Boston University Chancellor John Silber, who assumed the university’s presidential duties upon Jon Westling’s resignation last July, and Assistant Vice President for Public Relations Kevin Carleton sat down with Managing Editor Dan Atkinson on Sunday, Dec. 8.
The Daily Free Press: First of all, I just wanted to look back at a few things that happened this semester. You already made your position on the Boston University Academy Gay/Straight Student Alliance pretty clear. I was just wondering if you thought that what happened with that in terms of student reaction would ever be so big with the School of Law, CFA, all sorts of students
John Silber: It wasn’t so big. There was a great deal of pressure put on many of those kids in the Law School. I got reports that many of them were simply pressured to go ahead and sign it, and they just signed it not to have a struggle. But it was not a large number of students and so far as I know, we have something like 30,000 students at Boston University, and there might have been as many as 500 to 1,000 involved. That’s not a lot of students.
DFP: It seems, though, as if there were more students than in previous years with causes against the administration.
Silber: Well, you know, this was a hot ticket that nobody wanted to understand fairly. The Daily Free Press did not report it accurately. My remarks were not reported accurately. The Daily Free Press did make amends to some extent because they did publish letters that I had sent both to the law students and to the parents, and that helped. If they had not distorted the issue to start with or if the other local newspapers hadn’t, I don’t think there would have been much of a protest at all. It is a perfectly reasonable position and had the overwhelming approval of the parents.
DFP: It seems the issue has pretty much died down in the past month.
Silber: Sure it has. You can’t keep a non-story alive forever. To force 12- and 13-year-old children to participate in a National Coming Out Day is so outrageous that it is perfectly obvious that thoughtful people are not going to support that.
DFP: The other big issue this semester as far as a lot of the students were concerned were the changes in the Guest Policy. You got on record as saying that there would never be changes, I think two years ago in an interview with the Daily Free Press [see Silber: Straight Shooting, Apr. 28, 2000]
Silber: No, I am not at all sure that I ever said there would never be changes.
DFP: I believe in an interview with Adam Swensek in 2000 you said that students should be taking up better causes to fight.
Silber: I agree with that. I don’t think that is much of a cause. But I don’t believe I ever said categorically that there would be no changes. I wasn’t even president at the time and I couldn’t say what President Westling might have done. I know he had taken it under advisement. I don’t think that quotation is accurate.
DFP: Okay, that said, what do you think of the fact that the changes were made after a very large and cohesive student proposal? I know that it got praise from I think Dean Ross and other people for actually having taken the time to go out and have the research done and present an argument as opposed to just random rioting and protesting. Do you think that signifies any significant student change in student activism?
Silber: I don’t’ know. I thought it was a very thoughtful thing that the students did. I am very please to respond when students want to present their position as clearly and as thoughtfully as they did. Obviously I think they deserve a very constructive and serious response.
DFP: Looking ahead to Tuesday when you are going to be speaking to students at the Union meeting I know in the past you would occasionally have debates in the GSU and now you are speaking in a broad public form with students do you see that as
Silber: Where are we meeting?
DFP: SMG 105, I believe. It is a large auditorium room.
Silber: Is that the conference auditorium?
Kevin Carleton: Yes, I believe so.
Silber: That is a fairly small room. That will hold about 150 to 200 people I guess. Anyhow, what am I supposed to talk about?
DFP: I believe it is just going to be a question and answer.
Silber: That will be fine.
DFP: Do you think that this will be a sort of repeat of days in the past where a similar thing would happen and students would basically be more rowdy and
Silber: No, I don’t know that. You weren’t even here. I have had many, many meetings with students, many more meetings that were not rowdy. This idea that every time I have met with students there has been some kind of fight is a piece of garbage. I met with students at the Towers dormitory and the Warren Towers, in the Castle, in Metcalf Hall I have met with students in any number of place with very amiable discussions. All you choose to remember are one or two occasions in which there was some issue that was inflammatory. That goes back maybe 30 years to the Vietnam War. I had to explain to students over and over again that I do not set United States foreign policy; that unfortunately I was not the Secretary of State. Unfortunately, I could not change that policy. But they were mad at me as if I were making that policy in Vietnam. Or angry at Boston University as if we were making the policy. That issue has been gone now since about 1975. You have to go back 27 years for that.
DFP: Do you think there is going to be any issues of particular importance in students’ minds on Tuesday or
Silber: I don’t know. I will find out.
