The following interview with Boston University Chancellor John Silber was conducted on July 23 by former Daily Free Press Managing Editor Scott Brooks.
DFP: In [Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam’s July 23] column, he alleges that a dissatisfied group of trustees was responsible for ousting President [Jon] Westling.I wanted to know if you have any comment on the matter.
Silber: I don’t believe that’s true at all. I don’t believe that’s true. I think he used the word cabal — I don’t know of any cabal on this board. I haven’t seen a cabal on this board since 1975-6.
DFP: You’ve said that you consider your new position more of an obligation that an opportunity –
Silber: I did this for over 25 years, so it’s not exactly an opportunity to be a college president, because I’ve been a college president for 25 years — a little more than 25 years ‘ I think it’s a responsibility. I don’t mind doing it. I’m not pleading a hardship case; I don’t want anybody to say, you know, ‘you have my commiserations.’ I don’t feel that way at all. But on the other hand, I don’t regard it as a subject for congratulations, either.
DFP: Do you feel at all that you were put in an awkward position by having to accept this position?
Silber: No, I don’t think I was put under any pressure at all. It’s a matter that, if I didn’t agree to take on this responsibility, which I certainly know how to do — I’m far better equipped to take it on in short notice than anybody else around here. And it doesn’t create a problem of musical chairs. If you move the provost to the president’s office, then you’ve got to move somebody into the provost’s office. If you take the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and put him into the provost’s office, then you’ve got to find a new dean of Arts and Sciences. You can go through seven or eight appointments by picking somebody else, so it’s just much simpler, and the trustees recognized the simplicity of asking me to do it. And I could understand why; that makes perfectly good sense. So I’m quite happy to do it.
DFP: Can you outlay your top priorities for the next year?
Silber: Well, I would say the absolutely top priority is to assess the situation nationally and internationally, because there are periods in which international affairs don’t have any influence on the operation of a university. This year is not one of them. There are times in which the national economy is going great and there’s no reason to worry about these macroeconomic problems. This year is not one of them.
Right now I’m very concerned about the budgetary issues. We have parents who have had savings accounts for their children for maybe a quarter of a million bucks — enough to send two to three children through college — and now, all of a sudden, that scholarship fund that was once a quarter of a million dollars is now, say, $50,000. How are they going to pay the tuition at Boston University? I know we’re getting requests — frequent requests — for additional financial aid. And I can understand why. And so, obviously, I’m concerned about the budget, about how we’re going to find additional funds for financial aid packages and how we’re going to help these parents over the economic situation that they face.
DFP: How will you address those problems?
Silber: Well, I think that you look through the budget and you try to determine, are there things that we’re doing that we don’t need to do? If so, can you cut some costs? Are there other ways of enhancing revenue? And you work on both sides.
DFP: Your presidency was marked by a significant level of faculty discord –
Silber: I can’t accept a falsehood as if it were true. If you asked, what was it like from the time I came in in 1971 to, let’s say, 1980, I think that would have been a fair description, because, at that time, I came into a university that was on the verge of bankruptcy. When I came in, the operating budget of Boston University was $71 million, and I found out one-third of the way through the fiscal year, precisely on October 31, that we had an $8.8 million deficit in a $71 million budget. That’s about a 13 percent deficit. Before the end of the year, by making drastic cuts and enhancing revenues, I cut that deficit to about $124,000. And we operated on a balanced budget and generated, so far, I think we’ve generated close to $450 million in operating surpluses since that time.
Now, you don’t come in and have to make cuts and changes like that and win a popularity contest. But if I hadn’t done it, there would have been about 7,000 employees of Boston University that would have gone back on the unemployment list. And there would have been students and people who had gone to Boston University who would have no Boston University to talk about.
