Money is a little tight at Boston University. Just ask the thousands of employees on the university’s payroll. They’ll tell you their friends and coworkers are checking out, and no one is coming in to replace them. Other staff members are getting pink-slipped, all toward the goal of saving $25 million in university expenses.
The bottom line is fat and menacing at today’s BU. The university has some high-priority projects in the works right now, and the belt has to be tightened a bit. Chancellor John Silber has committed himself to trimming the fat and right now, BU is grossly obese.
So naturally, there might be some questions about the money being spent this very moment to build 30,000 square feet of office space for Silber and his administrative cronies: $16 million, according to Executive Vice President Joe Mercurio. The space, at the top of the School of Management, is prime real estate overlooking the Charles River on one side and Fenway Park and the Citgo sign on the other. Silber ‘ Co. will be moving in over winter break.
Be assured, this isn’t your average office space. It’s under construction right now, but you can see the grandeur in the making. As with the seventh floor below it, there will be intricate designs on the walls, glossy hardwood floors and some swell paintings to boot. Plans for the space also left room for a few enormous file rooms and a completely new set of furniture for each administrator. Everything is dusty and unfinished right now, but it won’t be more than a couple months before it’s goodbye Bay State Road for BU’s top guns.
Most impressive of all, however, is the 10,000 square-foot convention room, designated for Board of Trustees meetings but otherwise open for rent. The room, to be known as the Metcalf Trustee Center, is big enough to seat 300 for dinner or hold 500 theater-style. At the very least, the spot will be a step up from the board’s current meeting spot, the second-floor small ballroom in the George Sherman Union.
Overall, this is no modest project and at first glance, it might seem as though this is the very kind of wasteful expenditure BU should be shunning right now. As a matter of fact, BU saw it that way, too. The university put off the project for six years.
Since 1996, when the School of Management opened for business, the top two floors have remained a shell. Though the floors were supposed to be ready early on, money ran short. The seventh floor, now devoted to the Office of Development and Alumni Relations, did not open for about a year after SMG was completed. Plans to relocate the administrators were put off a little longer. It wasn’t until 1999, when BU sold its three television stations for a reported $40 million, that the university earmarked funds for the project. Construction began shortly afterward.
More than two years later, Silber, Mercurio and Provost Dennis Berkey are just about ready to move in. The move will bring the campus’ top three administrators, and ultimately the new president, closer together than ever. Mostly, though, it will get them out of their current offices, clearing the way for BU to bring something else in.
Far from being a waste, the project has the potential to bring something new to the campus. Come January, there will be some open real estate in Bay State Road’s ritziest district. The five-story offices belonging to the chancellor, the president to come and the provost will be on the market, and they’ll stand as some powerful chips in attracting new academic organs to the campus.
Anyone who has seen these buildings knows what I’m saying. For years, Silber and former BU President Jon Westling were nesting in some of BU’s finest space, distinguished by turn-of-the-century Italian architecture found nowhere else at BU. Those buildings offer an atmosphere that SMG simply can’t offer. Already, BU has received inquiries about the buildings, and the university had been in negotiations with a math institute that hoped to make Bay State Road, and Boston University, its home. Those negotiations failed, but Mercurio said the space will almost certainly be put to some kind of academic use.
Right now, Mercurio said, there are no plans on the table. Still, there’s a lot of potential behind those bricks, and the benefits to students could be huge, so long as BU opts to put academics first.
So let the chancellor and his cohorts have their luxury penthouse. Students will get a kick out of the idea anyway, grinning at the image of a vulture-like Silber perched nine stories above the scuttling plebs. What’s important is that BU, a cramped urban center without an inch to spare, puts every bit of space to maximum use. Massive construction is already checkering the campus, promising broad improvements in the long term but only eating space for now. Until Boston University can claim the sprawled campus of its neighbors, it needs to saturate its grounds with centers, academic or recreational, devoted wholly to its students.
When all is said and done, that’s the real bottom line.
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