2005. Early academic career Silber received his M.A. in 1952 and worked first as a teaching assistant and then as an instructor while pursuing a doctoral degree. Peter H. Hare, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at SUNY-Buffalo, remembers Silber as a teaching assistant at Yale in the mid-1950s while Hare was still an undergraduate. Hare wrote, "George Schrader was the lecturer in the introductory course where John Silber was the TA leading my discussion section. Silber, a rabid Kantian, was the person with whom I had my first heated philosophical arguments as an adult." In 1959, Silber earned a Fulbright scholarship, which enabled him to travel to West Germany to teach at the University of Bonn for a year. It was there that he learned of his father's Jewish heritage. His first full-time faculty job was at the University of Texas at Austin, where he chaired the Philosophy department from 1962 to 1967. Larry Hickman, Director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, recalls his time as a student in philosophy at UT. "The department chairs during those years, John Silber and Irwin C. Lieb, were busy using Texas oil money to collect the very best faculty and graduate students they could find." While at UT, Silber was well known for his support of liberal causes, having founded the Texas society to abolish capital punishment and being a supporter of civil rights. In 1967, Silber became Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UT. Three years later, in a widely publicized firing, Silber was removed as Dean in 1970 by the UT Regents Chairman Frank Craig Erwin, Jr. Boston University Silber was named president of Boston University (BU) on December 17, 1970. He took office the following month. With an annual salary that reached $800,000, Silber ranked as one of the highest paid college presidents in the country. He took a one-year leave of absence from BU in 1987, and then again in 1990 when he ran for governor of Massachusetts as a Democrat. He returned to his position at BU after losing the election to William Weld. In 1996, he was named university chancellor after stepping down as president. That same year he was appointed by Gov. Weld to serve as head of the Massachusetts Board of Education. Among Silber's recruits to the Boston University faculty were the author Saul Bellow and Elie