DFP: One of the things you were talking about in your interview this summer with us with Scott Brooks [see Silber: Tracking international, economic affairs is BU’s top priority this year, Jul. 9, 2002] you referred to one of the main goals for this semester as to examine the economic situation and how it is going to impact students at Boston University and just how you were going to react to it. And so far you mentioned that you are trying to trim the fat out of the budget. I would like to know how you think that has gone so far and what you think the next step is.
Silber: Well, we are still in the defining stage right now, trying to see where the cuts can be made without ever degrading the quality of education or the quality of services in general. It will get done eventually but it can’t be done overnight.
DFP: There is a fair amount of backlash that was reported about professors complaining a lot of the time off the record on your piece on class sizes
Silber: Again, that has been distorted in the press because what I made quite clear was I do not believe there should be any specific set of class sizes. On the other hand, you can have 40 percent of you classes with enrollment under ten. You can’t have 80 percent under 20. Those are ridiculously small classes when you have that percentage. It’s not that you should have no classes of five or ten students or fifteen students or twenty students, but the idea that you would have anywhere from 30 percent to 35 percent with fewer than ten students, and anywhere from 75 to 80 percent with fewer than 20 students or 25 students is not consistent with financial survival. Faculty cannot just duplicate courses and increase the number of small sections without running up the cost of education to the point that we have a deficit. There has to be some reorganization of the curriculum and some clarification of it. But I made quite clear that if you are teaching an advanced student in violin it’s one professor and one student. That is the only way it can be done at a high level of quality. If you have got a string quartet that is being educated you can have one professor and four students. If it is a brass quintet you can have one professor and five students. But if it is a class in anatomy you can certainly have twenty-five art students working on a model or working on a skeleton and the professor can move from one to the other as they develop their work. And that’s consistent with high-quality education. At the Art Students League in New York they have had excellent anatomy classes taught with more than 100 students in the class. It depends on the subject and the abilities of the professor.
DFP: Another thing you mentioned around the same time was grade inflation. I know it hasn’t been viewed at BU as anywhere near a problem as say like Harvard, but I have also been talking to students who in their views, the requirements for classes have gone up this semester. I was wondering if
Silber: I hope that’s the case. I know one thing the students remember the toughest professors. If they remember the professors that gave them easy grades and just all A’s, they are more apt to remember them with contempt than with anything else. The ones that they greatly admire and feel indebted to are those whose demands were so great that they pushed the student to greater achievement than the student perhaps imagined possible.
But you are quite right. Grade inflation at Boston University, although it has crept up some in recent years, is not anything like the situation that was reported at Harvard. And there is practically no grade inflation in the School of Engineering or the School of Management and there is very little in the College of General Studies. Those are pretty demanding programs and they have several departments in the College of Arts and Sciences in which the standards are very high. There are few individual professors who simply give practically all A’s. And there has to be some reconsideration of those things, but that is the work of the department chairmen and deans. It is not my job.
And with regard to statements by faculty members that go without names, I regard those with the same contempt that I treat anonymous letters. I throw anonymous letters in the wastebasket and I am not interested in anonymous statements. Not a single person in the last 33 years has been fired at Boston University for what he has said. There has never been a case of somebody being fired or penalized for expressing an opinion. And consequently when somebody says he is afraid to speak his mind, that’s just rubbish. What you have, rather, is a coward on your hands and a man or woman who prefers to engage in slander or rumor or gossip rather than stand up and make a declaration of some sort that they are willing to stand by.
I think that in an academic community you should expect more honorable behavior. But again, you are not talking about a large number of faculty members, you might be talking about three, four, maybe five. And we have, what is it now 2500 faculty members?
Carleton: It’s about 3000 if you include all of the School of Medicine faculty.
Silber: It probably is, probably 3000 is you count all the adjuncts.
DFP: Okay, a couple ore questions related to monetary matters. It is getting toward that time of year where students will go home and eventually get a letter telling them about tuition increases.
Silber: Tuition, yes.
DFP: Any idea on what it’s going to be for this coming year?
Silber: We haven’t decided yet. That has to go before the Board of Trustees. It will be presented to the Board of Trustees at the next meeting and there will be a lot of reflection by members of the Administration on that between now and Christmas, but you will get your Christmas letter all right.
DFP: I think a year ago, there was talk about a larger increase than usual because of, one, the lack of a large freshman class for the class of 2005 and two, because of a decrease in the endowment and just in general.
