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In November, 2004, in response to a call from the chairman of the search committee for a new president for Boston University, I wrote concerning the qualities that I felt were needed. I wrote, inter alia, “The new president will need to lead the University to transform its administrative culture and build stronger links between academic and non-academic administration, integrating key administrative functions across two campuses of the University. Such change will require strong and continuous attention by the president to lead the administrative team while encouraging both leadership and collaboration among members of the team. The University administration needs to move away from a culture of [fragmentation and localism] to a new culture of proactive leadership and teamwork in developing solutions and support for faculty and students and emphasizing foresighted prevention of problems. A balance between offensive expansion and defensive operational support is needed. Operational supports, which include financial management, human resources, student services, information technology, communications, purchasing, environmental health and safety, research administration and research compliance, legal affairs, and others, need to be strengthened, integrated and systematized to serve both campuses of the University in an effective network of services informed by a comprehensive and expert vision and tailored to the needs of the faculty.” I am grateful for One BU because the report can help us to work together towards an important cultural change. It is time for us to look inward at our culture. Each of us needs to take responsibility, in a new way, for the whole, not just a small part of it. I am also grateful for the One BU website. The “medium is the message” in that the President’s invitation to the whole community to participate in the dialogue constitutes an important expression of the new culture. If we could bite off an even larger task, I would change the title to One BU: a Partner with Many. We need to look not only inward, but also outward, as one. The report, if not its title, certainly supports this view. While the University moves forward to develop a more holistic culture, it is also vital that the University reach out to nourish important partnerships. As critical example, the University is virtually “married” to the Boston Medical Center--every clinical department in the University’s School of Medicine is also a clinical department in this legally separate entity, our principal affiliated teaching hospital. As suggested in an earlier comment on this website from Dr. Richard Saitz, a critical need for the clinical faculty of the School of Medicine, is for the University--at its highest levels and as one-- to work with BMC to ensure that our marriage has the over-arching agreements necessary to enable it to function as a systematic and efficient whole, without confusing duplication and constant low-level tensions, particularly in the area of research administration. Susan Frey, Assistant Provost
It has been my experience at BU that when I have an idea to improve my life or the life of other students, my biggest obstacle is not coming up with ideas, but a disagreeable, sluggish, and unaccommodating bureaucracy. BU needs administrators who welcome new ideas and change, not a body of people opposed to progress. With all of this talk of unifying our student body as “One BU,” the issues that the majority of students agree on (i.e. the need for a new guest policy, the need for better T-Pass discount, need for a unified system for addressing complains) remain unaddressed. In fact, I look at this “task force” assigned to describe what we students need, and find not one student or student representative on the board. The closest to such student representation is Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore. But even he cannot truly understand being a student at BU as much as actual students might. For a board trying to change our culture, it seems more like paternal board trying to force us into their philosophy rather than a board meant to improve life on campus. If a body wants to help its students and improve its university, a good start would be getting student input. However, rather than participate policy-making, we, the students, are merely allowed to “post feedback” on it afterward. Rather than being a intelligent body and source of progress, we, the students, are merely children who need a council of mostly post-graduate-degree-holding middle-aged adults to “unify” us into “One BU.” Rather than allow us to develop our own culture, we, the students, are merely supposed to take the one handed down to us. Perhaps I have missed points as I looked over this “Report of the Strategic Task Force,” but for a body that boasts to update our curriculum “to meet 21st-century needs,” a good start on those needs would be the nourishment of independence and development one’s own culture, not the passive role of relying a bureaucratic body to provide improvement.
A typo crept into my quotation yesterday of a sentence from the Report. The sentence reads as follows: “Mobilizing for ONE BU will require connecting the disconnected parts of our University to leverage our individual expertise across our faculties, to share increasing levels of knowledge about the University, and to share in transparent decision making so as to become nimble, interactive, and receptive to new ideas.”
Student Life: - Create community within residences. Transform each brownstome house/hall into a specialty house. Build new residences with lots of common spaces that give room for socialization. Foster some set of traditions that are unique to BU. - Unify social programs - SAO, BU After Dark, BU Central ...just pick one of those things and make it "the one and only program that offers fun activities onw eekends" Its too confusing right now and people dont even know it exists - Make one easy place for BU students to get connected online. There are too many little places right now (Daily free press, BU Today, Studentlink etc, BU Calendars). Just make it one easy place for a student to access EVERYTHING. I'd suggest it be the Student link page. Undergraduate Programs: - Bigger and better Career Services office! This is so important for the university but its often overlooked. SMG has a really proactive and aggressive careers office, and it seems like other students dont have access to that type of service(its not true, but thats what it seems like). Many CAS seniors haven't even thought about job searching, and so they often seek out structured programs like TFA or AmeriCorps. Those programs are great, but not for everyone. They certainly are not the only options for CAS graduates. Just make the University wide Career services office so ubiquitous that every senior is encouraged to think about their careers during their senior years. On a side note, the Career Services staff at 19 Deefield is FANTASTIC - they're so helpful to the students who go to them.
