Last night’s State of the Union overshadowed another recent announcement that may have affected the Boston University community even more than the president’s policies, though the event was no less symbolic — the Office of Marketing and Communication unveiled a brand new BU logo that ended up looking almost exactly like the old one. This wasteful project — which the administration itself admitted required one and a half years of paid work to develop — only bodes ill for students and faculty.
Spending hours of salaried work on a gesture that few people outside the university will even notice hurts the students and faculty who expect better pay and improved facilities from university funds. The administration has clearly allotted too much funding to its public relations wing over the past years, and the rest of the university community will pay for it.
Spending money on improving BU’s image is a vital component of raising the university’s prestige. If the administration wants to gain positive national recognition, however, it should avoid making the kind of negative press these wasteful projects inevitably cause. BU is hardly the only institution of higher education to become embroiled in embarrassing red tape debacles similar to this phantom facelift. But it is hard to imagine reputable schools spending so much in return for so little.
The decision exposes weaknesses lingering within the depths of BU’s antiquated administrative system. The university needs strong leadership willing to curb spending within the administration as well as outside its executive structure. Too many decisions are still made by committees whose interests too often side with management and marketing staffs over the parts of the school that actually teach. Even research falls prey to this inflexible model. The result is a bureaucratic embarrassment that more closely resembles an ineffective government than a private university.
The worst aspect of this new logo is that it came from the same administration that constantly justifies increased tuition and painful budget cuts by citing its limited funds. A university like Harvard could dip into its sizeable endowment to revamp its own image without a murmur of dissent. But at BU — where officials constantly remind students and faculty they work at a tuition-based institution — the community expects a certain degree of fiscal responsibly in return.
It is not as if the BU community has held very high expectations for its university in the first place. This is the school that reportedly paid almost-president Daniel Goldin $1.8 million to stop pursuing the job after the Board of Trustees got cold feet. This is the school that created the position of chancellor simply to give longtime President John Silber another way to interfere with its leadership after he retired. But this most recent case has proven BU can still rival its own worse scandals.
