Q&A: BU President Melissa Gilliam talks signage policy, affordability, inclusivity

By Emma Clement and Jack Schwed • April 24, 2026

BU President Melissa Gilliam speaks to The Daily Free Press in her office.

The Daily Free Press interviewed Boston University President Melissa Gilliam Thursday afternoon to discuss the past academic year, the state of higher education and the future of BU. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

DFP: Do you have any opening remarks?

Gilliam: It's a really, I think, in many ways exciting time for Boston University, even though I know we're also at a time of tremendous amounts of change, and we can think about that in lots of different ways. But I'll kind of talk a little bit about how I've been thinking about it. The first thing I kind of talk about is when you're at times of inflection points, or times of turbulence, looking ahead and sort of thinking about anchoring your view and your gaze, so that's where we got this idea, or why organizations use the North Star. For us, it's this idea that we think about the traditions and who we are and who we've always been as a way of guiding us into the future. What's been really interesting to me about this institution, one, is we have just we have an incredible history of being an institution that's deeply engaged, and engaged in the world around us, and so when we think about the types of research we do here, or the ways that our students work there, we're often thinking about research that has impact on society — experiences that have impact. So I think about this sort of North Star. I use this term convergence, but it's thinking about crossing disciplines, having students that are crossing disciplines, being much more engaged in the community, thinking about deeper collaborations with the community, deeper collaborations with our alumni and deeper collaborations with the world, so that we really become a destination. So now we have this sort of framework that will guide us and help us channel what we're doing, and the first is saying, let's put research, teaching and learning at the top of everything we do because that distinguishes us as a university. The second is really thinking about people and our faculty, our staff and our students, and creating an inclusive culture. The third, which I think is a little newer for us, is really focusing on external and global engagement. The newer part is thinking about multiple partners, whether it's the city or the state or industry or our global community. The third, where we have quite a bit of opportunity as well, is in operations. Thinking about operations technology and how we spend our lives and limiting the bureaucracy and bringing all of those together to think about these long term goals. That's the way I think about the University.

DFP: In your letter to the BU community, where you announced the pause on the ban of outward-facing signage, you said you met with a lot of community leaders. If you could talk about who those leaders were, what they said, and what those conversations between you and other senior leadership looked like when you announced that pause.

Gilliam: Many people wrote to me during that time, but even from the beginning, this is not always leaders, but a lot of times faculty, and I'm continuing to meet with faculty and students to hear their perspectives. I was interested in their perspective but also in some larger questions about how we as a University communicate and work together, how people's sense of, when there's something they disagree with, do you come together and do we have a conversation about that? What does it take to have a community where people feel like they are empowered to be part of decision making? So it's probably a little more meta than what you imagine, but that's important. A number of our conversations, we worked very closely with the leaders of the LGBTQIA faculty, staff and student centers and so a lot of our conversations have been with those centers because we were aware, we have a policy that is connected now very specifically with that community. Part of why the policy is paused is through these conversations [with the LGBTQIA community] because what we know is, even despite our intentions, there's just the outcome and the effect and the combination of the policy, as well as the coverage of it. We realized that for this campus, there's just too many additional effects, and so that was really putting a pause on it.

DFP: In 1986, the Massachusetts Superior Court ruled in the Abramowitz case that banners hung by students are examples of free speech protected under the First Amendment. So our question is, how do you square that with BU signage policy, which was put in place in 1982 before the ruling?

Gilliam: I'm going to not get into the weeds of a law versus BU signage policy. What I will say is that many schools have time, place and manner rules. Ours are not more restricted. The decision that we've made is to ask a group of faculty and students to talk about the policy, rather than to make it, this is the president's viewpoint versus, right? It is a larger conversation, and we'll have that larger conversation, and I'm committed to doing that and getting people's best thinking on how we proceed as an institution.

DFP: Earlier this month, in your StuGov Town Hall appearance, you talked about BU losing significant amounts of money in August. We know that loss has to do with a variety of issues — broadly, the culture surrounding higher education right now and costs outpacing revenue infrastructure and tech being costs, among others — how would you explain what that means for students? Particularly, these high costs the University is facing, and where the university is moving in terms of addressing those costs and losing money?

Gilliam: So universities, like many institutions, are facing financial pressures, and so that was the general conversation. What times like this also force you to do is to say, ‘How are we spending both our financial resources, but also, how are we spending our time?’ So the vision is that it gives you an opportunity to say, if we look at our student experience, if we say that our very top goal is the success of our students and our student experience, then where should we put our time and attention, and what matters? Then you start to make choices. We are what we call a tuition-dependent institution. Therefore, we're going to have to think really carefully about how we spend our money and how we spend our time. One of the things that we see, and one of the things that I hear from students, is that there's a lot of bureaucracy — that when they try to do things or try to find out information, there's redundancy. There's different information. So you can say, ‘yes, we have financial challenges.’ But you can also use this as an opportunity to think about administrative modernization and to transform the administrative experience. You can also think about, and what many families are asking is, ‘what is the return on investment from going for education?’ What we're saying is, ‘We need a set of metrics, and we're going to use these metrics to make sure that where we spend our money is on the things that will make students successful.’ I want people to think not only about money, but I want them to think about time as money, and that we make choices, and are there things we should stop doing and things we should start doing if we're going to have a student-first approach to how we work?

DFP: In your interview with The Daily Free Press last year, you said you're in consistent communication with BU’s Office of Federal Relations. What does that look like, and have there been discussions about research funding with Trump administration officials?

