We welcome newly elected Board of Trustees Chairman Robert Knox to the helm of a university amid a period of exciting changes. The group of influential figures who comprise the Board technically own Boston University, and Knox bears the greatest responsibility of them all for bringing the transparency and community identity the university needs to stand out from its peers.
As a longtime officer of the Board, Knox assumed a leading role in wisely picking President Robert Brown to lead the university in the wake of its embarrassing about-face with Dan Goldin. Choosing the university’s highest authority is arguably the Board’s top responsibility, one that the trustees seem to have finally fulfilled by selecting a competent leader capable of building consensuses.
A transparent university is not a weak university; in the long run, honesty truly is the best policy. The administration will build a better reputation by explaining the way it generates and spends its revenues and endowment than it will by keeping these matters secret. Alumni will also give far more generously to the university’s troublingly small endowment if they feel administrators level with them about how the money is being used.
More importantly, bringing transparency to administrative dealings would set BU apart from its peers, a feat to which ambitious trustees like Knox constantly aspire. The university also seeks to raise its reputation for biomedical research — a wise and realistic goal — but one that institutions like Tufts and Harvard universities have already excelled at in Massachusetts. When it comes to institutional transparency, however, few private universities fit the bill.
Knox has the potential to help build a wholly unique institution, yet all too often BU gains notoriety for its shortcomings. With its contested infectious disease laboratory in the South End, swarms of undergraduates reviled for driving up rent in Boston neighborhoods and controversial administrators like former President John Silber and former College of Communication Dean John Schulz filling headlines, BU often nourishes an unwanted crop of ill will in its local community and beyond.
If anything, BU beats its more prestigious neighbors through its proactive community service program. While this is encouraging, Knox should demand much more from the institution to which he has devoted so much of his personal and professional life if he wants the university’s fortunes to rise. All trustees must work to build a more transparent, altruistic institution that earns the right to call itself Boston’s university. BU may never eclipse the accomplishments of Ivy League universities, but it can achieve greatness by joining a league of its own.
