The Zinn Reader (70 page)

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When I first began teaching, I had a rather naive idea that colleges and universities, however the world outside was dominated by money and power, were special havens for freedom of expression and democracy. It did not take long for me to be disabused of that idea. My first personal experience was at Spelman College in Atlanta, where my political activism offended the college president and—though I was a full professor, with tenure, and chair of the history department, presumably secure—he fired me, with forty-eight hours notice, for "insubordination," a charge which was undoubtedly true. The university, as in the title of Ellen Schrecker's book on McCarthyism in higher education, is "No Ivory Tower," but a battleground in which students, faculty, university workers have to struggle constantly for democratic rights. Boston University was a particularly intense site in that struggle. In this essay, I tried to put what happened there, under the presidency of John Silber, in the larger context of the attempt of the national establishment, after the exuberant democracy of the Sixties, to restore order and authority. This appeared in
The Progressive,
June 1980, under the title "A Showcase of Repression."

Think a bit about the history of these past twenty-five years in the United States—the years of the black revolt and the movements of women, prisoners, native Americans; the years of the great campaign against the Indochina war and the illumination of Watergate. It was in these twenty-five years that the Establishment began to lose control of the minds, the loyalties of the American people. And since about 1975, the Establishment has been working steadily, with some desperation, to reassert that control.

In those years of the movements, great numbers of Americans began to take democracy seriously, to think for themselves, to doubt the experts, to distrust the political leaders, and to lose faith in the military, the corporations, even the once-untouchable FBI and CIA. In mid-1975, the Harris poll, looking at the years since 1966, reported that public confidence in the military had dropped from 62 percent to 29 percent, in business from 55 percent to 18 percent, in the President and Congress from 42 percent to 13 percent. When the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan posed the question, "Is the Government run by a few big interests looking out for themselves?" the answer in 1964 was "yes" from 53 percent of those polled.

Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington reported to the Trilateral Commission—a group of Establishment intellectuals and political leaders from the United States, Europe, and Japan, assembled by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in the early 1970s—on what he called "The Democratic Distemper." "The 1960s witnessed a dramatic upsurge of democratic fervor in America," Huntington observed, and that troubled him. He noted that in 1960 only 18 percent of the public believed the Government was spending too much on defense, but by 1969 this figure had jumped to 52 percent. He wrote:

"The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. In one form or another, this challenge manifested itself in the family, the university, business, public and private associations, politics, the governmental bureaucracy, and the military services. People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents."

Huntington was worried: "The question necessarily arises, however, whether if a new threat to security should materialize in the future (as it inevitably will at some point), the Government will possess the authority to command the resources, as well as the sacrifices, which are necessary to meet that threat." We were beset, he wrote, by "an excess of democracy." He suggested "desirable limits to the extension of political democracy."

Let us imagine the nation's elite addressing itself to the problem posed by Huntington. If the proper respect for authority is to be regained, then surely the universities must do their job. It has usually been possible to count on them to fill the lower ranks of the Establishment with technical and professional people who, fairly well paid and engrossed in their own advancement, would serve as loyal guards for the system. But in the early 1960s, young black rebels came off the college campuses and formed the militant cutting edge of the black movement, and then the universities became the focal points of teach-ins and demonstrations against the war.

True, the loss of allegiance extended far beyond the campus, into the workplaces and homes of ordinary Americans, into the Army ranks where working-class GIs turned against the war. Still, with twelve million young people in college, the fear of a working-class-professional-class coalition for social change makes it especially important to educate for obedience. And the intensifying economic pressures of unemployment and inflation may suggest to the national elite that it is now easier, and also more necessary, to teach the teachers as well as the students the advisability of submitting to higher authority.

Thus, it may be part of some larger reordering of the nation's mind when the president of Boston University, John Silber, says on national television (CBS's
60 Minutes,
viewed by thirty million), "A university should not be a democracy.... The more democratic a university is, the lousier it is."

As soon as Silber became B.U.'s president in 1971, he began to act out his philosophy by destroying what is at the heart of humanistic education: the idea that students and faculty should have a decisive voice about the way education takes place. And he had an additional target: the idea that workers at the university should have some right to decide the conditions of their work.

Those of us who are involved in the intense, sometimes bizarre battles at Boston University have not had much time to step back and look for some grand national design into which we might fit. Furthermore, it seems immodest; we have not yet become accustomed to the fact that our campus, with its nondescript assortment of buildings straddling Commonwealth Avenue in the heart of the city, with its heterogeneous enrollment of 20,000 students, has begun to attract the attention of the country. It is as if a rare disease had broken out somewhere, and was being observed by everyone with much curiosity and a bit of apprehension.

John Silber, formerly a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, had hardly settled into the presidential mansion—a twentyroom house, rent-free, only one of the many fringe benefits adding up to perhaps $100,000 a year which augment his $100,000 salary—when he embarked on the process the Germans call
Gleichschaltung.
"straightening things out." He quickly made it clear that he would not tolerate student interference with military recruiting at B.U. for the war in Vietnam. Early in 1972, his administration invited Marine recruiters to a campus building. When students sat down on the steps of that building, remaining there firmly but peaceably, he called the police. Arrests and beatings followed, and Silber said he was maintaining "an open university."