“Mobilizing for ONE BU will require connecting the disconnected parts of our University to leverage our individual expertise across our faculties, to share increasing levels of be knowledge about the University, and to share in transparent decision making so as to become nimble, interactive, and receptive to new ideas.” This remarkable sentence, on page three of the recent Report to President Robert Brown by his Task Force on the future of Boston University, is a kind of masterpiece . In fewer than fifty words, it manages to convey the infelicity of style, the mixture of beyond-Orwellian jargon, covering an emptiness not only of thought or ideas, but of any substance or meaning whatsoever, of all seventeen pages. “Mobilizing … will require connecting the disconnected parts … to leverage our individual expertise across … faculties.” Surely “require connecting the disconnected parts” must mean something --- more, say, than “connecting the connected parts” would. But what does it mean to “leverage… expertise” --- more, to “leverage” expertise, or anything else “across” something? And to what purpose? If “leverage” were a verb or a notion that could be used in this way, “leverage across” is not. Why, what would be the goal of this leveraging across? This:“to share increasing levels of knowledge.” “Levels of knowledge” does have an accepted meaning; “increasing levels” does not. Higher levels, or deeper, perhaps, a matter of ascent or depth. Increasing, no. Increasing refers to quantity or growth. Not to be pedantic about this, however, we can pass straight on. “Levels of knowledge” about what? About Mathematics, Literature, the Arts and sciences? No. “Knowledge “about the University.” Rather an anti-climax. "Mobilizing,” then (why an inapposite military metaphor, and the unfortunate use, whenever it can be avoided, of gerunds ending in ize), to achieve, this seems the essence --- One BU. What is an, unpunctuated, BU? It looks, at first, like a unit of measurement for air-conditioning, then like a vocable, to be sounded out: Boo. ONE BU to be followed, perhaps by Two BU, Three BU, Four --- on the order of the song One Meatball, perhaps, or the child’s game, One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato, Four But no, we are speaking it seems of a university, Boston University. The “uni” is, of course, already embodied in the title of any “university.” So the message of this vulgarism and public relations howler is to rename a respectably-named institution, “ONE BU,” both redundant and short for Boston University, in which the One was already incorporated in the U. The required “connection of the disconnected parts,” and the “leveraging across,” however, do not complete what this sentence would convey. “To share” (who is to share is not specified) not just the “ increasing levels of knowledge about the university,” but also (and this is where it is important, in one of the report’s favorite verbs “to focus”) “to share in transparent decision making so as to become nimble, interactive, and receptive to new ideas.” “Decision-making” normally requires a hyphen but that is not the point. The report is replete with grammatical errors, split infinitives, long, elaborate strings of bureaucratic travesties of written or spoken language. The point is rather that there is nothing in it but pretentious garble, a word heap. It is inconceivable that a group of educated persons, members of the faculty, should produce a document so mindless, verbose, full of malapropisms, grammatical errors, and solecisms --- or that the president should accept or disseminate it. If this is not the most embarrassing document ever issued by the administration of a major university (or any university) for the consideration of its faculty --- and even for ratification by that faculty and the Board of Trustees it is certainly a contender. Even the title of the issuing body, Strategic Planning Coordinating Task Force is misconceived. What is “Strategic Planning,” outside the more self-important and less successful reaches of the military --- or outside public relations and business, perhaps, where what is meant is marketing strategy? Task Force, apart from its military association, denotes a group devoted to a defined and specific problem, complicated perhaps, but clear: how best to blast a trail, say, through a mountain, so that a railroad can pass through. Not, as here, a group that “encapsulates a major theme that has emerged” in its “vision,” or “pushes us to look more holistically at our academic programs, especially undergraduate education, and to learn how better to leverage the enormous strengths of the University in graduate education, research and scholarship, and outreach.” Outreach? “Give us your feedback.” Feedback? “Discussion and input will be crucial.” Input? “Moreover, as we move to educate an ever more socio-economically and culturally diverse student body, we must focus on creating the diverse academic community needed to ensure the success of these students.” What? “Commit to continuing support of research infrastructure including professional staffing and operational costs for multi-user facilities that serve a wide cross section of our faculty and students.” “Commit,” of course, is a transitive verb; “cross-section” requires a hyphen, at least as surely as “multi-user” and, whatever the writers of this entence may mean, they should perhaps commit themselves to submitting their drafts to copy-editing, and to editing for meaning --- and perhaps also this entire document to a literate English class, to salvage whatever is meant, and to edit the prose and the content to meet the standards of a sophomore at Boston University. “Further the University’s core commitment to teaching excellence.” A praiseworthy commitment, no doubt. Only, there might be a way to eliminate