More than a dozen people had stopped to check out the car. A couple of students with "Silber Bullet" T-shirts were busy adjusting the car's mechanical parts. They were the University's solar car racing team and were answering many questions from the passersby. Among the questions was one that you might have already come up with yourself: What's with the name?

The team members emphasized that it's not a misprint. They don't mean "Silver Bullet." Japanese readers who have a hard time pronouncing the letter "v" will be happy to know that the name of the car is truly the "Silber Bullet."

John Silber was the president of BU for 25 years, and he's still a prominent figure in the university. I read in the WWW Silber Bullet Homepage that he had "blessed" the flashy little car bearing his name. That gesture itself is a sign of the gregarious personality that has made John Silber famous among university presidents.

Although university presidents have important jobs in educational administration, they usually aren't very well known. Diana Chapman Walsh, the Wellesley College President, has a prominent position within the Wellesley community, but she's hardly a famous person beyond the Wellesley campus. The previous Wellesley President, Nannerl Keohane, was mentioned in some national newspapers when she took over the position of president at Duke University, but it's been "business as usual" since then.

The Harvard President, Neil Rudenstein, was featured prominently in many papers and news programs last summer when he became ill from overexertion, but everybody knows that Harvard is exceptional. Harvard often makes the national news even when other colleges are just as "deserving" of the press coverage.

But among university presidents, John Silber is well-known. When I told one of my professors at Wellesley that I was going to attend graduate school at BU, he said I ought to be fine as long as I avoided listening to anything Silber said. When I told one of my friends, a Ph.D. recipient from the University of Chicago, that I was going to BU, he said more college presidents ought to run their ships like John Silber.

I don't know much about Silber besides the fact that he paid himself the highest salary of any university president in the United States, and that he made a lot of enemies for doing so. I also hear that he has accomplished a tremendous amount for BU. One of the main jobs of the president is to raise money for the college, and judging from how large BU has become, Silber has done his job well.

However, he is also known for his stubbornness in applying his own, very particular, academic standards to the university at large. Rumor says that he's even pushed "rudimentary writing classes" on the professors. His authoritarian ― some might even say patriarchal ― methods have infuriated many postmodern and deconstructionist scholars, and has brought a smug smile to many conservative academics.

Of course, I know nothing of what really goes on behind the doors of the president's office, but I suppose "the masses" will always talk about what they imagine people in power do day-by-day. This kind of idle gossip is often exchanged on the street, for example while gathering around a snazzy solar racing car in front of the science center on a sunny fall day.

Since we're here gossiping over the Silber Bullet, I've got an interesting "college president" anecdote about the aforementioned Harvard President: He had come to speak at Wellesley for Diana's presidential induction ceremony. When his name was called, Rudenstein marched up to the podium, and one of the students whispered to her neighbor, "Look at him!! He looks so conceited!!" A woman sitting nearby added, "Yes, he sometimes can be." That woman was his wife.



ST

(C) All rights reserved