The Ivory Tower Triggerman

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.