the ambiguity: Is ONE BU’s core commitment to “excellence” in the quality of its teaching, or as part of the subject being taught. “Teaching excellence” could be either. Surely there is some way to declare which of the two it is. The scattering of a little mangled Shakespeare here and there, “Past as Prologue,” “ONE BU invites a sea change in involvement, caliber of performance, and conversation,” though arguably philistine, is harmless. Whatever underlies (beneath the boldface heading A Change in Culture And Philosophy: ONE BU) the Power Point objective “cooperative work across departments, Colleges and Schools, and administrative boundaries in order to eliminate pockets of activity and bureaucratic barriers to broad disciplinary study” is ominous, in precisely the totalitarian and deceitful way that, however unconsciously, smugly and perhaps stupidly, has been characteristic of this administration in virtually all of its public documents and decisions. “Cooperative work … in order to eliminate pockets of activity” is unmistakable. “pockets of activity” are those places in which individuals work and make discoveries which do not fall in with the administration’s demands for conformity, its intellectual investment in “metrics,” “systematic evaluations,” “information systems that lend themselves to self-correction and improvement.” This formulation, one might almost say this instinct, is antithetical to any understanding of individuality, freedom, creativity, the intellectual life. Like the president’s policy of allowing programs of which he does not approve to “wither away,” and the provost’s insistence on “confidentiality” (as he completely and in detail misrepresents the findings of an investigative panel he has appointed), these policies and formulations are based, however inadvertently, on the language and policies of Marx Stalin, the Kremlin, and the party cell. “Pockets of activity” are vital to the community and to the academic enterprise. To write of steps “in order to eliminate “ them is chilling. Except for its defining elements --- mindlessness, incoherence, verbosity, malapropism, sub-literate prose, and this appalling determination to punish or eliminate the real value of a university, which resides inescapably, not in its toadies but in its individuals --- the document is not worthy of discussion. Its overriding impression is of emptiness. No respectable educational institution would issue or accept this report. There is no question of Feedback, Task Force, Strategic Planning, and the rest. What might have been helpful would have been something called, perhaps simply, A Report by The President’s Advisory Committee on the Future of Boston University. And what might have been asked for is not Feedback but Response. ONE BU is disgraceful, laughable and unfortunate. With luck, no one outside the university will notice it.
Where does BU's relationship to the local, regional, and global environment fit in? This is a great opportunity to incorporate the environmental impact of the University into a new integrated strategy. BU should seek to be a leader when it comes to sustainability and corporate responsibility. These increasingly important considerations should be part of any comprehensive strategic initiative on the part of the University.
By what metric are we accounting for the quality of undergraduate education? How to tell whether we are equipping graduates with the knowledge needed to achieve personal, professional, and civic success? Surely this is as deserving of attention as "student satisfaction"... the surveys of which are in any case rightly left to marketers rather than educators.
Regarding research and an issue not mentioned in trying to achieve ONE BU: A large proportion of BU research is health-related. Many BU faculty doing health research do so via grants to Boston Medical Center (because any clinical research with patients at BMC would not come to BU). Attention to the administrative confusion and barriers to success created by having researchers attending to two different research administration structures (BU and BMC) would likely remove disincentives and greatly improve efficiency. Example: A subcontract is necessary for a BU Med Faculty PI on a BMC grant to collaborate with a Charles River Campus BU faculty member co-investigator-a disincentive to cross-disciplinary collaboration.
The sections of the report labeled Benchmarks, Metrics, and Accountability are nothing short of useless. The statement on benchmarks avoids establishing any sort of genuine benchmark and repeats the same thematic statement three times in one paragraph. Metrics? What metrics? This is a list of things, but with no indication of how/when/why to measure them and how we should interpret the results of measuring within the various categories. It would be useful to have something actually set out and stated in a straightforward manner (e.g., we aim for X in the following category; if we obtain X number of Y, we will show progress toward our goals. At the moment the goals are admirable as they stand but still rather amorphous, seemingly requiring action in the form of committees meeting who will be accountable to other committees meeting. I was hoping for more substance.
I would like to participate in the Task Force on Undergraduate Education. We have developed strategies in the Division of Natural Science at CGS that articulate a well thought out curriculum and provide a great interdisciplinary educational experience for our undergraduates. Not surprisingly, our work with undergraduates reflects many of the goals presented by the Strategic Planning Task Force. I would like to share our experience with teaching undergraduate non-science majors in the hopes that it will contribute to a more effective teaching and learning environment at Boston University.
