Mr. Silber was a legend in his own time, both for his accomplishments and for his personality (as Mr. Kinsley puts it in his introduction, "No one that I'm aware of has compared [Harvard President] Derek Bok to Socrates and Churchill or to Hitler and Stalin. John Silber has elicited all of these flattering comparisons"). Here, he is consistently interesting on the modern American academy. Two samples: "There is no way to make ideas safe for students. You have to make students safe for any and all ideas." ... WFB: "Would you consider it reason for disqualification if somebody were in fact a Marxist--i.e., would you not hire a Marxist?" JS: "No, I have knowingly hired Marxists, but I think it is very important to see the kind of work they're doing and the way in which they operate with regard to evidence ... [in] pursuit of truth."