President Robert A. Brown heads to the stage during the Class of 2018 Matriculation ceremony at Agganis Arena, August 31, 2014. Photo by Cydney Scott

Community Reactions

Transformative. Visionary. A Leader. BU Community Pays Tribute to President Brown

Faculty, staff, students, others, along with his wife of 50 years, reflect on his legacy

Transformative. Visionary. A good man. Those terms are used by people all over Boston University to describe the leadership of President Robert A. Brown, who announced on Wednesday that he will step down at the end of this academic year.

“He has been a phenomenal leader and leaves BU in a much, much, much stronger position than when he arrived,” says BU School of Law Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig. “Bob sets a goal and far exceeds it every time,” including the ambitious $1 billion Campaign for BU, which ultimately raised more than $1.8 billion.

“He has transformed the University in so many ways. He has made our reputation incredibly stronger, our student body much stronger, our community much stronger,” says Onwuachi-Willig, the Ryan Roth Gallo & Ernest J. Gallo Professor of Law. “He has made the University more accessible at the same time he has made it far more selective—one of the most selective universities in the country.

“He and [University Provost] Jean Morrison have done an outstanding job of creating the supports for students to thrive here,” she says, “everything from the Newbury Center for first-generation students to increased aid to meeting [students’] full need to the Thurman Center to all the new buildings to making the residence halls better.

“He just rebuilt the landscape of the institution, and rebuilt us from the inside in a way that has made us truly outstanding,” Onwuachi-Willig says.

“President Brown has been a visionary leader throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Judy Platt, chief health officer and executive director Student Health Services, who worked closely with him throughout the pandemic. “While thinking critically about the overall health of our entire community, he simultaneously created new leaders, new opportunities, and advanced our knowledge of this new illness.

“Personally, he provided me with the opportunity of a lifetime and a chance to lead when the path was anything but clear. His trust, confidence, and support has been remarkable and inspiring,” Platt says.

Sandro Galea, dean of the School of Public Health and Robert A. Knox Professor, calls Brown’s tenure transformative. “Under his leadership, BU has built on its strengths, seized new opportunities, extended its global reach, and helped define the role of the university in the 21st century. It has been a privilege to work at this University as he has created a lasting legacy.” 

“He was definitely good at his job,” Zach Sherman (Pardee’24) says. “BU is now one of the leading universities in the nation. I picked BU because of its reputation, and I hope that the next president will continue leading in this upward direction.”

Brown, a chemical engineer by training, was named president of BU in June 2005, taking office that September. In announcing his plans to step down as president, he says he intends to take a sabbatical, join the College of Engineering faculty, and return to teaching and writing. The search for a successor will begin soon.

One of Brown’s highest achievements, and proudest moments, was BU’s acceptance into the Association of American Universities in 2012, an organization of elite nationwide universities on the cutting edge of research. Barbara Snyder, AUU president, says Brown leaves “a truly exceptional legacy,” at BU.

“I have known Bob since we were both provosts—he at MIT and I at Ohio State at the time—and I’ve had the pleasure of observing his successful efforts to transform BU over the last 17 years,” Snyder says. “Bob’s brilliant leadership and focus on the connection between excellence in classroom teaching and research deserve much of the credit for BU being invited to join AAU in 2012. A few years later, while I was still a university president myself, I had the opportunity to lead the accreditation review team for BU and see the results of his leadership up close.”

Few people worked more closely with Brown during the COVID-19 pandemic than Laurie Leshin, who was president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute at the time and served with Brown on Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s COVID-focused Reopening Advisory Board. (Leshin left WPI earlier this year to be director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.)

“He was more generous than any other college president I worked with over the COVID pandemic,” Leshin says. “He’s an extraordinary leader, not just for BU, but as importantly, for the higher ed community in Massachusetts. He was incredibly generous with his time and insights and his care for all of higher education. That, to me, is the definition of a great leader. I am so honored to not only call him a colleague, but also a mentor.”

She says Brown’s strength during COVID was his science background. “He put science first. And then he was very forward-leaning, with solutions to keep our communities safe and advance our students’ educational goals. Both of those were critical in the time of COVID. And he worked with all colleges, including the small ones that did not have the resources that BU has, and that’s where his generosity came through the most. He’s an icon in Massachusetts higher ed.”

The person who has known about Brown’s decision to step down as president the longest is Beverly Brown, his wife of 50 years, who is also director of development and industry at BU’s School of Public Health. Reached late Wednesday, she says the decision to come to BU was made by them together, and the decision to leave was also made jointly.

“It’s been very, very rewarding for me, and for him,” she says. “It was not an easy decision, but 18 years, by the time next summer comes, is a long, long time. You don’t have the energy you did, the stamina you did. My husband and I are very proud of all the work he’s been able to do. We’ve gained a lot of ground, but you can’t do these jobs forever. It is possible to overstay.”

She says they are both looking forward to less stress, and traveling on their own schedule rather than a University schedule. “It will be nice to travel without having to worry about cell coverage all the time,” she says. “Or responding to the latest emergency when you are in the middle of the Mediterranean. More quiet evenings, and travel because we want to travel, not because we have to.”

