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Book Review: 'Seeking the North Star' by John R. Silber
A genuine liberal, John R. Silber was on a collision course with the illiberal liberalism of contemporary academic culture.
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By ROGER KIMBALL
Aug. 3, 2014 4:30 p.m. ET
When writing about academic administrators, I often prepare for the task by retrieving a copy of Ralph Buchsbaum's zoological classic "Animals Without Backbones," to remind myself what species of creature I am communing with. A conspicuous exception to this rule was my friend John Silber, about whom no trace of invertebrateness was ever detected. Indeed, Silber, who died at 86 in 2012, thrived on confrontation. In a commencement address delivered at Boston University in 1996, he told his departing charges that "you can never succeed in realizing your highest dreams and ambitions if you do not strive for them with all the force of your personality." You can be sure that all graduating seniors at BU would have learned that, for John Silber, "force of personality" was no idle commendation.
A specialist in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant —like the peripatetic timekeeper of Königsberg, he liked his imperatives categorical—Silber began his career at the University of Texas at Austin, where he chaired the department of philosophy and later served as a dean. But it was as president of Boston University, a position he held from 1971 until 1996, when he became chancellor, that Silber emerged as a national figure, celebrated or reviled depending on the filiations of the person delivering the judgment.
In his tonic foreword to "Seeking the North Star," a wide-ranging selection of Silber's speeches, Tom Wolfe notes that, at BU, Silber transformed "a moribund streetcar college into a major teaching and research institution," building its endowment to some $430 million from $18 million. He stocked the faculty with world-class talent, including Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel, Derek Walcott, Saul Bellow and the physicist Sheldon Glashow. Unambiguous grounds for celebration, you might think, but that would be to neglect politically correct mediocrities such as historian Howard Zinn, who was for decades a fixture at BU and with whom Silber often clashed.
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