BU law students are riled up* about Chancellor (and acting President) John Silber's order to disband the Gay-Straight Alliance at BU Academy, BU's high school. Silber -- who's been shooting his mouth off in the Boston Globe and other area news sources for a few months now -- defended his move in a speech to the University entitled "Tolerance and its Consequences," in which he took a pro-discrimination stance.

Silber responded to the law students' complaint by charging they could not form coherent arguments. They, in turn, wrote back to clarify a few points Silber attacked.

Silber is a reactionary and doesn't quite think through the consequences of his remarks, or, at least, doesn't give a whit. Quite frankly, I've never seen anything like this come from a University President, especially of such a large school. It can hardly pass for leadership, regardless of what you might think about the appropriateness of his actions.

Unbelievably, the Board of Trustees forced his predecessor out in order to allow Silber to tackle the school's money problems. One would think he might be a little more responsive to the law students when they intimate they will withhold funds as alumni. It's been done at other schools with serious downward pressure on the fund-raising arms of those universities. At a school like BU (respectable, but not top-tier), law students easily have the highest earning potential of all students. Silber can hold his views, but it seems pure folly to alienate such a large group of potential donors on purpose.

* For the record, while the OED (1989) does give "discrimination" the definition of "The action of discriminating; the perceiving, noting, or making a distinction or difference between things," it also notes a definition of "The making of distinctions prejudicial to people of a different race or colour from oneself." I'd wager that newer editions have an updated definition.