Silber and Zinn first locked horns on the return of ROTC and Vietnam-era military recruiters to the BU campus in 1972. As a Scoop Jackson, anti-communist Democrat, Silber could have explained his support for the controversial policy by invoking patriotic, Cold War rhetoric; instead, he couched his decision in terms of the rights of students to meet with and learn from the Marines. When the recruiters arrived, students blocked the entrance to the building where they were staged, at which point Silber called in the police and warned students to disperse through a bullhorn. Arrests soon followed. When hooligans are loosed, Silber later explained, police must be involved: "Disruptive students must be taught respect for law." The parallels with Silber's involvement in the Conrad situation at UT are unavoidable; when it came to protecting students and handling violence on campus, Silber would walk his talk. At BU, the adults would be in charge.
In advocating for student access and law and order, Silber always kept an eye on the university's role in a democratic society. With respect to the idea of military recruiters on civilian campuses, Silber said, "I and most faculty members believed that civilian control of the military is better ensured when a significant percentage of officers are civilian in orientation and educated in civilian institutions rather than in military academies." On this same subject, Silber would later write:
Being willing to take up our obligation to the nation does not mean that we fail to recognize the deficiencies of the United States. It means rather that we, free to pursue the truth, are obligated to recognize them and to call attention to them. If our universities contribute to the education of journalists in such a way that they recognize and prefer the success of the United States to its defeat by its enemies, we will be doing no more than our job — not only as patriots, and certainly not as chauvinists, but as educators. We will be meeting a fundamental obligation placed on the university: to put the highest value on human freedom as a sine qua non of human fulfillment.
Zinn did not feel the same way about the university or its relationship to our republic, to put it mildly. Sympathetic to the demonstration against military recruiters, Zinn saw Silber as an oppressive dictator who called in the police not to protect students, but to impose his point of view on them. "If his arguments don't work on the students — who sometimes prefer to look at the world around them than to read Kant — then he can call in the police, and after that momentary interruption (the billy club serving as an exclamation point to the rational argument) the discussion can continue, in a more subdued atmosphere."
