To say it’s the “end of an era” at Boston University with the passing of John Silber is an understatement. Very few university presidents in the country’s history have made their mark as Silber did at BU. In his case, however, the mark is contradictory.
When I arrived at BU, in 1974, Silber had been president for only three years. It’s difficult to imagine how a university leader could so quickly bring about such a polarized environment. BU had become the academic equivalent of a war zone. The established official narrative was that Silber had been compelled to smack heads together to make any progress. The institution was mediocre, and it needed an extreme makeover.
Many new arrivals, including me, bought into this narrative initially. Silber did appear to be an authentic reformer. But it didn’t take long for the official storyline to unravel. Junior faculty, caught in the middle of the fracas, sympathized with many of Silber’s objectives, but also saw how much he relished locking horns with anyone in his path. That led to the faculty strike of 1979, the largest at any private institution in the history of the country.
The strike didn’t have to happen. It was the result of Silber’s bullheadedness. The man generated conflict more as a matter of his own psychodynamics than the actual situation confronting him. And it was this way throughout his reign: The entire institution was held captive to his inner need to duke it out.
Much of the positive press Silber received over the years centered on BU’s transformation after his arrival. A persistent question remains, however: How much more progress could have been made had Silber’s “managerial style” been different? Many institutions have made enormous strides under presidents who did not become household names because of their flamboyant belligerence. (Father Donald Monan, president of Boston College during virtually the same period as Silber, is a case in point.)
And then there is the great paradox: You can build up an institution while simultaneously doing it monumental damage. In Silber’s case, this meant recruiting talented faculty and erecting new facilities while creating a toxic environment. Silber didn’t lead BU—he controlled it. He cultivated a corrosive “them” versus “us” mentality. If you were a “friend” of the administration, you could land one of the fiefdoms Silber handed out; if a “foe,” you garnered yourself substantial abuse, verbal or otherwise.
The institutional culture under Silber resembled that of the court in a 17th-century monarchy, with courtiers jostling among themselves to curry royal favor. And as happens in absolutist environments, people were guarded in voicing criticism. Those who complained out loud declined in numbers, especially after the demise of the faculty union in the mid-eighties.
A host of well-known faculty either left for other institutions or chose retirement (Alasdair McIntyre, Helen Vendler, Frances Fox Piven, Fritz Ringer, even Howard Zinn). This led to a dampening of BU’s once lively public forum. Many colleagues went into “inner exile,” just going about their business as quietly as possible while trying to ignore what was going on around them.
Silber was a media darling. He could be counted on to say something outrageous (his “Silber shockers”). He also excelled at self-enrichment (with salary and other forms of compensation reaching record levels for an American university) and self-promotion, as he used the institution as a launching pad for what he hoped would be a career in politics, culminating in his nearly successful run for the governorship of Massachusetts in 1990. Many colleagues at BU mobilized to defeat him. I opted to sit back and wait for him to self-destruct, which is precisely what happened.
Any further political aspirations were dashed with an exposé on 60 Minutes in which Silber was shown (despite his denials) to have benefited financially from risky investments he had convinced the Board of Trustees to make in a biomedical start-up. This led to an investigation by the state’s attorney general into the extremely close financial relationships between BU’s president and trustees.
Here, of course, was the key to the Silber phenomenon in general: He controlled the very group that was supposed to oversee his performance. Faculty votes of no confidence mattered not at all, given where real power resided.
I’ve often wondered how Silber managed to strong-arm not only BU faculty but also many local political, community, and business leaders. I came to attribute it in part to the fact that New Englanders were unaccustomed to the bare-knuckle rhetorical techniques Silber employed as part of his Texas-born, Lone Star persona. He would dare faculty, staff, and, not least, students to move into his terrain, and few would do so. If they got caught there by surprise, they would get trampled on.
Silber’s admirers defend him by saying that he simply liked to test people. If they didn’t push back, they deserved his tongue-lashings. The notion that everyone (including students) had to “man up” and play the game his way is patently absurd.
Many outside of academe, including some journalists, relished the image of Silber whipping his pack of over-privileged professors into shape. Had they themselves been subject to the same treatment, they would have howled in protest.
Like most heads of oppressively run institutions, Silber tried to project his legacy into the future by anointing his successor: Jon Westling, who started his career at BU serving as Silber’s office assistant (he held no advanced degree and had no track record in research and publishing). That project came to naught when Westling was defenestrated unexpectedly in 2002, thereby initiating a period of real transformation. First under Aram Chobanian, and then under the current president, Robert Brown, BU has slowly but surely shed the negative features of the Silber era.
It has not been an easy process, given the entrenched institutional ethos. (Silber continued to reside in his presidential mansion until his death.) A thorough transformation of the culture of the Board of Trustees also needed to happen, and it has, for the most part. Those of us who have been on the campus for a long time have to pinch ourselves occasionally to make sure we’re not dreaming. BU is making big strides under Brown’s stewardship, and none of that progress has been accompanied by the sturm und drang of the Silber years.
But the Silber legacy is likely to linger for some time still. One ironic vestige is the result of the city’s decision a few years back to rename Sherborn Street as Silber Way. It’s a very short street (only two blocks), but there’s one very important address there. For the foreseeable future, the official presidential address at BU will be “One Silber Way.” For those familiar with the institution’s history, it’s a particularly cruel joke.
James Iffland is a professor of Spanish at Boston University and former chair of the faculty council.
