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Silber has toned down his rhetoric since then, but he remains as addicted to controversy as a moth is to a porch light. Last month he suggested that funds for teenage welfare mothers who have more than one child be cut off. He enraged the party establishment by comparing the 15% convention threshold to the exclusionary tactics Southern white supremacists used to keep blacks out of politics.
Even most of his critics concede that Silber's 19-year tenure at Boston University has produced a clear improvement in the institution, both academically and financially. But his combativeness has left the university in a state of "enervative calm" because, says one professor, "people are too tired to fight anymore." Silber handles the university's board "like Stalin worked the Politburo," in the words of one faculty member. He has reduced faculty and students to tears with his explosive temper and bruising classroom behavior. During the 1970s he dismissed undergraduates who published a student newspaper called bu exposure as "short-pants communists."
Armchair psychologists speculate that Silber's ballistic streaks are compensation for being born with a deformed right arm. But his brother Paul says, "The only thing John couldn't do growing up was pick his nose with his right hand. He never knew he was handicapped. He just knew he was different." As a boy in San Antonio, Silber concluded it was best to attack early in a fight, a strategy that has been an article of faith ever since. "He learned that if he had to fight, it was best for him to land the first blow," recalls Paul. "If he couldn't whip a man with one arm, he'd figure out how to hit him harder, and that's what he did."
Silber graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio, received his doctorate from Yale and maintained a mercurial profile as a philosophy professor and later as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Texas. He almost succeeded Terrel Bell as Secretary of Education under Reagan, a job he craved, but lost out to his friend William Bennett.
Ronnie Dugger, publisher of the liberal Texas Observer, says the U.S. needs more John Silbers, flaws and all. "What we have here is a valuable citizen," he says, because of Silber's energy and commitment. No way, counters James H. Sledd, a former English professor at the University of Texas who taught under | Silber. "We don't need any more people who know they're right. They are the most dangerous people going." Both men have a point.