I pledge you my word, it came popping out of my mouth just like that, as if The Force had commandeered my voice box to make an announcement. This was the evening of October 16, 2008, nineteen days before the presidential election, Barack Obama vs. John McCain, a matter of minus-ten interest to me at that moment. I was here in Chicago for a Chicago Public Library book program…holding forth, as requested, upon a book about the original Mercury astronauts and their adventures half a century ago, The Right Stuff.

No sooner had I left the rostrum than an ace blogcaster for the online Huffington Post, Greg Boose, appeared: “Do you think that either of these candidates in 2008 have ‘the right stuff’?”

Without a moment of reflection, without even a Well… or an Ummmm… my voice box said, “I’m voting for John Silber, a write-in vote. He was president of Boston University—not College—and he almost won the governorship of Massachusetts in 1990. He’s a Democrat, but no matter what, he’s like Epictetus the Stoic. He cannot assent to what he knows is wrong. He cannot disagree with what he knows is right.”

“Tom!”

我

On the issues, Silber never gave an inch. He refused to avoid collisions. He made the shade of Epictetus gulp with admiration. From beginning to end, as the pressure mounted, he refused to assent to a single thing that struck him as false in light of his master plan for turning a moribund streetcar college into a major teaching and research institution in head-to-head competition with the two giants across the river, Harvard and MIT.

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So he thought he’d take a different tack. The seniors gathered in the dining hall, and Silber made sure they had a nice warm breakfast before he rose to speak:

“It is my pleasure to welcome you to this Senior Breakfast of 1976, and to have this occasion to speak to you.

“Ordinarily we anticipate that only the graduating class will be leaving the University. This morning, however, there is some anticipation that we may all be leaving. Your parents will be very disappointed if you do not depart, and my mother will be very disappointed if I do. It may have surprised some of you that I have a mother. Those of you who majored in biology know that all mammals have mothers.”

He said he wanted them, the seniors, to get to know him better, even though recently the press had made his life “something of an open book, and in that way I think you have come to know me perhaps in a reasonably satisfactory fashion. I am abrasive, acerbic, ambitious, angry, arrogant, and autocratic. And that is just the a’s.”

He had no idea why he was perceived that way, he said, until he was listening to the car radio one day and heard the country music star Mac Davis singing “a song that fit my situation perfectly and would give you some understanding of the problem that I face, and I hope, though I have no license to practice singing, that you will let me try.”

With that, he broke into song with all the gusto and quite a few of the same notes as Mac Davis himself:

“Oh, Lord, it’s hard to be humble,
When you’re perfect in every way.
I can’t wait to look in the mirror,
’Cause I get better looking each day.
To know me is to love me.
I must be a hell of a man.
Oh, Lord, it’s hard to be humble.
But I’m doin’ the best that I can.”

With that, Silber cracked laughter out of three quarters of the seniors and actual applause, serious hand-clapping, out of at least half. There’s no saying how many hearts he won, if any, but he sure softened up a lot of them.

When he then turned to “what is really on my mind this morning”—namely, those among them who were so obtuse they didn’t realize that “real life” doesn’t begin the day you leave college but the day you begin—they were like cattle. They didn’t raise a peep. They just sat there staring at him and digesting their Senior Breakfasts and chewing their senior cuds.

By the time the board came to a vote, the rebellious Gang of Three were left out in the cold. For by then Silber had on his side the most powerful single ally a man could ask for at Boston University: the board’s new chairman, Arthur G. B. Metcalf [SED’35, Hon.’74], a charismatic BU alumnus who had started off his career as an aeronautical engineer, inventor, and pilot. He had joined the BU faculty in 1935 for two years. That was all it took him to found two organizations, the Boston University College of Engineering…and the enormously profitable Electronics Corporation of America. He was a mega-millionaire when he became BU’s chairman of the board and champion of John Silber in that crucial year, 1976. The board’s vote backed Silber 100 percent—minus the Gang. Within the next five years the magnitude of his success began to be so overwhelming, not even his worst enemies could avoid seeing it.

His new faculty “stars” turned out to be precisely that, professors who stood out brilliantly in the firmament of academia. Two, Elie Wiesel [Hon.’74] and Derek Walcott [Hon.’93], won Nobel Prizes not long after he recruited them. Two others, Saul Bellow [Hon.’04] and the mathematician Sheldon Glashow, won Nobel Prizes and then joined Silber’s faculty elite.

As chancellor of the endowment, Silber increased the University assets fivefold, tenfold, twentyfold, so gloriously manifold, people were astounded. In the four decades of the Silber era, the endowment rose from $18.8 million to $430 million. He had overseen the construction of 13 million square feet of university space, including the Arthur G. B. Metcalf Center for Science and Engineering, the Rafik B. Hariri Building for the School of Management, the BU Photonics Center, and the Tsai Performance Center. He had turned the streetcar college into an outstanding research university, one of the very best in the country. Recruiting was no longer a desperate matter. Faculty and students from all over the world now rushed to what awaited them where the Boston trolley line went around the bend near the Charles River…across the water from the competition, Harvard and MIT.

Editor’s note: Mark Dwortzan (COM’98), a BU College of Engineering editor/writer, corrects the history of the founding of the College of Engineering: Arthur G. B. Metcalf (SED’35, Hon.’74) founded the department of aeronautical engineering in the College of Business Administration. His colleague, Hilding N. Carlson, who also helped start the department, began teaching aeronautics at a vacant American Airlines building at Boston’s Logan Airport in 1928, and launched the New England Aircraft School in 1940. The school was eventually deeded to BU and renamed the College of Industrial Technology (CIT) in 1951. CIT was consolidated in one building on the BU campus in 1963 and renamed the College of Engineering in 1964. By that time, the college offered BS programs not only in aeronautics, but in technology and management as well.