TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/082889/08288900.034

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 102 lines

EDUCATION, Page 69

The Ivory Tower Triggerman

In a new book, B.U.'s president takes aim at U.S. education

By Sam Allis


    Few people are neutral about John Silber. After 18 stormy years
as president of Boston University, Silber, 63, continues to delight
admirers and enrage critics with his outspoken conservative views
and hard-nosed leadership style. George Washington University
president Stephen Trachtenberg, who worked under Silber at B.U.,
calls him "one of the most distinctive and seminal voices in
American higher education today." Freda Rebelsky Camp, head of the
B.U. chapter of the American Association of University Professors,
says he runs a "sleazy, fascist regime" and dismisses his
acknowledged intelligence as irrelevant: "First-rate minds can be
lunatics, like Ezra Pound. It doesn't mean he should run a
university."

    Love him or hate him, John Silber is impossible to ignore. The
spotlight of controversy seems to seek him out. Earlier this year
he was in the headlines with an audacious fund-raising plan to take
out life-insurance policies on students and alumni. In May, Silber
scored a double coup over neighboring Harvard by playing host to
Presidents George Bush and Francois Mitterrand of France at B.U.'s
graduation exercises. Next month Silber's precedent-setting
experiment at running the troubled public schools of Chelsea,
Mass., gets under way in the glare of national publicity. And in
a forthcoming book called Straight Shooting (Harper & Row; $22.50),
Silber takes some potshots at the shortcomings of the nation's
educational system.

    In Silber's view that system is in an appalling state. "The
standards today are derisory by standards that were operative in
ordinary little country schools a hundred years ago," he writes.
A believer in meritocracy based on struggle, Silber decries what
he sees as a pernicious confusion between equality of opportunity
and equal ability. "Not a single member of our founding fathers
believed any such rubbish," he says. "It is perfectly obvious that
all individuals are not born with equal ability. I wish I could run
as fast as Carl Lewis. I can't."

    The U.S. teaching profession gets generally low marks in
Silber's book. He lambastes U.S. schools of education as an
"unintentional conspiracy to defraud the American public because
they are certifying the ineducable to be educators." To draw a
better pool of prospective teachers, he suggests scrapping the
current time-consuming four-year certification program in favor of
rigorous qualification tests and one semester of pedagogy and
practice teaching. In another controversial view, he believes that
high school teachers should score an A on a freshman-level college
exam in their subject before being allowed to teach.

    Silber feels that many students have it too easy these days,
paraphrasing the Roman poet Juvenal in observing that "luxury is
more ruthless than war." He chafes at hearing undergraduates speak
of entering the "real world" once they leave school. "That is an
expression of escapism," he writes. "It suggests that they were
avoiding the real world all the time they were in school." He also
argues that college freshmen, rather than graduate students,
warrant special attention: "If more of our academic resources were
spent on freshmen and sophomores, advanced undergraduates and
graduate students would be far more able to study on their own."

    Silber's outspokenness is not limited to educational matters.
Whether writing or speaking, he characteristically offers opinions
on everything from Nicaragua (pro-contra) and Gorbachev (don't
trust him) to abortion (pro-life) and Jesse Jackson (full of
"mindless, rhyming pieces of nonsense on which he has built a
career"). One of his central philosophical tenets is the necessity
of accepting hardship and disappointment. "I'm sorry I didn't put
`death' into the index," he said in an interview. "I really believe
that confrontation with death and with reality is necessary to
moral education."

    Confrontation and struggle have marked much of Silber's career.
"Everything is combat to him," says one B.U. professor. Born in San
Antonio, Silber grew up in the hardscrabble Depression years. His
mother helped support the family as a schoolteacher while his
father, a German architect, tried to make ends meet. Silber started
life with a deformed right arm, and his efforts to overcome that
handicap probably contributed to his combativeness. After graduate
forays into law and religion -- he once studied for the ministry
-- Silber received a doctorate in philosophy from Yale and went on
to teach at the University of Texas in Austin. He later served as
dean of the College of Arts and Sciences there before being named
B.U. president in 1971. Since then he has increased the
university's budget more than sevenfold, hired and fired faculty
with abandon, and imposed his tight moral code on campus. Although
Silber has made his share of enemies over the years, says George
Washington president Trachtenberg, "nobody says Boston University
is not a better place now than when he came."

    Despite his often abrasive words, Silber can be charming in
person -- as long as he is unchallenged. Interviewers confront
seamless arguments peppered with quotes from Shakespeare and
references to his critics as "pismires," creatures defined in the
dictionary as ants. A small-framed, brown-haired man with angular
features and hard eyes, the pipe-smoking Silber smiles rarely,
swears sporadically and goes stone-faced when angered. Little of
what he says, he concedes, is spontaneous. "I've spent more time
thinking about most of the issues I talk about than (other) people
who talk about them. And as a consequence I'm not shooting from the
hip." Not from the hip, perhaps, but, as he amply demonstrates in
Straight Shooting, John Silber is not afraid to pull the trigger.