State of the University, Spring 2019
April 5, 2019
Dear Colleagues,
The race is on to the end of the spring semester, as Commencement is about six weeks away. In this letter I want to focus on our efforts to build an interconnected university, a topic that I introduced in some detail last spring and where several important initiatives are underway. Since then, much work has been done in this area. But before turning to this, I want to report on a number of other highly relevant matters.
Free Speech on Campus
First, as I wrote earlier this spring, we have launched two committees charged with developing a set of University-wide policies that articulate and affirm our commitment to free speech. These policies must provide the bedrock for the wide-ranging intellectual inquiry and open debate that are essential to the University’s mission. I believe that unimpeded inquiry and open debate can not only coexist with, but also flourish in, a community devoted to inclusiveness and diversity—a community in which people with differing backgrounds and points of view work to find common ground. Dedicating ourselves to creating such an environment at Boston University is more critical than ever as we witness how racial and religious hatred led to recent horrific acts of violence such as those in New Zealand and Pittsburgh as well as in Nigeria and East Africa.
As we work to affirm and articulate our commitments, I would offer the observation that while protection of speech—including speech that most of us would find distasteful or even antithetical to our personal values—is fundamental, we can and should make the case that it is nonetheless wrong to misuse speech protections as a license to incite and inflame rather than discuss and debate. We must ever press for good faith and serious intent in discourse.
The National Scandal in Undergraduate Admissions
Our offers for admission to our fall 2019 freshman class went out on Saturday, March 23, in the midst of the most troubling scandal ever to affect admissions in higher education. An unscrupulous agent took bribes from parents to rig college admissions by fraudulently enhancing standardized test scores and by bribing coaches to support consideration of their children as varsity athletes when they were not. I will not recount the details, as I am sure you have read the plentiful press coverage. Let me review where Boston University stands on this.
As has been publicly reported, we received two applications that we now know included fraudulent test scores. These scores were received directly from the testing agencies; we had no reason to doubt their validity. Both applicants were rejected for admission, so there is no action required on the part of Boston University.
No member of our coaching staff has been implicated in the scandal. Our procedures for admission of varsity athletes keep coaching staff at arm’s length during admissions deliberations and do not give coaches the authority to independently guarantee admission of a candidate (as is the case at some institutions). While no system is totally invulnerable, ours places decision-making authority squarely with our admissions experts, where it should be.
We are implementing additional procedures to reconcile the names of students admitted with the expressed intent of playing a varsity sport with the eventual rosters of our varsity teams, so that we can monitor alignment between recruitment and participation and, if needed, raise questions.
The broader (and, I would anticipate, more lasting) impact of the admissions scandal has been to rekindle national discussion about the consideration in admissions deliberations of attributes other than academic merit. I believe most would agree that success in career and life depends on intellectual ability as well as qualities such as perseverance, integrity, and leadership. If we believe in holistic evaluations, then accomplishment in athletics and other cocurricular domains merits consideration.
There are, of course, other forms of advantage that are more challenging to justify and which may be specific to a particular academic community. Preferences, however subtle or marginal, for children of alumni and employees are being widely discussed, as they are seen as limiting the available positions for others.
Finally, there are the issues of cost of attendance and availability of financial aid, which can significantly limit access to a quality education at a private university without a large endowment. Unless an institution is in the position to maintain a need-blind admissions process and then meet full demonstrated financial need (particularly in the eyes of the parents), access to that institution is inevitably skewed by family means. As a private university that relies on tuition and fees for over half its revenue, Boston University is subject to this pressure more than are some others. We cannot in the near future afford to practice need-blind admissions. We are working diligently to control costs and to close the financial aid gap in order to move closer to the goal of meeting full need for admitted students.1
Sexual Misconduct Prevention
I want to thank all the members of our community who have completed our mandatory online training in sexual misconduct prevention. This training is a critical piece of our efforts to ensure that we provide a safe and welcoming environment for all members of our community and to help eliminate unacceptable behavior. For those of you who have not completed the training, I hope you will do so soon and not run up against the deadlines that have been announced.
Undergraduate Admissions
In late March, offers for admission to our fall 2019 undergraduate class were made with the goal of recruiting 3,100 freshmen. The successful applicants are drawn from an admissions pool of 62,210 applicants. We saw a 12 percent increase in early decision applications; this increase is part of a national trend of more students applying to a single institution. We selected almost 45 percent of the fall class from the early decision pool, which was significantly larger and more academically qualified than in previous years. Our overall admissions were more selective than ever with only 18 percent of applicants being offered seats. The students offered admission are academically exceptional and geographically and ethnically diverse. On average, admitted students earned a 3.8 GPA, ranked in the top 7 percent of their high schools, and scored 1468 on the SAT (33 ACT). The newly admitted first-year students hail from 50 states and 116 countries. Twenty-two percent of the admitted students are underrepresented minority students and 23 percent are international.