Now, my highest obligation was to save this university. And that’s what I did, and I did it by building faculty. Now why was it so important to build faculty? When I came, we were raising $2.5 million a year annually in fundraising. As you know, perhaps just from a week or so ago when the announcement was made, we raised over $90 million this year, which is an all-time record at Boston University. That’s a big improvement over $2.5 million. But back then all we did was $2.5 million, so I knew I can’t balance the budget by trying to raise money, because when you had a deficit, nobody gives you money. You don’t put good money after bad.
So, I had to figure out another way, and the way to do it — as I told the trustees, Boston University is not well-endowed. We had an $18.8 million endowment. Boston University gets no support from the state. Consequently, we can’t try to recruit people on the basis of price. We can’t lower the price of tuition in order to attract people. We have to attract them on the basis of quality because tuition has to be increased. Every year, for the first four years, I drastically raised the tuition at Boston University in order to help balance the budget. What was the other source of money? Faculty. We had grants and contracts of $11 million back in 1971, when I came. That’s what the faculty brought in through competitive research grants. This last year they brought in over $250 million. Now, it was the faculty, the outstanding faculty I recruited, that helped finance the development of Boston University. They were a source of important and absolutely essential revenue for the rejuvenation of Boston University, and moreover, they were the people who added luster to Boston University so that we could become more attractive to students. They had a two-fold effect. They helped us recruit students, and they brought in a great deal of research money under competitive grants ‘
Now, when you have a group of faculty who aren’t capable of bringing in those kinds of grants, and you suddenly start appointing people who can, it’s only human nature to be a little resentful. I think the faculty in the early years, from, say, about 1972 to around 1978 or so, were highly resentful because there were a large number of second-raters who had passed themselves off as first-rate until the first-rate faculty arrived. And then it was perfectly obvious they were second-rate. There were third-rate members of the faculty who were delighted to welcome first-rate members to the faculty because they enjoyed working in a more prestigious university, and a university of greater quality.
And it took time to change this. Now, 95 percent of the faculty — by the time I’d reached the 20th year of my administration — 95 percent of the faculty had been recruited since I was here. If they were hostile to me, why would they come? You can’t tell me that the faculty of Boston University is opposed to Silber and then say, but 95 percent of them — and by now it must be 98 percent — came either while I was president or while I was chancellor.
DFP: So has the reaction been mostly favorable to your return to the duties of president?
Silber: I have not had a single negative note. I must have had at least 100 letters or telephone calls, and every one of them has been enthusiastic.
DFP: President Westling was well respected for his fundraising abilities. How will his departure affect the Student Village project?
Silber: I don’t think it will have any negative effect on it at all. We are committed to that project, and we’re going ahead with it. We’ve already raised about $50 million toward the completion of that project, and I hope that we’ll raise some more. I’m going down to Washington tomorrow looking for some additional money for that very project.
DFP: What progress has been made on the Master Plan this summer?
Silber: Well, you caught me too early. Come back maybe a month or two from now and ask me that question again and I could probably help you. Nobody has discussed with me a master plan, and I’ll make a note of that [Silber takes out a pad and writes, “Where is the Master Plan?”].
I don’t have a lot of confidence in master plans because you can’t see very far into the future.
DFP: Well, it would be a five-year Master Plan.
Silber: Well, it’s very hard — I don’t know when the next terrorist strike is going to come. I don’t know what the Stock Market is going to do. Our ability to do many of the things we planned will become much brighter if we finally hit bottom on that Stock Market and it starts going back up. That’ll be very good news. If it doesn’t go back up, it’s going to be very bad news. I don’t know how you plan in that level of uncertainty.
DFP: Regarding the search for the next president, do you favor an internal or a national search?
Silber: We did not have a national search — I think Alex Beam claimed that we had a national search and then came up with Jon Westling; that wasn’t true. We didn’t. The trustees met, they decided what they wanted, they said, “What we want is continuity. We want to continue in the direction we’re going.”
