Straight Shooting
Wycliff, Don
INTELLECTUAL GUNSLINGER STRAIGHT SHOOTING What's Wrong with America and How to Fix It John Silber Harper & Row, $22.50, 336 pp. Don Wycliff as there been a moment since at least 1929 when a...
...Silber would like to see a change in the way the federal government provides financial aid so that college students can borrow against their own future earnings (with repayment guaranteed through payroll deductions), rather than against their own or their parents' current incomes...
...in an essay it comes off as simply outrageous...
...Even the pope, however, seems reluctant to employ the moralistic vocabulary and tone that Mr...
...One of the most disturbing parts of the book is the essay "The 'Private' Sector and the Public Interest...
...And that needs to be said forthrightly to a people who have largely forgotten how to think in moral philosophical terms and, more important, have failed to teach their children so to think...
...When it comes from someone with John Silber's reputation as a kind of intellectual gun-slinger, many people are likely to write it off as simply Silber...
...Silber finds the strongest evidence of failure "in our inability to reform our public schools...
...He says, "we bear the unmistakable traces of self-indulgence...
...As a result, universities must confront a student body ignorant of the evidence and arguments that underlie and support many traditional moral principles and practices...
...The example that leaps most readily to my mind is our inability to balance the national budget...
...The book is divided into three parts, each of which comprises a set of freestanding but related essays on one general subject...
...While that may be true of some private institutions, it ought not to be...
...We seem incapable of making those decisions that, though imperative for our own well-being and that of our children, require unwelcome self-restraint and self-denial...
...The root of our moral confusion and flaccidity is a "forty-year experiment with luxury, a luxury unprecedented in degree, in duration, and in distribution...
...For the most part, Silber's essays began as speeches...
...In recent years," Silber writes, "our society has become increasingly secular, and the curriculum of the public schools has been stripped of almost all ethical content...
...Silber's prescriptions go beyond calls to juice up the moral/ethical/philosophical content of the curriculum...
...These essays deal with selected aspects of American foreign policy, including the various conflicts in Central America and our evolving relationship with the Soviet Union and the East bloc...
...Silber is well-known as a hawkish anti-Communist, yet Mikhail Gorbachev's policies have caused him to entertain some second thoughts...
...He wants to see the educational system expanded at the bottom end to provide a head start for children of the underclass...
...No apology is called for, Silber believes, because our present crisis is fundamentally one of morality...
...Michael Dukakis offered a similar plan during his 1988 presidential campaign...
...It will take a series of regimes as tyrannical as Stalin's to have any hope of obscuring the record now revealed...
...At the present rate," he writes, "it will soon hardly matter whether the situation reflects Gorbachev's intentions or has gone out of his control...
...In the process he comes close to asserting that there is nothing intellectually and educationally distinctive about private institutions as opposed to state-sponsored ones...
...Silber's purpose is clearly political: to justify and build public support for additional state funding to private universities and colleges, including his own...
...In fact, he gives the distinct (and, to me, discomfiting) impression that the reason may be that he does not respect that difference intellectually...
...The third big chunk of the book seems gratuitous and out of place...
...The Soviet parliamentary elections early last year and evidences of glasnost, like the admission of Stalin's mass murders, seem to have influenced Silber-almost...
...That's unfortunate, because it detracts from the message Silber tries to deliver...
...Outrageous overstatement might be effective in a speech...
...If this sounds vaguely familiar, readers might recall some of the warnings about the dangers of materialism that Pope John Paul II has voiced during his pastoral visits to North America and northern Europe...
...But Mr...
...Don Wycliff as there been a moment since at least 1929 when a fair-minded observer couldn't have said what John Silber says at the start of this book: "Our [American] society is in trouble and we all know it...
...Silber, the philosopher-president of Boston University, makes a mildly persuasive case that this is a uniquely troubled moment for America...
...It's an idea that deserves to be explored...
...Probably not...
...The first two parts are devoted to education at the school and university levels...
...in too many cases they still read like speeches...
...Has there been a moment when it could have been said with better reason that now...
...Silber diagnoses what he perceives as the failures of American education and offers telling criticisms that ought to make more than a few of his fellow academics squirm in their seats...
...I suspect it is not true of most religiously affiliated institutions, including Catholic ones...
...Silber uses without apology...
...Yet Silber seems not to recognize the difference...
Vol. 117 • January 1990 • No. 1