Silber: It didn’t have anything to do with the endowment. Boston University does not depend, to any significant degree, on its endowment. We are building that endowment, and consequently we use as little of that endowment as possible.
DFP: I know the endowment has declined in value…
Silber: Yes, every endowment in the country has declined in value. I don’t know of a single university or college that hasn’t had a decline in the value of its endowment over the last two and a half years.
DFP: How are you planning on trying to rebuild that decline besides hoping the economy becomes better?
Silber: Well certainly, there have been some substantial increases as the market has increased this fall. And I am very proud of the general vector. There was an $18.8 million endowment when I came and it is about $500 million now. That is not an insignificant increase and the amount of appreciation in the endowment is more than equal to the amount that has ever been given in gifts to the endowment. So no one who had made a gift to Boston University has ever seen the principal of that gift decline. The principal has always increased. And I think we can be very proud of that. I am not ashamed of that. And I am not ashamed of the fact that the endowment, after having gone up so rapidly in the year 1999, should suffer some decline when that dot-com bubble burst. Nobody times the market perfectly. Nobody. And we certainly didn’t. But on the other hand, the value of our endowment has moved up over the last ten-year period at 13.7 percent annually. And that compares favorably with the average increase at 381 other universities and colleges where the increase was 12.2 percent.
DFP: Okay, I am just asking this. One of the things that you were talking about in an earlier interview [see Silber: Tracking international, economic affairs is BU’s top priority this year, Jul. 9, 2002] comparing the endowment this was like in 1971 or something when you first cam here with what it had reached at that point, which I think is going to be a year ago. And you were talking about how people didn’t want to throw in good money after bad. Obviously a decrease is not necessarily bad money, but something that still might indicate to potential donors and gift givers
Silber: You know, I guess you didn’t understand what I just finished saying. Every single gift to Boston University I think the total value of the gifts to Boston University is about $256 million and the value of the endowment is more than twice that amount. Consequently there has never been a person who gave to Boston University and suffered a loss in the principal of his or her gift. Rather, each person who has given to Boston University has seen the principal of the gift increase in value as the market has gone up. Now, obviously a person who ahs given, let’s say in 2002, hasn’t had the gift in the portfolio of the university long enough to have any substantial increase. But if they made that gift in 1975, 1980 or 1990, they would have seen a substantial increase. So we are not talking about good money after bad money or anything like that. The point is every single donor to the University has seen his or her gift increased, not decreased.
DFP: Okay. Moving on to some stuff that is a bit outside of BU, you mentioned in an interview this summer bilingual education in conjunction with Chelsea schools [see Silber: Tracking international, economic affairs is BU’s top priority this year, Jul. 9, 2002]. Now, voters have rejected bilingual education. What do you see as the future of Chelsea schools now with that?
Silber: I think that it is going to make it possible for us to do a better job in teaching children English. That’s the great problem with the Hispanic children, that we have so many of them a very large percentage of in Chelsea, and I think that they will do far better. I was very please with the latest results on the MCAS because of all but one of the schools in Chelsea not only increased scores, but increased the scores above the goal that had been set for them. One of them increased but did not exceed the goal, and that is the Williams School. That is a middle school, which has a tough age group and a tough situation there. But they are all making wonderful progress and I think we can be very proud of that. You can’t make a statement that four out of five schools in Boston improved and exceeded their goals. I don’t think there are very many urban schools that did as well as Chelsea in terms of improvement and I think we can do better now that the proposition two passed.
DFP: Anything else besides, obviously, proposition two in Chelsea, but are there any other plans to keep schools on the rise?
Silber: Well, sure. That is an entirely different interview. That would take an hour. You would need to discuss it with the management committee and the Superintendent. You would need to discuss it, perhaps, with some of the principals. They have extensive plans for the continued improvement of the schools.
DFP: Okay.
Carleton: How much more time do you think you will need?
DFP: I’d say about five or ten minutes more. Is that all right?
Silber: Yeah, sure.
DFP: Okay. And the final two questions I have were about the search for the President and the Trustees. You described yourself when you were speaking to Josh Karlin-Resnick in your last interview [DeWolfe resignation will not impede progress, Silber says, Nov. 25, 2002] as someone who is facilitating this search for…
Silber: Yes, providing secretarial help, organizational help. Yes.
DFP: Okay, I just wanted a further definition of that.
