetoing the hiring of Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse and a war of wills with historian Howard Zinn in the Department of Political Science. Silber fired the renowned black journalist, William Worthy, Jr., who served as head of the B.U. African American journalism program, after Worthy spoke out in support of workers who attempted to form a labor union. Silber's actions led to a climate where other notable scholars left B.U. to take positions at other universities, including Fritz Ringer and Henry Giroux. The latter took a position at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and later Pennsylvania State University, prior to his current position at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

Historian Fritz Ringer was for eight years the president of the Boston University chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). "Serving at a time when the BU president (Silber) was running roughshod over faculty rights, Fritz Ringer vigorously championed the principles of academic freedom."

In 1975, the Boston University faculty voted to form a union and Silber refused to recognize the union.

Real estate scandal and connections with organized crime

Contemporaneous with a real estate scandal broken by the Boston Globe, it was claimed that B.U. was buying properties in the Kenmore Square area of Boston from organized crime figures with ties to directors on the B.U. board. These charges resulted in several protests. and possibly contributed to a lower rate of alumni giving.

Allegations of homophobia

A Village Voice article published in 2002 speculates that Silber's anti-homosexual agenda is bound up with his experience of losing his son, David to AIDS in 1995 In a 1992 interview in Newsday, Silber said, "Decent parents don't even discuss [with their children] the possibility that there are homosexuals."

In 2000-2001, Silber upheld a campus-wide guest visitor policy for Boston University's housing that was much stricter than that at area universities. He justified the policy by arguing that lax visitor policies would lead to students bringing "their sexual partners to the room for sessions of fun and games", according to his interview with the Daily Free Press, B.U.'s student newspaper.

In 2002, Silber ordered that a B.U.-affiliated high school Boston University Academy to disband its gay-straight alliance. The alliance was a student club that staged demonstrations against homophobia. Silber dismissed the stated purpose of the club, that of serving as a support group for gay students that also sought to promote tolerance and understanding between gay and straight students. Silber accused the high school club of being a vehicle for "promoting homosexuality". At the time, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts funded gay-straight student clubs in 156 schools.

Silber's order to disband the gay-straight alliance club was highly controversial and engendered a great deal of criticism from the gay, progressive communities, including public condemnation by U.S. Representative Barney Frank in the Daily News.

Though Silber said he had recruited many homosexuals to work at Boston University, Silber also said the university would not agree not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. He said "there are more sexual orientations than just those that involve consenting adults, whether homosexuals or heterosexuals. To refuse to discriminate with regard to these other orientations would require the acceptance and thus the endorsement by Boston University of pedophilia, incest and bestiality. I added that Boston University would definitely discriminate against anyone with these orientations."

The reputation of Boston University and its alumni giving rate

Silber hired Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel in the School of Theology.

In 2002, U.S. News and World Report ranked B.U. as a "second tier" national university, not in the top 52 institutions. Seventeen Magazine, in its rankings of "The 100 Coolest Colleges", ranked B.U. 72nd.

For at least 30 years, Silber's controversies and his acidulous personality were cited as the root cause of B.U.'s unusually low rate of alumni giving. In 2008, U.S. News and World Report reported that only 6% of B.U. alumni contributed to their alma mater, a low rate for a national university.

Silber's "Deferred Compensation Package"

On May 10, 2006, the New York Times reported that the trustees of Boston University had given Silber an unprecedented compensation package worth $6.1 million in 2005 , which critics contend is more akin to a golden parachute, bonus, or gift given to a corporate chief executive officer. Academic sources say it is three times higher than the normal payout and is the highest such payout in over 30 years. The announcement of Silber's windfall, which was revealed due to tax filings by B.U., reportedly has engendered outrage in the academic community.

Political activities

Silber was the first person to chair the Texas Society to Abolish Capital Punishment. He advocated integration at the University of Texas and promoted Operation Head Start, an early education program for preschoolers.

In 1990 Silber ran for Governor of Massachusetts as a Democrat. His outsider status as well as his outspoken and combative style were at first seen as advantages in a year in which voters were disenchanted with the Democratic Party establishment. As the Democratic nominee, Silber faced Republican William Weld. Silber's angry personality, which appalled many voters, coupled with Weld's socially liberal views helped Weld in the race. During the gubernatorial race, Silber regularly overreacted to questions from the press. These overreactions came to be known as "Silber shockers". On the campaign trail he called Massachusetts a "welfare magnet" and proposed cutting off benefits for unmarried mothers who have a second child while still on public aid. He questioned saving the lives of terminally ill elderly people, quoting Shakespeare and saying that "when you've had a long life and you're ripe, then it's time to go." He said that the feminist Gloria Steinem, the black Muslim leader, Louis Farrakhan, and white supremacists are "the kind of people I wouldn't appoint as judges." Ultimately, Weld was able to hold on to a significant portion of the Republican base while appealing to large numbers of Democrats and left-of-center independents, enabling him to defeat Silber by four points. Weld became the first Republican to serve as governor since 1974.

In 1998 Silber expressed support for Benjamin LaGuer, a state prison inmate who said he was innocent of the 1983 rape for which he had been convicted by an all-white male jury. LaGuer had earned a bachelor's degree magna cum laude through the Boston University prison education program. Silber continued to support LaGuer even after 2002 when a trace DNA test seemed to link LaGuer to the crime. In 2003 Silber told the parole board of irregularities in the way the evidence was handled, raising the possibility that the test was botched.

Publications

Silber wrote two books. Straight Shooting: What's wrong with America and How to Fix It (Harper & Row, 1989), and Architecture of the Absurd: How "Genius" Disfigured a Practical Art (Quantuck Lane, 2007).

Straight Shooting is part autobiography and partly a statement of Silber's concern that the United States has experienced a decline in moral and spiritual values traceable to excessive avarice and materialism. He also faults society with excessive reliance on litigation to settle disputes.

Architecture of the Absurd discusses Silber's view that certain celebrity architects frequently fail to meet the needs of their clients because they consider themselves primarily sculptors and do not adequately consider financial constraints, the physical needs of building occupants or the urban environment. He is critical of architects Josep Lluís Sert, Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Steven Holl. One example cited by Silber is Le Corbusier's megalomaniacal 1930s plan for Algiers, which called for the demolition of the entire city. A more recent example is Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall which, before it was modified at additional expense, made rooms of nearby condominiums unbearably warm causing their air-conditioning costs to skyrocket and created hot spots on adjacent sidewalks of as much as 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

In 1976, BU published a 32-page article by Silber called "Democracy: Its Counterfeits and Its Promise". Other of his articles have been published in Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Review and Kant-Studien where he served as editor.

Boston street named for him

On May 14, 2008, the City of Boston renamed Sherborn St., which bisects the main Boston University Campus from Commonwealth Ave. through Bay State Rd. ending at Back St., "John R. Silber Way." Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said the new name for Sherborn St. was "fitting" as an honor for Silber. "Was there any other way?" Menino quipped, referring to Silber's four decades of influence on the B.U. campus.

Further reading

• Allis, Sam, The Ivory Tower Triggerman, Time Magazine, August 28, 1989, 69.

References

External links

• Boston University's biography of Silber
• and
• Village Voice article accusing Silber of bigotry and homophobia
• The Boston bully: Boston U. chancellor John Silber had a gay son who died of AIDS. So why is he such a dedicated homophobe? The Advocate (Nov 26, 2002)
• New York Review of Books sequence of letters:
  • Letter from professors at Boston University accusing Silber of violating academic freedom
  • Response to the letter by the Boston University professors from a Silber supporter
  • Rebuttal by the Boston University professors to the response by the Silber supporter