More than anything, Beverly Brown says, they will miss the students. “They are everything. Matriculation is a real energy boost. Just watching them, talking to them, hearing their boundless optimism to be at BU. Without that, that would make the job impossible, if we didn’t have as much contact with students.” In the end, she says, it’s a bittersweet moment. “It’s a very hard job, but it also has its perks. We will definitely miss the interactions we have had.”

She says they plan to stay in Boston and that while President Brown hopes to teach and write after leaving the presidency, she wants to continue her efforts to promote women in STEM careers. “This is a very happy chapter in our lives,” she says.

While Brown’s training is in the sciences, members of the BU community praise his support for the arts. “I know a lot of university presidents, and he’s the only one that I’ve ever met, or that I know of, who has really centered the arts, as part of his legacy,” says Harvey Young, dean of the College of Fine Arts and a professor of theater. “You can see this even looking at Sloane House [the University president’s residence], where from day one as president he has hosted the work of students in visual arts in his home, and it wasn’t a one-week gesture at hosting an event. He welcomes students and he welcomes their artwork, and it stays there year over year with new groups of artists.

“The fact that they’ve been doing this for so long, it’s amazing,” says Young, who is also a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English. “And I think that you can look at the physical transformation of CFA, whether it’s the building of the Booth Theatre or the facade renovation of 855 Comm Ave, what he’s done is he’s literally put the arts at the center of the campus.

“His team will tell me that he’s going to attend a show at the Booth, but he’s very clear that he doesn’t want any special treatment, no seat reserved. He wants to be an audience member,” he says.

“The design of the Booth is something he took quite personally, so he was involved in all the conversations, he can tell you every aspect of detail of that building,” Young recalls. “The reason why it’s such an intimate space in terms of it seating less than 300 people, the crown jewel theater in Boston, is because he really was thinking about the experience of the students, the students as actors, as designers, as performers.

“He’s stood up time and time again for the arts, and that’s massive,” Young says.

“I arrived at BU in 2006, just after President Brown, with the ink still drying on my dissertation,” says Carrie Preston, Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Professor, director of Kilachand Honors College, and a CAS professor of English and of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. “My entire career, my sense of what it means to be a professor, and especially an academic leader, have been shaped by President Brown.

“I was lucky enough to have been named a Peter Paul Early Career Professor, which provided the funding to engage in the research and book project of my dreams. But I was just as lucky to be seated next to President Brown at the celebration dinner, because we had a conversation about war—Vietnam and Afghanistan, where my partner was deployed—that had us both in tears. It was the first, but not the last, time he shared his tears, vulnerability, and humanity with me and gave me a new sense of how leadership could be embodied.

“As he turns back to teaching after a long time out of the classroom, I appreciate that he shared his fears and vulnerability again,” Preston says, “and I hope to recruit him to teach at Kilachand Honors College!”

“President Brown’s tenure at Boston University has been nothing short of remarkable—not just because of its longevity, but most certainly because of his accomplishments,” says Drew Marrochello, director of athletics. “I’ve had the privilege to be with him at Patriot League meetings, and the respect that the league presidents and superintendents have for him is obvious. He is a visionary and a tremendous leader. Above that, he is a very good man.”

“I was surprised,” says Dhruv Kapadia (CAS’24), Student Government president, when asked about his reaction to Brown’s announcement. “This is my third year at BU, and from my understanding as someone who has been very involved on campus, I know President Brown has done a lot: increased need-based financial aid, the diversification of the student body, the creation of the Computing & Data Sciences Center, and increasing infrastructure. So many residences have been renovated and created, and his response to COVID-19 was one of the best across the nation, in my opinion.

“But like any leader, there are obviously shortcomings,” Kapadia says. “My hope is that the next president, in addition to continuing development and increasing accessibility, addresses systemic issues like sexual assualt, how isolating the BU experience is for some students. I want the next president to take a more active role in addressing the strenuous working conditions that faculty and grad students [who are unionizing] feel.”

“President Brown has incredible bandwidth to identify how issues affect every aspect of life on a university campus,” says Kelly Nee, chief of the BU Police Department and executive director of public safety. “That was painfully obvious as we discussed the horrific murder of George Floyd in 2020 and other acts of police violence that shocked the country.  President Brown’s decision to create the Community Safety Advisory Committee was thoughtful and insightful, understanding that the community needed to have a say in how safety services are provided to them.”

“It’s kind of bittersweet; he was an influential part of campus long before I was here,” says Hannah Dworkin (CAS’24), Student Government Senate chair. “I attribute the fact that I got so much financial aid to him. It’s exciting that next year we’ll have a practically new dean [of students] and a new president, and that gives [BU] a lot of opportunities to grow.

“I think diversity is always BU’s greatest asset,” Dworkin says. “We’re such a diverse school, and I hope the next president continues to develop a more diverse campus and is open to [hearing] the student voice. I’d like to see a president who will facilitate student discussion and form a student life that would reflect what students want.”

Chinyere Godfrey-Nwachukwu (CAS’24) also has high hopes for the University’s next president. “A fresh perspective is never a bad thing,” she says, adding that she is hopeful for a new leader who will “represent all the students at BU.”

“Like everyone else, I’m surprised—especially to hear that he’s retiring on the second day of classes,” says Cobbina Appiah (COM’24). “I actually texted a friend of mine who asked me, ‘Was he a good president?’ I’m like, ‘Buddy, he’s been president for 17 years—you tell me.’”