Beam, if I remember correctly, said something to the effect that Jon was notably unqualified for the job, or something like that. There couldn’t be a greater lie told. That is simply false. A) He is a brilliant man. He is a learned man. I don’t know any other college president who has his range and depth of knowledge.
Now, if I remember correctly — check me if I’m wrong — he also said he was the only college president without a Ph.D. That’s just simply false. University of Denver has a very fine president who used to be, I think, the vice president of ABC Communications. His name is Dan Richie. He’s an excellent president of a college. [Note: Richie is chancellor of University of Denver. He was CEO of Westinghouse Broadcasting but has never been affiliated with ABC.] I don’t believe Dan has a Ph.D., and he doesn’t need one. There are many college presidents with law degrees, there are college presidents with MBAs, and I’d be very surprised if there are not college presidents who have — I’m sure there are some — who have theological degrees and not Ph.D.s. I know that there are many people who have had ed. doctor’s degrees, which is by no means a Ph.D. The rigor of an educational doctorate is by no means equivalent to a Ph.D.
But most important about Jon Westling: He’s also a Rhodes scholar. And if he had been nothing, if he had been an autodidact, his quality of his mind and the range of his knowledge and the depth of his knowledge is simply outstanding. And he did a damn good job as president. So, how dare this man who does nothing but write gossip — and it’s his own malignant gossip — how does he come up with the notion that Jon Westling was unqualified? And if he was so badly unqualified, why did he do such a great job? Because he did do a great job. He set records — we set a fundraising record the last year of my presidency, and he has set a record in all six years of his presidency of increasing fundraising.
Now, I think he mentioned something toward the end of that article — I’m remembering more of it than I realized I did — he said something at the end to say the he didn’t like the “grip-and-grin” of fundraising. Who the hell does? It goes with the territory. You know, that’s part of what you get paid for. But I don’t know that you have to particularly enjoy it.
Now, Christopher Reaske, our vice president for development, actually enjoys it. I don’t enjoy it, but that’s something I do. Now, the enjoyment of it is sort of the planning. It becomes fascinating. I wouldn’t say it’s enjoyable, but it’s fascinating because you’ve got a target out there. You’ve got somebody with some money and you want to persuade him to give you some. And you’ve got to figure out, well, what’s my approach, how am I going to persuade him to do it. And there’s some excitement in that, and some satisfaction in it. But it’s not the equivalent of preparing a lecture or writing a chapter for a book or an article for publication, or meeting with students. Not as pleasant as meeting with the editor of The Daily Free Press, even.
DFP: So, regarding the next search for a president –
Silber: I think it’ll be a national search. I think that’s what the trustees are thinking about.
DFP: What’s changed from 1995 to 2002 that a national search is now more appropriate?
Silber: Well, I don’t think you have, necessarily, an inside candidate who’s just ideally suited for that job. Jon Westling had served as my assistant, and then as provost, and then as acting president on two occasions for 22 years prior to my resignation. He’s served now 28 years in the administration of Boston University, and he was highly successful in every one of those positions. That’s something else that Beam seems not to have taken into account.
I’m not saying there’s not going to be an inside candidate. There may very well be two or three inside candidates. But I’m pretty sure — in fact, I know — they want to have a national search and look for candidates outside the University, as well.
DFP: Could you name any internal candidates that you feel would be appropriate?
Silber: No, I’m not allowed to do that.
DFP: There were three names that were brought up in 1995: Provost [Dennis] Berkey, [School of Management dean Louis] Lataif and former [School of Education dean Edwin] DeLattre. Could you comment on any of those three as possibilities?
Silber: Well, DeLattre — I think he’s retired as dean of SED, and I just don’t think that he would be a candidate. The other persons might very well be candidates, but then the trustees are going to ask themselves the problem about musical chairs. You solve one problem and create another one.
Dean Lataif, I think, is the most outstanding dean of the School of Business that I could imagine. I think he’s absolutely first-rate, and he’s done a terrific job in the development of the School of Management. We’d have a hard time finding a successor of his quality.