Once again, we have increased our need-based undergraduate financial aid, with emphasis on meeting a greater portion of the demonstrated financial need of our students while continuing to meet full need without loans for Pell Grant recipients. For the 2019–2020 academic year we increased undergraduate financial aid by 10 percent to over $292 million. This is a major element of our operating budget.
We now enter the intense period in which we work hard to recruit these accepted applicants before May 1 through a variety of on-campus orientation events.
Faculty Awards
Since I wrote my fall letter, several of our faculty members have received notable, national recognition.
Ann McKee, Professor of Neurology & Pathology and Director of the BU Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center in the School of Medicine, was elected to the National Academy of Medicine for her groundbreaking research exposing the dangers of concussions as a cause for CTE.
Early this year, David Bishop was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in recognition of his research accomplishments and his leadership. David is Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Physics; head of the Materials Science & Engineering division; and Director of the NSF Engineering Research Center in Cellular Metamaterials.
Congratulations to Ann and David.
I will give a complete accounting of the many recognitions of our faculty in my letter next fall.
Comprehensive Campaign
The end of our first comprehensive campaign is in sight as we approach the September finish line. I still marvel at the level of engagement of alumni and friends who have responded generously to the tireless outreach efforts of our staff and academic leaders. We will finish with over 150,000 individual donors to the campaign and surpass by a wide margin our expanded goal of $1.5 billion. The impact of the campaign on the University has been profound. When the smoke clears next fall, we will take stock of what the campaign has accomplished and how we can best build on this success in our subsequent fundraising and stewardship.
Interconnections in the University
Now I would like to return to the theme from my letter last spring—creating a more interconnected university. In that letter, I proposed that we strive to become the “most integrated research university in the country, one that seamlessly connects programs and people across our schools and colleges to create innovative programs and contribute to the solution of the challenges facing society.” I went on to imagine “a university that leverages (ever more effectively) our collective strength to focus on the connections and integration among disciplines.”
Why? Because I believe this is the way the world works. Input from scholars and researchers from a wide range of perspectives and domains of expertise is necessary to make substantial breakthroughs in addressing the most complex challenges humankind faces. As a leading research university, we have the responsibility to organize ourselves in education and research to reflect this need. But this drive does not detract from our goal of academic excellence. The establishment and expansion of interconnections among academic programs and disciplines is not an alternative to quality within disciplines. Rather, it builds on our strengths as a lever to maximize our impact.
How do we assess the quality of the research and scholarship of our faculty? Clearly a difficult question. Most agree that the opinions of experts, as expressed in manuscript reviews, peer review of journal submissions, grant applications, and faculty promotion cases, are highly significant. Another approach comes from the world of data analytics where citations of work produced at Boston University can be counted and compared to those from other institutions. One measure that is gaining traction is the Field Weighted Citation Impact or FWCI.2 The chart below shows the FWCI computed for all publications from 2013 to 2018 for Boston University faculty and for several of our national and global peer research universities. In this evaluation a university-wide FWCI of 1.00 would represent a university in which the average of the citations per publication in all fields is at the international average; hence, the term field weighted.
As you see, by this metric, Boston University faculty do very well with an FWCI greater than 2.00, comparable to the FWCI for some other outstanding institutions.
Another illuminative measure is the percentage of Boston University–produced publications that are in the journals that are defined as being in the top 10 percent of the most highly cited journals in each field. The data for Boston University and its peers is given below.
Again, we do very well. Notwithstanding the many caveats that go with calculations of this sort, the analysis suggests that our faculty is creating research and scholarship that is highly regarded around the world. We have a great foundation on which to build.
Our Strategic Planning Task Force, working under the leadership of Jean Morrison, University Provost and Chief Academic Officer, is grappling with how to shape the vision for Boston University for 2030. Through listening sessions on the Charles River and Medical Campuses throughout the fall and early spring, task force members have heard from students, faculty, and staff about their vision for a thriving, forward-looking Boston University. The task force is assessing this input, developing common themes, and debating priorities. They are not quite ready to come forward with their recommendations. We hope to be discussing these ideas next fall.
