Goldin conflict has made BU a joke

A joke, joke, joke. That’s what Boston University has become. To whom? The better question is to whom hasn’t it become a $38,000-dollar-a-year punchline. And it ain’t spoiled undergrads whining about cable and the Guest Policy this time. And it ain’t the black hole of a Student Union. This time it was the university’s esteemed chancellor/ president emeritus/ego-in-chief and his gaggle of sock-puppet Trustees. And with all due respect to Mr. Silber and the immense amount he’s done for BU over the last 30 years no amount of scholarship is going to clean the bed you just soiled, which I eagerly await watching you sleep in. Dan Goldin’s ouster indicates one of two things: either 1) university administration has made a reckless reversal of its choice to lead BU for the near future, based on a petty power struggle, as press reports indicate; or 2) Dan Goldin is really as mean, nasty and ill-tempered as they say he is. And if that’s the case, then he was just the ‘visionary’ product of a slipshod search process. Neither choice is one to be proud of. And if he is so dastardly, I guess we should be grateful to the Board of Trustees for sparing us. Cue the crickets. I can’t wait to see how the university will try to spin this. BU golden-boy Bill O’Reilly may well have a stroke. Now I know how employees of The New York Times must have felt after the Jayson Blair train wreck. They found themselves embarrassed to admit their association with one of the most respected institutions in the country. But who can blame them, or us? Make no mistake, BU is not, has never been and will unlikely ever garner that much respect. And the recent goonery isn’t helping. The reality is there are thousands of brilliant, hard working professors and students at BU who will now be tainted by the childish behavior of the university’s administration. Mr. Goldin should understand this part well. A wacky metric mix-up by some low-level astro-functionaries below him at NASA caused a multi-billion dollar piece of space equipment to slam into a planet at about a zillion miles per hour. All of a sudden his whole operation was portrayed as incompetent. Luckily, somewhere along the line at BU, I learned that the only thing that really matters is the work you produce, not the name on your degree. So I suppose it means little materially no one is going to be denied a job or admission to grad school for speaking honestly about their connection with the big gray circus elephant on the Charles. But that’s not the point. Dammit, I’m tired of whipping out a stupid grin, shrugging my shoulders and saying, ‘Yeah, that nutty [insert name of cracked mid-to-high-level BU bureaucrat here]!’ when asked about my alma mater. Fact is, I thought spending the semester in Washington, D.C. might enable me to go four months without seeing BU’s name in a negative headline. Maybe it’s just sensationalism. Blame the media. (I know John doesn’t think too highly of reporters, anyway.) For the time being, though, all us somehow tied to BU have no choice but to puff out our chests and face the music (which vaguely resembles Taps right now). I know I will. If someone asks me where I go to school, I’ll lift my chin and proudly bellow ‘BU.’ That’s right. You heard me. Binghamton University. Jordan Carleo-Evangelist, a junior in the College of Communication, is a former associate editor of The Daily Free Press and is currently studying at BU’s Washington Journalism Center.