Continuing progress on the presidential search is new Boston University Board of Trustees Chairman Christopher A. Barreca’s top priority, after he was unanimously elected to the board’s top position at the trustees’ January meeting last Thursday.
Barreca said though he does not want to rush the search for a new BU president, he and the board do intend to work ‘as actively as we can’ to find a new president ‘without rushing into madness.’ He would not, however, put a time frame on the pace of the search.
‘To the extent that the chair is a managing force in [the search], I hope to keep it on track and keep our feet to the fire,’ he said in a phone interview. ‘It is something we can’t let it sit and gather dust.’
Barreca, a Connecticut lawyer and BU alumnus, was elected and former board Chairman Richard B. DeWolfe officially resigned at the meeting, after abruptly announcing his intentions in a letter to the board in November. DeWolfe headed the board for approximately a year and a half.
The board is in the process of finding a new president after former BU President Jon Westling’s resignation last summer. Chancellor and former president John Silber is fulfilling the president’s duties in the interim.
Barreca said he expects the board to search nationally, and even internationally, for presidential candidates in the coming months. Westling, whose six-year term began in 1996, was BU’s provost immediately before being selected by the board.
Silber’s role in the search will ‘depend on the issues as they evolve,’ Barreca said. The new chairman has ‘long-standing ties to Silber,’ according to The Boston Globe.
‘Obviously, the university people who are doing the legwork in this situation are under his leadership,’ Barreca said. ‘Hopefully he’s going to continue to spur them on.’
Barreca said he does not have any specific plans for increasing BU’s struggling endowment or keeping tuition as low as possible, though he said both are important goals. Continuing to improve the university’s physical plant will be a major priority for the board over the next few years, which he said will require significant financial resources.
‘Financial resources are important to any institution,’ Barreca said. ‘We don’t like to look at the university as a business per se, but you do have to have resources to build buildings. One of the major roles the Board of Trustees plays is to try and provide the resources for the university to not just survive, but to thrive.’
‘I wouldn’t exclude as we go along this line, the development of the physical plant of BU to match our intellect strength,’ he said later. ‘I do see BU, even now, as one of the world’s great universities, and our physical plant is just catching up.’
Barreca graduated from the Boston University School of Law in 1953 after attending the Boston University General College and was president of the BU Alumni Association from 1977 to 1979. Barreca is currently Senior Counsel at Connecticut office of law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofsky and Walker.
Barreca had been serving as vice chairman of the board under DeWolfe. The board’s other vice chairman, David D’Alessandro, was rumored to be a candidate for the top job, but will continue as vice chairman. Trustees contacted on Friday had no comment on the situation.
‘David is still a vice chair and would make a very good chairman at some point in his career,’ Barreca said.
DeWolfe announced his plans to resign in November after selling his real estate firm, The DeWolfe Companies, Inc. last summer for $149 million. At the time, BU public relations spokespeople said he was in the process of starting a new business venture.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
