News

Misleading Silber coverage

As someone who attended Chancellor John Silber’s lecture at UNI ID 500, I feel compelled to write to those of you who will misconstrue his message based on the article that appeared in this paper on Sept. 23 (“Silber defends discrimination in UNI speech,” pg. 1). Defending Dr. Silber was not something I ever saw myself doing, but you can’t cut and paste a lecture to suit what you want it to say. Their article serves merely as a medium to lash out at a man who has earned the disrespect of so many Boston University students, but falls short of being an accurate account.

Someone who read this article could easily have come to the conclusion that Dr. Silber used his lecture to justify removing the Gay-Straight Alliance from the BU Academy, but the lecture that was given covered a wide range of topics, including religious tolerance and societal norms. It did not deal exclusively with his views on homosexuality, as The Daily Free Press has portrayed it as doing. Though he did indeed make comments that set my stomach churning, Dr. Silber also made intelligent theoretical observations. Where he did go wrong was in attempting to prove his philosophical and theoretical beliefs through reality.

A good deal of his argument rested in the difference between tolerance and acceptance, two words we often used interchangeably, though they are in fact quite different in meaning. He mentioned homosexuality only briefly among such issues as religious tolerance versus fundamentalist extremism, and the effects violence in public media appears to have on our youth. He stressed that a lack of acceptance does not insist upon a doctrine of hatred or intolerance. The problem rested in trying to reapply his ideas to reality — in doing so he was only partially successful.

Regarding the issue that this paper focused on, as little as I care to agree with Dr. Silber, the Boy Scouts of America does indeed tolerate homosexuals; they simply do not choose to allow them within their ranks. Unfortunate though it may be, as a private organization they have a right not to accept those people they see fit. Dr. Silber deserves criticism for disbanding the Gay-Straight Alliance, but he was within his rights as the head of a private school to do so. People choose to go to private high schools; they are not forced.

I won’t deal much with that aspect of his lecture, because it has already been dealt with, but I will say that I under no circumstances believe we should discriminate against homosexuals. His point, however antagonistically made, was that we discriminate every day in all aspects of life. Just because one religion puts up with another does not mean that it accepts its creed, and private institutions are allowed to choose admittance criteria. Every day we discriminate on the basis of intelligence. What, after all, is a minimum SAT score for admittance to a university but a way to weed out basic intelligence?

We should not worry so much about disagreeing vehemently with our president and chancellor on every point. We should worry about the same issue he was attempting to address on a philosophical level. Where do we draw the line between public and private, between ethically right and wrong?

Website | More Articles

This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.

Comments are closed.