I would suggest another person of great quality and that’s Dean [Aram] Chobanian of the School of Medicine. But where would we find another dean of the School of Medicine as good as Chobanian? And also he’s on top of multi-million-dollar research grants, and he wouldn’t be able to do that as president.
DFP: You’ve mentioned in the past your ability, and President Westling’s ability to remove academic “fads” from the University –
Silber: No, I don’t believe anybody’s ever mentioned that. To resist fads.
DFP: Should the next president uphold those same ideals?
Silber: I don’t think anybody’s going to be appointed who wants to be politically correct, because that’s just ideological — that’s non-thinking. A person who doesn’t believe in the search for truth is not going to be appointed president of Boston University. If somebody doesn’t believe there’s an objective world out there and objective standards of cognition, so that you can distinguish between truth and error — between the most likely story and an implausible story — I don’t think a person who denies those basic tenets of rationality will be accepted as president of Boston University.
And it doesn’t have anything to do with whether one is to the left or whether one is to the right. People keep mistakenly identifying me as a conservative, which is not true. I started the Texas Society to Abolish Capital Punishment, and I’m still opposed to capital punishment. I helped in the organization of Operation Head Start. I’ve worked on the Parent-Child education program and got some additional funding for it from the state; they even named that scholarship fund for me because of the work I did on that.
All of those are liberal causes. The fact that I don’t believe in ideologies, and I never accepted Marxism as an ideology, doesn’t make me right-wing. Since I was never a Marxist, I’m regarded as conservative. And it’s an epithet that won’t stick. I helped with the racial integration of the University of Texas, and I refused to allow any campus radicals from shutting down the University back in 1971, 1972, 1973. That wasn’t because I was conservative, it was because I believed in First Amendment rights, and I wasn’t going to let some students, in the name of the freedom of speech, put an end to freedom of speech.
While I was president, we had Angela Davis here who spoke, but then when we brought in a conservative to speak, students would try to break up the meeting. I wouldn’t let that happen. That didn’t make me a conservative; it made me a person committed to the First Amendment and committed to an open campus.
And fortunately, those tensions are no longer [existent] on the campus. I think people know that in this campus we respect all points of view, we listen to all points of view, but we’re not going to be dominated by any one point of view.
DFP: I’m going to move to one of your favorite topics: Do you intend to respond to last year’s Student Union Guest Policy proposal?
Silber: Well, I had a meeting last week with the president of the student body, Mr. Ethan Clay, and Mr. Clay asked me exactly that same question. And I said I had never seen the document that he sent to Mr. Westling but that if he would send me a copy of it that I’d be very happy to respond to it and that I thought probably what I’d do is appoint a committee to let them review it and see what changes could be made.
I think there may be aspects of that Guest Policy that call for correction. I think there’s a part of that Guest Policy that I suspect is sound, and that’s the only policy that I commented on last academic year in The Daily Free Press, and that is on overnight guests. The only reason that we put this ban on overnight guests in rooms was at the request of students. It wasn’t something that was conjured up in the central administration and we decided, ‘How could we put a chastity belt on the student body?’ That’s not what we tried to do. Many of the student body were damn tired of not being able to get a night’s sleep because an inconsiderate roommate brought in a girlfriend or a boyfriend to spend all night in lovemaking while they were trying to sleep, or while they were trying to study.
Now, that’s not what we’re trying to do here. Can’t they have their fun and games between 8:00 in the morning and 11 or 12:00 at night? I mean, that would seem to be enough time to allow for that. So then just set aside some time when these kids can sleep. I haven’t heard any argument for suggesting that the abuse of the privilege of using the dormitory should be reintroduced.
But I’ll look at it, and if there’s a good argument for why we ought to get rid of that, then fine. You can’t use the argument that, “Well, we’re adults, so we ought to be allowed to live the way we want to,” because adults are very often inconsiderate. If you live in an apartment house, every now and then you have inconsiderate neighbors, you know, who have the hi-fi on at an unreasonable volume, and in a properly run apartment house, there’s a manager who puts a stop to that.