I would like to describe several initiatives that are well underway and driving new levels of interconnection and collaboration across our campuses.
Innovate@BU
Innovate@BU, our all-University center for budding entrepreneurs and innovators, is bringing together students from across the University to form new enterprises and design solutions for society’s challenges. Since Innovate@BU opened only one year ago, more than 3,000 students have taken part in one or more of the programs offered by the center. There are currently 115 teams of students from across the University working on programs; of these, Questrom (29 percent), CAS (24 percent), and Engineering (16 percent) have the largest number of team leaders; approximately 40 percent of these leaders are women.
BU Hub
We are well through the first year of the BU Hub, BU’s first University-wide general education program, which launched in fall 2018 for our 3,620 incoming freshmen. As most of you know, the BU Hub is a general education program in which students develop knowledge, skills, and habits of mind in six essential capacities, whose constituent areas are often combined within a course. The Hub is integrated across curricular and cocurricular offerings, on the Charles River Campus and at BU’s Study Abroad sites, and across all four years of our students’ undergraduate experience. Courses often combine several areas. In addition to its integration and its many interdisciplinary offerings, what is distinctive about the Hub is that it provides flexibility and opportunity for exploration while also ensuring that our students are prepared to flourish in career and life.
This past fall, the Hub offered freshmen over 300 Hub courses (with 800 sections and nearly 40,000 seats). Students had a full range of courses to choose from in all areas of the Hub’s six capacities. These first-year students will soon register for the sophomore year, with over 800 courses and 16 cocurricular experiences now approved for the Hub. Transfer students will matriculate under the BU Hub in fall 2020. I encourage you to visit the BU Hub website.
The 2018–2019 academic year also saw pilots of the BU Hub’s Cross-College Challenge (XCC), a project-based, team-taught interdisciplinary course in which juniors and seniors from different majors addressed topics ranging from healthcare mergers to affordable housing in Somerville to drawing new audiences to the Royall House and Slave Quarters museum in Medford. Students presented at the XCC Project Showcase in December and will do so again on Saturday, April 27, 9:30 am to 1 pm in the Ziskind Lounge of the George Sherman Union.
Life Sciences
Building on the recommendations of the Committee on the Basic Life Sciences, we are moving to enhance integration of our life sciences faculties on the Charles River and Medical Campuses. This spring, University Provost Jean Morrison launched a program for joint faculty hiring among the basic science departments in the School of Medicine and those in the College of Arts & Sciences and the College of Engineering, with the goal of fostering closer collaboration in both teaching and research. Faculty hired through this program will have joint appointments and teach both undergraduate and graduate students. Proposals for joint hires are due to the University Provost by May 1, 2019. I am hopeful that, over time, this initiative will foster a new level of collaboration among the basic sciences in the School of Medicine and the CRC, bringing us closer, even with the two-mile separation of our campuses.
Data Sciences
Last summer we assembled a task force to envision data sciences education and research at Boston University. We saw this as an important step in positioning the University to lead in the highly connected world driven by machines and algorithms. This task force reported last month and has made the case that data sciences (I use this phrase to cover all algorithmically- and data-based approaches and fields) are transforming every part of society and that to respond effectively the University must drive collaboration in new ways.
The charge to the task force was to recommend how the University can best organize to lead in data sciences. The report recommends that we form a new all-University academic unit with a responsibility (1) to develop and coordinate undergraduate and graduate programs that connect to the needs (and capabilities) of our schools and colleges; (2) to coordinate research; and (3) by virtue of the faculty involved (whether with full or partial appointments), to establish Boston University as a leader in this important developing field.
The data sciences recommendations are transformative; they lay out a road map as to how the University can embrace an emerging field that is likely to become part of our interconnective tissue. The report has been posted on the task force website. We will shortly begin discussions of its recommendations with the schools and colleges and Faculty Council.
All the best for a successful conclusion to the semester.
Sincerely,
Robert A. Brown
President
[1] Our announced 3.4 percent increase in tuition, room and board for the next year is among the lowest of our peers and the smallest percentage increase for the last 27 years. We also increased our undergraduate financial aid budget by 10 percent over the previous year.
[2] The Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) is the ratio of the total citations actually received by the denominator’s output, and the total citations that would be expected based on the average of the subject field. A score of 1.00 means the article is cited as it would be expected, greater than 1.00 means the article is doing better than expected, and less than 1.00 means the article is underperforming. The source of the data in the two charts is the SciVal database, Elsevier B.V., http://www.scival.com, March 2019.