AND ASK QUESTIONS AFTER : STRAIGHT SHOOTING: WHAT’S WRONG WITH AMERICA AND HOW TO FIX IT BY JOHN SILBER, (HARPER & ROW: $22.50; 352 PP.; 0-060016184-1)

John Silber has become a celebrity. I am not certain what a celebrity is in our society, but surely someone who becomes a household name, at least to the readers of the Los Angeles Times (and more so to the readers of the New York Times, since he has been featured in The New York Times Magazine), surely must qualify as a celebrity. John Silber also is a university president. The number of university presidents who are thought of as celebrities is, understandably, small.

John Silber represents an increasingly common phenomenon of our times. For a long time--undoubtedly too long--the trade-union card for being an intellectual was to be a liberal Democrat. In America, as in Europe, this qualification has, over the last decade, receded. The intellectuals of Commentary and Public Interest, some of them former liberals, are now the powerhouse of the New Right. John Silber seeks to put his name in that firmament. He fails.

He fails for a number of reasons. First, he lacks the charm, wit, and grace of a Bill Buckley or a George Will. His is more the style of a Bill Bennett--and the Bill Bennett of secretary of education fame--rather than the new, somewhat less strident version. Nor does Silber’s combativeness have the engaging quality of a Bob Bork.

Second, John Silber has written a poorly constructed book. He admits that the book represents a series of essays. In principle, there is nothing wrong with that. The essays, however, are poorly grouped, in many respects one-dimensional, sometimes with themes difficult to follow, and with virtually no attempt to link the arguments in the different essays. As to the claim that the book in some way represents a handbook on what is wrong with America and how to fix it, the claim is pretentious. Only with respect to education is there anything like a coherent policy spelled out.

Third, the book is irritating. John Silber is a philosopher, no doubt a smart philosopher. He writes, however, in a style which is certainly irritating to one who has even a tenuous claim to be a historian. He totally misunderstands the origin of the American university. The New England colleges and universities were essentially public institutions when they were founded, and only became private--or as we prefer to say, independent--institutions as the 19th Century progressed. Similarly, in his irritation with such things as the two or three generations on welfare, Silber fails to realize that, in his own state of Massachusetts, county justices were complaining about three generations having been on welfare as early as 1800. So much for some of his allegations about the thriftiness and moral qualities of earlier generations of Americans.

I do not mean to say that there are not some points with which an increasingly curmudgeonly moderate does not find himself much in agreement. The Greening of America, while it was symptomatic of an age, is an intellectual embarrassment. As a lawyer manque, I share much of concerns about the fact that, at the current galloping rate of increase in the number of lawyers, every man, woman, and child in the United States will be a lawyer by the year 2074. Even here, however, Silber engages in hyperbole--a rhetorical style not unknown to college presidents. His contrasts with the United Kingdom and Japan are misleading. Those countries do, indeed, have fewer lawyers, although, certainly in the United Kingdom, the number of lawyers is growing at a rate virtually comparable with that of the United States. More important, however, in both England and Japan, many of the “law jobs” are, in fact, done by other professions--in England by civil servants, company secretaries, accountants and others.

Silber, too, in his guise as the barefoot boy from Texas, would also find that many of the substitutes for the Rule of Law--and lawyers to enforce it--are less than attractive. He claims to be a civil libertarian, yet civil liberties are less alive in England and Japan than they are in this country.

No doubt, an important reason for that is the different role of the legal profession. Social class, and the other subtle pressures of a much more authoritarian society, make a need for a lawyer-ridden society far less important. These are, however, high costs. These costs Silber ignores.

Silber is a very American American. He is the kind of American who, in so many ways, makes us a “can-do” society. For those of us who grew up in Europe, he is the kind of person who makes this such an exciting society in which to live and work. Vibrant Americans see things in black and white. They like simple solutions to complex problems. Whereas Europeans, for instance, allow themselves the luxury of thinking the politics of Nicaraguan complex and unclear, Americans have bad guys and good guys. For Silber, they are, not unnaturally, the Sandinistas and the Contras, respectively.

Silber is, indeed, in so many ways, the American success story writ large. His is a more intellectualized version of that rather unstructured thinking which is endemic in our society. In our social life, the weakness of the liturgical churches in this country insures the ahistorical enthusiasms of the Moral Majority on the right, and groups such as the Quakers on the left, just as it inspires ahistorical spokesmen like Silber.

In this All-American sense, of course, Silber’s is an exciting book. The book has many challenging passages. He ranges into foreign affairs; he challenges the liberal view of disarmament at any price. He has an interesting chapter on tenure in the universities, and he scores some good points. He clearly cares that leadership in the academic community is now automatically seen to be the enemy. Yet his tough-minded views seem sometimes illogical and inconsistent, one with another.

He appears to come down against abortion. In an essay that is not always easy to follow, he also seems to be one of those who is against sex education.

He is, of course, in favor of morals. Ethical relativism is not for John Silber. Yet, his list of enemies is, at best, confusing. Among the “bad guys” are program traders and drug dealers. Yet he is strongly in favor of the private-enterprise system. He is opposed to regulation. Perhaps it is my muddled European background, but I still find it odd that we attempt to have the lowest speed limit on the roads among the major industrial nations; we have the best record for regulating new pharmaceutical products, for having lead-free gasoline, and may have the first smoke-free airlines. Yet, at the same time, we seem to think that teen-agers should have an inalienable right to buy AK47s.

In other words, the objects of John Silber’s attack sometimes seem simple-minded and certainly not coherent--or at least consistent. To get rid of program traders, we may have to have far more regulation; to get rid of drug dealers, we may need less regulation. Perhaps Silber should embrace the views of his intellectual guru, Milton Friedman, and decriminalize all drugs. The money and energy now spent on fighting drugs in Colombia, Miami and Los Angeles, could then be spent in trying to educate our populace on the dangers of drugs. This might also show that the fault lies on the demand side rather than on the supply side. The subtleties of such approaches, however, are lost on John Silber. That makes for fun reading; it does not make for a serious book which will have lasting significance.

The one area where the book does offer a coherent picture is in education. If Silber had, like the good cobbler, stuck to his last, the book would have been a better one. He makes some good and stimulating points on Headstart programs and the need to subsidize them; he thinks through the implications of rigor in the high schools (again with a number of historically inaccurate assumptions), and he ends with a plug for his tuition plan for higher education. This would provide that, in return for paying the bulk of a student’s education at the tertiary level, the state would take a percentage of that person’s income throughout his life. In describing it, Silber also offers some stimulating analyses of the independent and state institutions of higher education. In short, if this book had been primarily on education, it might have achieved some of the same popularity that Allan Bloom achieved in his diatribe “The Closing of the American Mind.” While “Straight Shooting” already has been chosen as the main selection for the Conservative Book Club, and while it is certainly to be recommended as a good romp, its intellectual force is not profound.