I lived in London one year, when the Beatles were in vogue, and we were paying a very high rent; it was all we could do to make ends meet and pay the rent in that place. And up above us, they had rented a room to about six guys who didn’t have to put up much a piece but they could meet the rent, and they ran this hi-fi — thump, thump, thump, thump, thump — to the point that we could hardly exist. And we went to the landlord and said, “You know, we’re not going to pay our rent until you put a stop to that. And you try to evict us, and we’ll see you in a domestic court.” And I believe the magistrate in that domestic court would understand that we didn’t pay that rent to have that kind of interference. And so he put a stop to it.
Now, that’s not because those people upstairs weren’t adults. It was because they weren’t behaving as responsible adults. And it’s one of our concerns at Boston University to encourage responsible behavior in young people. Just because they’re adults doesn’t mean that we’re going to let them bring all the alcohol they want into the dormitory, or we’re going to let them use drugs in the dormitory. This is something we’re not going to do, even though they’re adults.
DFP: Can you think of any specific portion of the Guest Policy that you might consider changing?
Silber: Well, one thing — and as I say, I haven’t seen that document — but one thing that I’ve heard about that may have some serious justification is this question about, suppose your brother or sister or your cousin arrives in town unexpectedly, and you don’t have time to get a permit — 24-hours in advance, 48-hours in advance, whatever it is — and so you can’t put them up. Now, I think we can do something about that. If I’ve stated the policy correctly — and I haven’t looked at that policy in over six years — but if I’ve stated that policy correctly, I think that that needs to be changed.
DFP: To switch topics for a second, what’s in store for the Chelsea school district for the next five years?
Silber: I don’t know. That’s a very good question. That’s a tough situation. I think a lot of it turns on how this referendum on bilingual education turns out. We are hampered in Chelsea by the existence of that law that doesn’t allow us to teach English as rapidly as we could to predominantly foreign-speaking students. Over 55 percent of the children in Chelsea do not speak English as their native language, and they need to be in immersion programs right from the start, particularly when they’re three, four and five years of age. And we get stuck with this bilingual stuff, and it delays their educational progress. It’s a very serious mistake, and I hope that this referendum passes and we can accelerate their access to the English language.
DFP: Are you doing any work to make sure that the referendum passes?
Silber: Well, yeah. I’ve talked to Lincoln Tamayo [former Chelsea High School principal and chairman of the Unz campaign in Massachusetts], I attended a debate on the subject, and I’m thinking, depending on how it goes, I may do some op-ed pieces on it.
DFP: You said that you would step down as chancellor if the next president requested that.
Silber: Sure.
DFP: Do you ever intend on retiring?
Silber: I certainly don’t intend to continue as chancellor for as long as I live, unless I live a lot less time than I anticipate [laughs]. But I don’t ever intend to retire in the sense that I intend to quit working. I’m going to be doing something. See, I don’t see this fascination in golf, and in all those repetitive activities where you work on your golf game and you start off scoring 110, and you work hard at it and you get down to 100, and you work hard at it and get down to 95 — that’s just not for me. I think engagement is more interesting, more exciting.
I think retirement, in that sense that you’re simply going out to lunch or going out to dinner, or traveling or playing golf or playing tennis or boating, and you’re doing that full-time — that to me is about as attractive as death.
And, you know, I’m probably screwed up on that. I’m not passing judgment on people who enjoy retirement. My mother taught until she was 82 years of age, but, being a quitter, she retired at 82. And she lived to 98. Well, that’s 82 to 98; that’s a long time — 16 years of retirement. She enjoyed a lot of it. She really did enjoy it. So I’m not criticizing anybody that enjoys retirement. But that’s just not the way that I’m put together.
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