[I am Dr. John Talbot (GRS ’01), a professor at Brigham Young University and former faculty member at Boston University Academy. My e-mail address is [email protected]. If you print my article, you’re welcome to include my e-mail address. Thanks very much.]

I warmly applaud John Silber’s decision to eliminate the so-called Gay-Student Alliance at Boston University Academy. I taught Greek and Latin at the Academy from its founding in 1993 until 2001, when I left to accept a professorship at another university. From that perspective, I offer the following reasons for the wisdom of Dr. Silber’s action.

(1) ELIMINATION OF THE GSA HONORS THE FOUNDING PRINCIPLES OF THE ACADEMY.

Among the advantages of the Academy at its inception was its principled exclusion of sensitivity training, diversity-celebration indoctrination, self-esteem affirmers, and such other cognate varieties of pandering as drain so much time and money from other schools. The Academy was intended as a refuge for students who preferred the rigors of a no-elective classical curriculum. The first BU Acadmey students fled to the Acadamy in part because they sought respite from the relentless demands, propagated in their old schools, for “celebration” of their classmates’ “differences.” Our students could see that by devoting so much time to such social-awareness programs, the schools were defalulting on their responsibility to teach core academic subjects. BU Academy began with the committment to avoid the kind of social programs that dilute the academic core.

Students who want clubs devoted to promoting the currently fashionable social causes ought not apply to the Academy: they have literally thousands of alternatives, schools which promote those consoling pieties and reward students for parrotting them. And not schools only: the doctrine of unlimited tolerance emanates from television, the press, movies, the trendier religions, and even from that quickly-vanishing institution, the home. Let those who want it seek it in those places, not during precious school time at Boston University Academy, which was designed instead for those who want Greek and Latin, physics and English, math and history. Let BU Academy remain the alternative it was designed to be.

A sex-education program, implemented some two years ago at the Academy, took up hours of class time and offered students nothing more than the values-neutral pandering about “choices” and “self-discovery” readily availble on Oprah and everywhere else. Sniggers in the hallway–and franker confessions in my office–made it clear to me that the best studednts were aware of the condescension and the time wasted.

The current headmaster, a relative new-comer, played no part in the Academy’s founding and early history, and may not have understood how organizations like the GSA undermine the purposes for which the Academy was created. But Dr. Silber, who presided over the school’s founding, _does_ understand: his foreclosure of the GSA brings the school–which he, not the current headmaster, created–into greater accord with its founding principles. It sends a message to serious students that the school will concentrate on academics.

(2) THE GSA SPONSORED AN INTELLECTUALLY IRRESPONSIBLE EVENT.

The Boston _Globe_ has reported that the Academy students, at the behest of the GSA, were permitted to remain silent during a recent school day, in honor (as they supposed) of those oppressed and silenced by our intolerant society. This stunt–which the headmaster ought never to have authorized–demonstrates how students in such clubs can excuse themselves from the hard work of academics to engage in an effortless, risk-free, self-congratulating travesty of genuine civic action. Students are deceived into thinking such gestures more effective than the painstaking task of acquiring knowledge upon which real and disciplined civic participation must be based.

(3) ORGANIZATIONS LIKE THE GSA TEND TO ADVOCACY, COERSION, AND INTOLERANCE.

Dr. Silber knows schools in Massachusetts well enough to have seen that GSAs in high schools are generally dedicated not merely to preventing the mistreatment of those who regard themselves homosexuals, but also to promoting acceptance of homosexuality and transgender. Some schools sponsor events and cancel classes to hold them. The potential for coersion is great: students may feel expected to assent to the social beliefs being presentedby their teachers and administrators. Any student opposed to such events, on the principle that schools ought not to insist that their students approve of any sexual behavior of any kind, are subject to the intolerant and unthinking label “homophobe.” John Silber is not the first to have observed the irony of the poetential intolerance of those seeking to enforce tolerance. By moving eliminating the Academny’s GSA before it has a chance to develop into an advocacy group, he protects the students from the pressure to assent to views on sexuality which they and their parents may not share.

(4) THE GSA IS NOT NEEDED TO PROTECT STUDENTS.

Many letters to the editor have advanced the thesis that Dr. Silber has put Academy students in harms way by striking down the GSA. The absence of such an organization, they have argued, is tantamount to sanctioning violence against homosexuals; and the more sinister implication is that Dr. Silber would bear some responsibility for anyone hurt in such an incident. This argument ignores some plain facts.

The Academy already has an honor code which forbids any mistreatment of any member of the Academy “community,” as it is called. Any student who taunts or bullies or in any way abuses another can simply be expelled or submitted to some lesser disciplinary action. During my years at the Academy, students were from time to time dismissed for behavioral offenses. There was no qualification: you would be dismissed not because you taunted a homosexual, but because you taunted anyone for any reason. The distinction is vital. No group–not homosexuals, not short people (like me), not annoying people, no one–lay outside the protection of the school’s honor code. Students who are bullied for being short have no need to organize a Short-Tall Alliance, because their school is committed to protecting them regardless of the pretext for their mistreatment. No need to bring up anyone’s sexuality or (far worse) to make special claims for it. No mistreatment of any student need be tolerated at the Academy.

It has become a sport at BU for students (and some faculty) to react with hysterical shock at Dr. Silber at the very moments when he demonstrates himself unwilling to condescend to them by repeating the comforting platitudes they demand. A case in point: the uproar whenever he suggest to them that they ought to dedicate the great majority of their time to study (of all things). Instead of recognizing this as a compliment and a challenge, the students moan about his “outdated” notions. So to with the GSA. In striking it down, Dr. Silber has once again shown himself to be the Academy students’ greatest benefactor.

Dr. John Talbot Brigham Young University