John Silber, President Emeritus of Boston University, has some advice for the New School:
The recent attempts to drive Robert Kerrey from the presidency of The New School are reminiscent of how Larry Summers was driven from the Harvard presidency in 2006 and, further back, how controversies, real and specious, roiled American campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. If the Trustees of the New School are at all tempted to give in to demands for Kerrey’s head, these previous academic power struggles ought to send them one clear message of warning: lose a president to a coup and you will fail in the governance of your campus.
Silber earned recognition during his tenure at Boston University for championing causes unpopular with the left. But he survived attempts by faculty and certain trustees to remove him. Typical of Silber’s style was this response to campus protests of the Vietnam war:
I informed the students at their rallies that if they wanted to change the policies in Vietnam they would have my support, but that they should go to Washington, DC, where the foreign policy of the United States is made.
Academia would do well to find a lot more administrators with this kind of common sense and backbone.
Naturally Silber got no credit from the left for this:
Silber was the first chair of the Texas Society to Abolish Capital Punishment and a leader in the integration of the University of Texas. He was involved in the creation of Operation Head Start.
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