n As a recent female alumna, I read with horror Chancellor and Acting President John Silber’s comments to the Boston Globe (“At BU, Silber fights ‘excess’,” Sept. 8, pg. 1). I find his attitude toward women outdated and rather repugnant.
I worked two jobs at a time, graduated summa cum laud with distinction, fulfilled the requirements for majors in German literature and sociology and a minor in history, was accepted into Phi Beta Kappa and participated in a number of fulfilling extracurricular activities during my time at Boston University. His comment that me and my female classmates’ presence on campus was a distraction to our male counterparts is abhorrent. I think I contributed a great deal to the University during my tenure, and his implication that the women on campus run around husband — or lover — hunting belittles my achievements and the achievements of all of BU’s female alumnae and students.
In addition, Silber’s suggestion that female students are somehow at fault for male students’ hormone-riddled brains insults the integrity of all the students. The idea that women are at fault for inappropriate male behavior went out, I thought, with Bob Packwood, Tailhook, and the disheartening grilling on national television of Anita Hill by a group of old white men. To suggest that men on campus are unable to concentrate on their studies because of women insults their intelligence and their achievements, as well as those of female students.
Silber’s suggestion that a 60-40 female-male ratio is somehow detrimental to the University is an anathema to me. Women receive the majority of Bachelors degrees and law degrees awarded every year in the United States. They are at parity with men in nearly every other field, except engineering and the physical sciences. Boston University is simply a microcosm of a larger national trend. Silber’s discomfort with that trend is unworthy of his position as the head of a major university and his national reputation as an educator.
His seeming obsession with the sex lives of students is disturbing. Nearly every student at BU is old enough to make those decisions for themselves. It is not his place as the president of a university to attempt to make them for the adults attending his university.
Finally, when Silber is looking for “fat” to cut from the budget, instead of cutting the professors that make BU a top-notch university, perhaps he should consider the bloated salaries and benefits awarded to administrators like himself. He collects a $700,000 salary and lives in a house that BU owns and maintains for him. His deans, the provost and other administrators also make hundreds of thousands of dollars (in some cases, quite rightly) and live in multi-million dollar homes owned and maintained by the University.
The small classes he ridiculed in his speech were an important and stimulating part of my education, and I still maintain some of the relationships I developed with some of those professors to this day. To cut those classes is to rid the University of the very thing that makes it pleasurable to attend such a large school.
In closing, I have written and asked the Development Office to take me off their fundraising lists. I will encourage other alumni to do the same until this situation changes dramatically.
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