Silber: I am not directing that search. These are very strong individuals who are on that Primary Search Committee. They are independent individuals. I don’t in any way dictate either the agenda or the positions that are taken by those people. But when it comes to organizing the meetings, I certainly arranged the interviews so that they now have interviews with several search firms and I set up those interviews for them. My secretary called them all [members of the committee] to arrange the times of the meetings and to arrange telephone conference calls for those who couldn’t be there in person. All of those are the kinds of things one does to facilitate the work of that committee.
DFP: You obviously aren’t the person running this, but you probably have some qualifications just as someone who is going to eventually be voting as a Trustee on what you would like to see as a President. Would you care to name any?
Silber: No. I think we will wait to see what the Board of Trustees does. The Primary Search Committee has developed a set of criteria. They will be presenting those to the Board of Trustees, and the Board of Trustees will have an extensive discussion over that and come up with their own set of criteria and I think those will be the criteria that are operative in the continuing work of the Search Committee.
DFP: Okay. And a few more Trustees questions. The Globe recently ran an article claiming that there was some sort of schism between younger Trustees, they specifically named Jeffrey Katzenberg, and some of the older Trustees [University Deluxe, Nov. 27 2002]. Do you have any idea what they are talking about?
Silber: No. I think the Globe again relied on anonymous statements. The basis for their views, I think, is something that you will have to interrogate them about. And interrogate them also on the standards of ethical journalism too while you are at it. As I said in one of those interviews, I think that one of the reporters what was his name?
Carleton: Was it Pat Healy or was it Steve Bailey?
Silber: Yes. Steve Bailey is a gossipmonger. As I said, he was sufficiently proud of my designation that he printed it. I think he thought that it reflected badly on me. I think that 99 percent of the viewers thought, once again, Silber just spoke the truth and that is exactly what Mr. Bailey is, a gossipmonger.
Carleton: Scandalmonger.
Silber: Or a scandalmonger. He is a person who doesn’t name his sources, perhaps doesn’t even have his sources. One never knows with his column whether he is a fiction writer or whether he has got some sources. But the one thing one does know is that the sources are not willing to be identified with whatever they have to say. And I don’t think that meets minimal standards of ethical journalism.
The Globe has shown remarkably little interest in publishing the positive stories about Boston University. When they get interested in Boston University is when they believe they have some kind of problem. But when it comes to, for example, our wonderful scholarship program for the students from the Boston City Schools they don’t send a reporter. They don’t say anything about it. There was something like $54 million involved in those scholarships that we gave. We have the Medeiros Scholarships for the 13 schools in the Archdiocese of the Catholic Church and we give four-year scholarships to them. We don’t get any coverage in the Globe. There has been one good story after another that is not reported. They didn’t report when Shelly Glashow left Harvard and came to Boston University bringing his Nobel Prize with him. They didn’t report that. That is good news, you see. So if it is good news involving Boston University, that is not something the Globe wants to cover. And we get used to that, but that’s not consistent with ethical journalism either.
DFP: Okay. I guess my final question would be, you’re one semester in and you have another one to go, is there anything you see coming up in the next semester that yu are going to try and focus on or is just going to be…
Silber: It will be more of the same. What did you say, the last thing you said?
DFP: It would be more like a holding operation.
Silber: No, it is not a holding operation and it hasn’t been a holding operating. Last time I was asked if it was a transitional program; no, it is not a transitional program. We don’t have to transition and we don’t have to hold because we have the continuity of policies and objectives that Boston University has been following for 31 years and we are going to continue to move in those directions with continued appointments of distinguished faculty and with continued and renewed vigor in bringing in research grants. I am very proud of the way in which our faculty has generated peer reviewed research grants, and this year they already exceeded $280 million. That’s a tremendous demonstration of quality in our faculty. $14 million came in that Whitaker [Foundation] grant and there was the $90 million grant for the SPIDR project that we are heading up but in collaboration with some other universities. $4 million brought in recently by the School of Social Work which is a monumental award for a small school of social work and nearly all school of social work are small. These are the reflections of the quality of our faculty. In engineering and in all the basic sciences it is a distinguished faculty, and also in social work and in the humanities and social sciences. We are doing very, very well. But that, after all, comes under the heading of good news so that interests you less and interests the Globe not at all.
DFP: OK. I think that’s it.
Silber: OK.
DFP: And again, thank you for your time.
Silber: Not at all. I am very glad to talk to you.
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