Citadel Professor Silver Knows His Biz

Now retired, Stephen Silver might be seen playing pickleball at the JCC. Not long ago, he was a business professor at the very elite Citadel Military College in Charleston – despite his lack of business experience.

What he lacked as a “biz whiz” was augmented by his peripatetic life of travel. Silver grew up in Washington, D.C. before moving to Ankara, Turkey, and then Seoul, Korea, where his father worked for ICA, the precursor of USAID. After those four years, he returned home to complete high school in Philadelphia. After completing high school, he joined the Peace Corps and spent two years teaching in a bush secondary school in Kenya.

He relates that this was the most formative two years of his life. First, because he was on his own, and second, because the volunteers were taught Swahili, which allowed him to communicate with the locals. After returning home and completing a master’s in economics, he took a job with the United Nations Development Program in Chad, after which he did a stint as an economic advisor to USAID in Cambodia. It was a short stint because in April 1975, the Khmer Republic came to an end, and he was evacuated from Phnom Penh.

He explained, “I realized that I would need the PhD to be considered a ‘real’ economist. After completing that, I taught at three colleges: Bentley in Waltham, Mass., VMI in Lexington, Va., and finally at The Citadel. My teaching assignments were mostly non-economics courses: statistics, finance, international business and operations management. Understand, while I was teaching in business disciplines, I had no business experience to speak of. The only reason they entrusted me with teaching international business is because of my overseas background. As for finance, I learned it sitting in on my colleagues’ courses at The Citadel.”

During his tenure there, he witnessed much change. Having started there in 1990, he noted that women were admitted in 1996. He recalled very few Jewish students. He estimates 20 and commented, “I can’t say that Jewish faculty experienced discrimination; and to the best of my knowledge, neither did Jewish students. I had two brothers who were Conservative, observant, Jews. They didn’t experience overt discrimination, and accommodations were made for them. And the same can be said of the Bahraini students – during Ramadan, for example, they were provided meals outside the normal hours.”

Silver jokes that one of his biggest claims to fame is teaching Nancy Mace as she was in his senior level production and operations management course. Mace went to UGA and is a U.S. Representative from South Carolina He recalled, “While she did well in the course, I didn’t get to know her as she was not popular with her classmates and didn’t participate. Other cadets barely spoke to her, in part because her father was the Commandant of Cadets. That was a very trying period for the institution and as with the service academies, it was extremely challenging for them to recruit women. None of the military schools exceeded 10 percent women for a long time. This has changed in recent years. The service academies now average about 25 percent.

The Citadel is a historic public military college and one of the six U.S. senior military colleges. Students in the Corps of Cadets live under a strict military system. Daily life is highly regimented, with uniforms, formations, inspections, and leadership training. About one-third of graduates typically earn commissions as officers in the U.S. armed forces, though commissioning isn’t mandatory.

Silver further added, “Faculty wear Army uniforms or that of their prior service if their rank equals or exceeds the rank based on their academic rank, to wit: colonel for full professor, LTC for associate prof and major for assistant professor. Freshmen are called ‘knobs’ for their shaved heads. Graduates need not serve in the military, and only about 30 percent do. The 11:1 student-faculty ratio is low compared with most other undergraduate programs; El Cid is the teaching college which has master’s programs in business, engineering, and education.

Silver enjoys golf in addition to pickleball and is fluent in French and Spanish and does OK in Chinese.