X-NO ARCHIVE: YES
BU critics decide it's time to speak up
By Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff, 11/16/2003
To Boston University graduate Peter Bernard, the
school's tumultuous parting with would-be president
Daniel S. Goldin was "a lightning bolt."
To professor Carol Neidle, it was "the final blow."
When BU trustees gave Goldin a $1.8 million settlement
to walk away from the presidency, they opened a rare
crack in the school's tightly controlled leadership.
They also galvanized a variety of critics among
faculty, alumni, and students whose quiet frustrations
have boiled over publicly in the past two weeks.
A group of professors have launched a website called
"BUWatch" to pressure the administration for reform.
Bernard founded an alternative alumni association. And
one informal group of alumni is even mulling a
class-action suit against the trustees for devaluing
their degrees.
"If this is not the time to stand up, when is?" asked
Neidle, a professor of French and linguistics.
The 30-year leadership of John Silber has seen a
number of uprisings by students and faculty who felt
disenfranchised, but they have been quieter lately as
his opponents came to see change as unlikely. Neidle
says she was active in campus politics a decade ago.
But seeing no way to make a difference, she hasn't
spoken out since then.
But after hearing that Goldin might be fired before he
could start as president, Neidle and three other
professors decided it was time to rejoin the fray.
Calling themselves the Faculty Committee for the Future
of Boston University, they organized an online petition
that garnered more than 3,000 signatures urging
trustees not to revoke his job offer.
It failed, but now they have turned their website
(bufuture.net) into BUWatch, a forum that details
controversies old and new and demands change.
BUWatch is joined by the BU Alternative Alumni
Association, founded recently by Bernard, a California
software executive who believes the official alumni
association is too closely tied to the school's
administration. Arguing that thousands of alumni are
disaffected, Bernard points to BU's low rate of alumni
giving -- which stood last year at 11 percent,
according to the US News & World Report's 2004 college
survey, well below the median for doctoral universities.
Other protest groups may be in the formative stages.
The head of the BU branch of the Green Party wants to
form a coalition of student groups to pressure the
board of trustees, while another group of alumni is
tossing around the idea of a class-action lawsuit.
"It's a much broader, more systemic problem than
Goldin," said Jon Spampinato, communications director
for the Visiting Nurses Associations of America, who
has been talking with a group of friends about the
possible suit.
Interim president Aram V. Chobanian said such
campaigns are divisive, backward-looking, and
distinctly in the minority.
"I'm getting innumerable e-mails from faculty and some
students in a very positive way, saying it looks as if
we can now move ahead," said Chobanian in a phone
interview. "I do think the mood has changed."
Spampinato, a 1990 graduate, said he personally wants
to hold off on litigation to see whether the trustees
will reform themselves, as they promise to do. The
board has put together an ad hoc committee to assess
its own management of the university.
But some critics are skeptical that the board can
reform itself. "Can we ask the leopard to change its
spots?" asked James Iffland, who is on the Future of
Boston University committee along with Neidle,
sociology professor Jeffrey Coulter, and math professor
David Rohrlich. Iffland, a professor of Spanish and
Latin American studies, is a former faculty council
chairman who has been opposing Silber for years. A
decade ago, in the midst of a brouhaha about whether
Silber was stifling academic freedom, Silber called
Iffland "a liar and a coward." Iffland also says that,
privately, Silber told him, "It's a shame the
institution of dueling was abolished."
Iffland has taught at BU since 1974, his entire
academic career. Over that time, he said, many
professors have grown increasingly worried that
criticizing the administration will lead to retribution.
"A huge amount of criticism goes on behind closed
doors," he said. "There used to be a public chorus, and
now there tends to be just a few soloists willing to go
on the line for what we believe in."
Now, his group is calling on Attorney General Thomas
Reilly's office to investigate the board of trustees
and the financial transactions between BU and companies
or charities with which trustees are involved.
Their criticisms are also being echoed in the student
press. Karlo Silbiger, a fourth-year student, wrote an
opinion piece in the student newspaper, the Daily Free
Press, calling on the entire board of trustees to
resign, and for officials to detail Goldin's settlement.
"There was a historic payoff for someone who never
worked a day at the university, and no one asked what
students felt, or faculty for that matter," Silbiger
said in an interview. The president of BU Greens, he
wants to bring leaders of student organizations
together to talk about forming a coalition.
Some of those who have been roused to speak out are
new to the role, like Spampinato, who described himself
and his friends as "not a group of malcontents."
Others, however, are familiar dissenting voices, such
as Iffland and Bernard. When he was a student in the
late 1980s, Bernard founded a short-lived campaign
called NOPE: Not One Penny Ever, in which students and
alumni could mail a card to BU, checking off a box for
the policy they wanted changed before they'd ever
donate money.
"He's always been a renegade," said Judie
Friedberg-Chessin, head of the official alumni
association and also a trustee. "I'd rather that we all
work together and not apart. That's the only way to heal."
Marcella Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
Posted by Permission
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