Boston University Alumni Leadership Moving Forward
The Boston University Alumni Council (BUAC), the new leadership organization of the Boston University Alumni (BUA), the overall alumni association, is on the advance. The nearly forty-member BUAC has met twice on campus, first in April and then September, and has a considerable charge — set the direction for the BUA, engage more alumni in the life of the University, and serve as the Association’s voice and ambassador to the University.
The BUAC has a nine-member board led by three officers: President Ron Garriques (ENG’86), First Vice-Chair Steve Karbank (CAS’79), and Second Vice-Chair Sven Grail (SDM’90, GSM’90). Garriques, president of Motorola, Inc.’s Mobile Devices Business, chaired an August board meeting to organize the BUAC’s efforts and focus its work. At the September BUAC meeting, Garriques reported that the board had focused on defining “straight forward, simple goals” for the BUAC, a strategy that lifted Motorola wireless from creative and financial doldrums to breakout success with the Razr cell phone. For Garriques and the board, basic and uncomplicated goals will allow all forty BUAC members, representing all of BU’s seventeen schools and colleges, to “really get some energy behind” making a difference and building on the strong foundation laid by the previous BUA Executive Board.
One of the BUAC’s goals is to get alumni back on campus and then to “wow” them. “Given that Boston is probably one of the most desirable places in the world to go visit…given how great the campus looks, how the facilities are, how the University has improved itself,” Garriques said, the most important touch point “to get more people involved in what we’re doing and excited about giving back is to get them here.” The campus has changed, Karbank said after the August board meeting, “but it’s still very much the same place, the same place that I knew.” The BUAC’s principle goal is “to reconnect the alumni with their own personal experiences with BU, with the people they knew and what they learned and with the new extraordinary place that it has become,” Karbank said. “It’s a nostalgic journey to some degree.”
The BUAC, which will meet two to three times a year and its board three times a year, is organized into three committees: public relations/marketing, technology, and schools and colleges. Working to knit the schools into a tighter weave of one university, the schools and colleges committee has assigned members to attend the individual school and college alumni board meetings. “If we can bring to the boards knowledge of what we’re doing and take back from them some ideas on what they’d like to see,” BUAC board member Ed Westerman (CGS’68, COM’68) said, “then you begin to get people again at all levels beginning to go in the same direction.”
Westerman sat on the previous BUA Executive Board, with current BUAC board members Michele Friedus (SED’72) and immediate past BUA president Judie Friedberg-Chessin (SED’59). The BUA Executive Board self-selected the three to transition to the BUAC board. “I’d like to be that bridge between the old board and some of our old goals and accomplishments…and to see some of those things carried through in the new organization, whether it’s summer send-offs, or doing the student fair, or doing the parents program,” Westerman said. “Those are things that we were really proud of, and I think they helped.”
Dr. Christopher Reaske, Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations, named all members of the BUAC and its board for terms of one, two, and three years. Going forward, the BUAC board nominations committee will select new BUAC members, and the BUAC will elect board members and officers. In addition to setting the direction for the BUAC, the new BUAC board has met to name alumni award winners and also committed the BUAC to raising $40,000 from its members for Boston University. Raising $40,000 would be a success for Karbank and the board, but the BUAC’s main goal is to “let the alumni know that the University cares for them and wants to re-engage them in the life of the University,” Karbank said. “It’s not merely to get money. It’s something much more than that.”