John SIlber: President Emiritus of Boston University

Educator was Pioneer of Higher Education as a Business Paradigm

John Silber, the former president and chancellor of Boston University and the 1990 Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts, was born on August 15, 1926 San Antonio, Texas. After graduating from Trinity University in Texas in 1947, he spent a year at Yale Divinity School and a semester at the University of Texas Law School before returning to Yale University to earn his doctorate in philosophy. Silber wrotehis dissertation on Immanuel Kant, but while at Yale, he also was interested in the philosophy of education. After five years teaching philosophy at Yale, he returned to Texas, taking a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin, where he chaired the Department of Philosophy from 1961 to 1967. As a philosopher, he distinguished himself by serving as the editor of "Kant-Studien", an international journal for Kant scholarship.

Back in his home state, Silber served as the first chairman of the Texas Society to Abolish Capital Punishment; he also became a leader in the integration of UT-Austin, as well as becoming involved in the creation of Operation Head Start, one of the educational programs enacted as part of fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. In 1967, Silber was named Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), where he established a national reputation as a maverick and a liberal. Silber claims that it was the splitting of CAS into separate colleges of liberal arts and natural science that caused his departure from the University of Texas in 1970, though many in the high education community, at the time, thought he had been given the sack due to his liberalism.