Higher Deaducation

(Props to Greg, who informed me of this passing, fittingly enough while I was on Long Island, point of origin of so many Boston University scholars)

Or
You Kant Take It With You
John Silber, scourge of the intellectually unrigorous, has died of kidney failure at the age of 86. He led the transformation of Boston University from a commuter school almost $9 million in debt in 1971 when he arrived to a top academic research institution and the finest college in America’s finest college town* in his 25 years as President, 7 as Chancellor and 9 as President Emeritus. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a huge prick about it. In a 1977 piece, Nora Ephron called him “the meanest SOB on campus.” The faculty twice voted for his removal by wide majorities. He toyed with the idea of taking out life insurance policies on students as a potential revenue source. He also attracted Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow and Derek Walcott and future US poet laureate Robert Pinsky to the BU faculty. In 1990, he went on sabbatical to try to win the governorship of Massachusetts. With his blunt assessments of the state’s problems, which came to be known as “Silber Shockers,” he held a 9-point lead a week before Election Day when he exploded at an interviewer who asked a stupid, if innocuous question during what should have been a puff profile. He ended up losing to Bill Weld by 4%. He returned to the university as pleasant, uncompromising and well compensated as ever.

* Shut up, Harvard and MIT are in Cambridge