Winnebagos on Wednesdays by Scott Cowen

Author:Scott Cowen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press • Princeton and Oxford
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

The orchestra analogy holds: each member is an individual, but if the ensemble is to succeed, all must play their roles with the knowledge that the sum is greater than the parts. When any member of the triad assumes a privileged status, the whole structure is likely to collapse. If UVA is a story of board overreach, involving conflicting personalities and agendas, the story of John Silber at Boston University, president between 1971 and 1996 and chancellor between 1996 and 2003, is by and large the tale of one personality and one agenda. After Silber’s death in 2012, a Boston Globe article on Silber’s “passionate, opinionated legacy” described him as an elitist who repeatedly traded blows with liberal opponents. Welfare, feminism, and bilingual education were all targets of his disdain. To take a single example, he used to call the English Department at BU, a quarter of whom were women, “a damned matriarchy.”

Today such sexist language would be met with immediate outrage on campuses where the talk now is of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” but even in a time of less political correctness, Silber operated outside the pale of most presidents. Many perceived him as a tyrant and bully, and historian-activist Howard Zinn twice led faculty votes in attempts to oust him. Nora Ephron called him “the meanest SOB on campus” in a 1977 Esquire profile. Silber took a leave of absence in 1990 to run for governor of Massachusetts; his unguarded (and barbed) remarks appealed to populist resentment of the political establishment, and he came within seventy-seven thousand votes of winning the governorship. In 2003, while still chancellor, he promoted Daniel Goldin, a former administrator at NASA, as BU’s ninth president and then, in no-explanation, no-apology mode, dismissed him with a $1.3 million payout before Goldin ever took office.

A decline in faculty authority and an embittered atmosphere on campus during Silber’s tenure as president did not preclude some major accomplishments. BU’s endowment increased from $18.8 million to $430 million, its physical plant more than doubled, four Nobel laureates joined the faculty, and—perhaps the boldest stroke of all—Silber disbanded BU’s football team, citing financial losses. Silber, acting on his own authority, certainly got things done, but the trade-off between efficacy and democratic process did not sit well with the larger community.12

In 2004, after Silber’s departure, attempts to shore up shared governance, with president Robert Brown and provost David Campbell creating new procedures for faculty input, led to an improvement in campus morale. But with the economic downturn in 2008, last-minute layoffs at the College of General Studies, mainly of non-tenure-track faculty members, subverted the fragile rapprochement.

Some of the turbulence under Silber can be attributed to the times, when identity politics were coming to the fore and disrupting traditional (white, male) hierarchies on campus, which Silber took it upon himself to defend. Some is attributable to Silber’s irascible temperament and improvisational style; he made an art of being impolitic. Today, a new round of socioeconomic and political upheaval has stirred things up again, and presidents often face faculty unrest.

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