Word: silbering
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...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...
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...
...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...
...This week Boston University President John R. Silber proposes parietal rules for the school. Silber will later give up the plan in the face of widespread student opposition...
...style is far more insidious than Silber's Despite his policies, he is still associated with liberalism, with democratic values, and with compassion--an image he shrewdly manages to preserve at the expense of the reputations of his underlings. When labor law scholar Bok tries to bust a union, he sits quietly in his office, while Associate Vice President for Human Resources Ann Taylor is sent to the front lines to use scare tactics and talk worse-case scenarios...