Education: The Ivory Tower Triggerman

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Silber's outspokenness is not limited to educational matters. Whether writing or speaking, he characteristically offers opinions on everything from Nicaragua (pro-contra) and Gorbachev (don't trust him) to abortion (pro-life) and Jesse Jackson (full of "mindless, rhyming pieces of nonsense on which he has built a career"). One of his central philosophical tenets is the necessity of accepting hardship and disappointment. "I'm sorry I didn't put 'death' into the index," he said in an interview. "I really believe that confrontation with death and with reality is necessary to moral education."

Confrontation and struggle have marked much of Silber's career. "Everything is combat to him," says one B.U. professor. Born in San Antonio, Silber grew up in the hardscrabble Depression years. His mother helped support the family as a schoolteacher while his father, a German architect, tried to make ends meet. Silber started life with a deformed right arm, and his efforts to overcome that handicap probably contributed to his combativeness. After graduate forays into law and religion -- he once studied for the ministry -- Silber received a doctorate in philosophy from Yale and went on to teach at the University of Texas in Austin. He later served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences there before being named B.U. president in 1971. Since then he has increased the university's budget more than sevenfold, hired and fired faculty with abandon, and imposed his tight moral code on campus. Although Silber has made his share of enemies over the years, says George Washington president Trachtenberg, "nobody says Boston University is not a better place now than when he came."

Despite his often abrasive words, Silber can be charming in person -- as long as he is unchallenged. Interviewers confront seamless arguments peppered with quotes from Shakespeare and references to his critics as "pismires," creatures defined in the dictionary as ants. A small-framed, brown-haired man with angular features and hard eyes, the pipe-smoking Silber smiles rarely, swears sporadically and goes stone-faced when angered. Little of what he says, he concedes, is spontaneous. "I've spent more time thinking about most of the issues I talk about than ((other)) people who talk about them. And as a consequence I'm not shooting from the hip." Not from the hip, perhaps, but, as he amply demonstrates in Straight Shooting, John Silber is not afraid to pull the trigger.