In a keynote address last night, Boston University President John Silber said actions do not necessarily constitute activism for today's generation.
Speaking as part of the Senior Symposium, Silber defined activism as an intellectual movement in which universities take on a leadership position to improve their communities.
Silber, a 1990 Democractic gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts, said it is wrong to think the university campus is isolated from the rest of the world.
"There is no world more real, or any world as real, as the world you are in right now," Silber said, "The world of ideas in which students are absorbed when they are students and the world in which faculty are absorbed for most of their lives is an intensely real world."
Silber said activism exists in subtler forms than just "marches and protests."
"I don't think you should suppose that because you get out there and wave flags and join political movements that suddenly that is the way to be an activist," Silber said.
"One can be an activist by being a serious intellectual, or a poet, or an artist, or a historian, or a mathematician or a scientist," Silber said.
Silber focused his speech on how two programs at B.U. demonstrate his ideals of the power of intellectual activism.
One program works to improve the quality of education in the Chelsea school district, an urban area where half of the 28,000 legal residents speak Spanish. Since B.U.'s involvement, Silber said 400 pre-schoolers have enrolled in a program that teaches them English.
The other program, at Boston University Academy, provides high school students with a classical education, requiring study in Greek or Latin, Silber said.
Silber said activism of this sort is at the heart of a university program.
During a question and answer session following the speech, an audience member criticized the Chelsea program as stifling multi-culturalism.
Silber responded by saying that the role of public schools is to raise the overall level of a student's ability to learn.
"Multi-culturalism - I don't buy into that slogan. You need to teach [children] what they need to know to function as American adults," Silber said. "It's not the obligation of public schools to keep culture." he said.