The university that was "open" to the Marine Corps turned out to be closed to the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which lost its charter and its right to meet on campus because a scuffle had taken place during an SDS demonstration. The logic was established: SDS was a violent organization, while the Marine Corps had a well-known record for pacifism.

A series of demonstrations followed, to which police were called again and again, and which they broke up with arrests and brutal beatings. The turmoil led to a huge assembly of the Faculty Senate, which voted overwhelmingly that Marine recruiting should be halted until faculty and students could discuss and vote on whether it should be resumed. Silber simply ignored the resolution. That summer, without the called-for campus discussion, he polled the faculty through the mail, not specifically asking about Marine recruiting, but rather about whether the faculty wanted an "open university." The answer, of course, was yes, and the recruiters were on campus to stay.

That fall, the students did vote, in an unprecedented turnout. A large majority rejected the policy of military recruiting on campus. Silber ignored them, too. Picketing students, he said, were "primates," and votes did not matter. "I would be much more impressed," he told the student newspaper, the
Daily Free Press,
"by a thoughtful document that was brought in by one single student than I would by a mindless referendum of 16,000." He would decide who was "thoughtful" and who was "mindless."

The centralization of power in Silber's hands, his contempt for faculty as well as students, his attempts to push tenured professors at the School of Theology into resigning, his repeated attacks on the tenure system—all this led to a burst of faculty unionization under the auspices of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Silber, confident of his oratorical powers, went to faculty meetings at the various colleges, arguing that a vote for unionization would mean the end of the "collegial" model and the introduction of the "industrial" model at Boston University. Nonetheless, the faculty voted by a clear majority for a union. In the next four years, the Silber administration spent huge sums of money before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and in the courts, trying unsuccessfully to overturn that vote.

Silber's argument against the AAUP was that well-paid and articulate college professors don't need a union. But when other employees tried to act in concert to improve their situation, his administration did its best to beat them down. Workers at the Student Health Clinic were fired when they met to voice grievances. The NLRB, after lengthy hearings, ruled that the B.U. administration was guilty of unfair labor practices in firing seven employees and intimidating the rest.

In the spring of 1976, departmental budget cuts led to anger on all sides. Later, it was learned that while Silber was jacking up student tuition and telling the faculty there was no money for raises, he was putting several million dollars a year into "reserves" and listing these setaside funds as "expenses" so that the budget barely showed a surplus.

There were calls for Silber's dismissal from ten of the fifteen deans, from faculties at various colleges in the university, from virtually every student organization, and finally from a Faculty Senate meeting. A committee of trustees, making its five-year evaluation of Silber, voted 7to-1 that his contract should not be renewed. But he worked furiously at lining up trustee votes, found powerful allies on the board, and persuaded them to keep him in the presidency.

As part of the campaign for control, Silber began to put the screws to campus newspapers that criticized him. Advertising was withdrawn from the
B. U. News
(which had been a pioneering critic of the Vietnam War under the editorship of Ray Mungo), causing it to close. A new student publication called
Exposure,
pitilessly anti-Silber (one of its headlines referred to him as: "Mediocre Philosopher, Expert Chiseler"), had its funds—allocated from student activities fees—cut off. A new policy was adopted: Campus newspapers that wanted funding from student activities fees must submit to prior review of their copy by faculty advisers. Programs at the campus radio station, WBUR, came under scrutiny of Silber's administrators, and one news director was fired when he refused to censor the tape of a speech by William Kunstler which contained a joke about John Silber.

It also became more and more clear that any faculty member who spoke out against Silber was in danger of being denied tenure or, if tenured, of being denied a pay raise. Again and again, departmental recommendations of raises for certain faculty who were outspoken critics of the Silber Administration were overruled. Early in Silber's administration, Professor Richard Newman, who had taught in the social sciences for nine years, resigned from the University, and told the
B. U. News
that budget cuts had eliminated almost half the faculty of his department, including "three or four of the best young teacher-scholars in the country." Newman said, "To disagree with the President is to be put on the Enemies List."

Students, faculty, and staff fought back. The
B. U. Exposure
raised outside money to keep publishing its stories of administration shenanigans. There was evidence that Silber was pushing law school applicants to the top of the list when financial contributions from their families were sought. "I am not ashamed to sell these indulgences," he told a meeting of the trustees, and somehow the
Exposure
got hold of the transcript. It was a joke, Silber explained. And later, when the
Exposure
reprinted an administration memorandum in which a wealthy trustee was described as having sought and received "pre-admission" to the law school for his two small grandchildren "for the twenty-first century," Silber said that was a joke, too—lots of jokes from an administration known for its utter lack of humor.

Clerical workers on campus, underpaid and harassed, began organizing a union and won an NLRB election. Librarians formed a union and won their election. The Silber administration refused to negotiate with them, as it had with the faculty union. When the buildings-andgrounds workers, long unionized, went on strike for a week in the fall of 1978, members of the other unions, along with students, formed large picket lines and held support rallies. They were getting ready for a big labor upsurge the following spring.

In April 1979, Boston University, whose employees were now probably the most organized of any private university in the country, became the most strike-ridden in the country. The administration, having exhausted its court appeals, had to enter into negotiations with the faculty union. It came to an agreement, under the faculty threat of an April strike deadline, then reneged on the agreement at the last moment.