More than three months after announcing the termination of the University Professors Program, President Robert Brown is unable to offer details about the honors program that is meant to replace Boston University’s smallest school or to justify the cut to UNI students now enrolled in the program — the last who will graduate from the school. This page, which questioned the nebulous discussion surrounding the plans for UNI’s replacement program in early September, reiterates its skepticism about the plausibility of creating a sufficient program to which prospective students could apply within the next year and enroll in beginning in fall 2009.
The absence of student input appears to have stymied the rapid creative progress Brown hopes will take place in the next year. Although the BU institution will outlive present students’ college careers, and it may seem irrelevant to administrators to craft a strategic plan with the input of students who will soon graduate, future programs made without a student’s view may lack relevance to the people who will actually study within them — and could alienate future alumni.
Brown may have felt he needed to tell students and staff a replacement program was already in the works when he cut UNI to assuage fears that UNI’s mission would completely disappear from the campus. The embarrassing lack of information available to students at this point seems to indicate Brown had very little to back up his statements this summer and continues to lack a solid plan for incubating the academic spirit of UNI in a different, more inclusive program at BU. Brown might be able to accelerate the planning process if he invited UNI students — some of the most academically satisfied at BU — to explain what about the program makes it intellectually compelling, even if Brown does not believe it is institutionally effective.
President Brown distributed James Collins’s management book, Good to Great, to senior administrators. He may want to take a lesson from the book and identify the “core values” of UNI to capitalize, adapt and expand the successful components of that education model by actually speaking with the students whose intellectual lives are tied to the program. Brown, who has been at BU for two years and is engaged in every aspect of the entire university, cannot intimately understand student values of interdisciplinary work without consulting students.
Committee members, whose reluctance to talk about details of the planning process underway hints that nothing more than a vague plan exists, say they are still working to pin down the educational philosophy behind the planned honors program. To do this, however, the committee should not be holding early-morning, closed-door meetings, but rather engaging UNI students and others who have actually studied in honors programs and done advanced work for distinction to find out why and how their experiences were — and were not — successful.
The fastest way forward for the planning committee would seem to be an influx of ideas and criticisms about pre-existing programs at BU. The administration should have made sure a definite plan for UNI’s replacement existed months ago. Now that one still does not, it must work to accelerate the planning process and open it up to students who have been affected by the administration’s decisions.