Gilliam: Initially, every other day, we spoke and met with our federal office, and it’s a small group of people really understanding the policy and new changes, making sure that we keep abreast [of federal shifts.] It also involves visits to D.C. Mainly, I and other presidents have been speaking to Congress, much more than [other branches]. We've done a couple of things, especially around research. We now have a new person who is in D.C., specifically focused on research and conversations with the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, really trying to understand policy and scientific policy. There's a big investment in thinking about AI called the Genesis Mission, and they're thinking both about AI for science but also the future workforce, and so making sure that BU is at the table and has representation there. We’ve also invested in our own research development infrastructure here within the Office of Research, enabling more research grants and larger research grants. Maybe you've seen this campaign called “You Are Why,” and that's meant to be a way of talking more broadly to the American public. I think it's really important for us to talk to people, to parents, to future students and stakeholders about the importance of higher education. So “You Are Why” is saying, higher education research is about doing good for society, but also there's a disinvestment in the scientific pipeline, so these are graduate students and training graduate students to be future scientists. We've been working on raising money for graduate student stipends so that we can continue to create future scientists, the future scholarly workforce. I think all of those things are needed.

DFP: You're appointed by a Board of Trustees. Many students do not understand their responsibilities. Could you speak to how you appease or collaborate with both students and the trustees? How do you reconcile the two perspectives?

Gilliam: You're assuming that those two things are in conflict. The board's number one job is to hire the president, but our board, many of them actually sit on our college-level advisory committees. Many of them are BU alumni, and they get up every day to volunteer their time to make this University a better place. Many students present to our board. In the most recent meeting, we focused on student success, what that means, our graduation rates, what we want to think about. They heard about advising and our efforts to shift advising. They often hear from student groups. We heard from BU Student Food Rescue, and board members asked, ‘What are the barriers? What can we do to help students?’ There is so much alignment with this, and it's quite a virtuous cycle of trying to hear from students — what they want, what they need, where they want to go — and how we transmit that to the board. The other thing is, our board, our faculty, they're the parents of students. We have a huge number that are alumni. For the “You Are Why” campaign, in hearing our challenges around graduate education, our board came forward with $6 million to create these endowed fellowships for graduate students. If you want to think about who is championing us and out in the world and serving as ambassadors, that is what our board does. BU administration does this daily, too. I don't find difficulty with alignment at all.

DFP: To shift gears, Black student enrollment at BU decreased from 9% to 3% after the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in 2023. The latest data is from the BU class of 2028, where the number was 3%. We have additionally spoken to Black students who said they feel isolated on campus. What are you doing to provide a sense of community to these students?

Gilliam: The first thing we’ve done as a University overall, is to collaborate with human resources, our DEI offices, our EOO offices that really deal with the issue of people. This has taken us a while to restructure. We're almost there, but we'll have a new position, which will be the chief of people, belonging and culture. We've been spending time visiting these different centers. While we have the Howard Thurman Center, I've also spoken with the African American and Black Diaspora Studies department, speaking to Margarita Guillory, their vision is to become a hub for our Black students. When I visited, I realized they needed tables and they needed gathering spaces. So we're now working on that. What I also saw is that that's also a place where our alumni of color are coming together, so we're working on supporting it. The department resides in CAS, but because it's such a central place, we're working on supporting and remodeling to provide the resources they need. The last piece I'll say, is really using our new orientation and this idea of instead of orienting students over the summer, but orienting everybody at once, and using that as a time to start to build community has also been an important way. I want to be completely honest: Whether it is this issue or others, how we create an inclusive culture at this highly polarized time in this country is really challenging. I will not claim that we have it right, and I will not say that intentions always come out in where we want to be, but it is incredibly important to us as a community, and it is essential. It is a work in progress, and we're going to have to keep working on it.

DFP: Harvard, MIT, Tufts and Brandeis are all private universities in our area that have ended tuition for students whose families earn less than $200,000. Is this a policy BU is considering?

Gilliam: When I came, we had something called Affordable BU, and I think one of the challenges with the program is that it was hard for families to understand what the cost of tuition would be. We've now looked at a number of models, and this year, we introduced, for the incoming class, something called the “BU Promise”. It's a simplified payment scheme with the full cost of attendance for families below a certain income, and at each level, it shows what a family will have to pay. I think you'll be really pleased when you see it. When we finished it, just given where we were in the admission cycle, we didn't go very public in announcing it, but know that we've introduced similar programs. We're different than those schools. We don't have the endowment that they do, but we definitely have their same commitment to students. You'll see this program, and I think you'll get a sense of our direction.

DFP: You talked about this a bit initially, but with big investments like the CDS building and the emphasis on being a renowned research institution, how do you balance these big, seemingly STEM-focused investments with arts and humanities at BU?

Gilliam: CDS is everyone's building. Have you seen how everyone uses it? So we have to think about all of these spaces as open and common, but I think this is the time to talk about both the arts and humanities. In this advent of AI it is the time for a renaissance for the humanities and the arts. We’ve launched an arts initiative and a new Office for the Arts. The dean of the College of Fine Arts is serving as the interim head, but we now have an Arts Advisory Committee. This is a group of international leaders in the arts who are saying, ‘How can BU really distinguish itself in the arts?’ I keep coming back to this thing about, it's not an either or, it's kind of a ‘yes and’ when we talk about convergence. When people talk about issues of trust — whether it's trust in science or trust in higher education — these things emerge because people do not feel that they're being seen, considered or treated with dignity. That's where the humanities — understanding other people and stepping outside of who you are into somebody else's shoes — that's where the humanities come in. The idea is that these aren't in tension. They actually need to come closer together, which is why convergence becomes such a great metaphor or concept for how we can think about this University, its opportunities and the importance of interdisciplinarity. I actually think being able to hold things in tension and to find resolution is the opportunity.

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About the Contributors

Emma Clement, Editor-in-Chief

Jack Schwed, Managing Co-Editor

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