STAFF EDIT: Trustees hurting credibility

In the continuing efforts to clarify the terribly murky Daniel S. Goldin conflict, a Boston Globe front page story Sunday used its continuously mysterious leak to attempt to clarify what Boston University’s Board of Trustees meant when they said they had problems with Goldin’s ‘temperament.’ The story attempts to address the Trustees’ concerns over Goldin’s heavily rumored problems with anger management (including an example in which Goldin had to be physically calmed at an Oct. 16 board meeting by board Chairman Christopher Barreca). The story also revealed two newer pieces of information, which many critics in the BU community are now speculating could have helped the Trustees’ credibility, had then been brought to light earlier. According to the source, the Trustees were concerned over an alleged Goldin ‘hit list,’ that is, people Goldin was planning to remove trustees, administrators, tenured deans once he was inaugurated as president. Secondly, the source alleges Goldin had stipulated that he wanted to spend a lot of time during the year at his new house in Malibu, Calif. and fly in and out of Boston on the weekends to be with his wife, who would have been living there. It is as though the trustees are trying to salvage all of the shame and ill-repute brought upon Boston University by only now explaining (at least through likely unauthorized leaks) what their issues were with Goldin taking over as president. But the reality is that even exposing Goldin now as making heavy demands and as having an anger management problem does nothing to help the Trustees; rather, it widens their credibility gap even further. These new revelations about Goldin do nothing to help the Trustees’ own reputation, but rather enhance the one thing that Goldin did manage to do for this university in the brief period he was in the limelight: expose an appalling lack of integrity and credibility in the Board of Trustees. Through this entire process, the Trustees exhibited cover-ups that led to more cover-ups, diversions that led to more diversions and further loss of credibility as they discovered the potential consequences of the early ones. They should have been up front and honest the second they had a problem with Goldin, and not made the situation worse by trying to cover themselves. The result is that things went way too far, and the Trustees not only look unprofessional, but they also look like self-indulgent sycophants interested in protecting only their own stakes in the university. In short, a situation that should have been nipped in the proverbial bud immediately grew into a national media circus because the Trustees were too blind to see past their own interests and act in the best of the university. Granted, as these pages have said several times already, it was a situation that should never have developed at all, and also one that can be traced back to the Trustees seriously botching the whole search process. After failing to consult with the BU community at large, the Trustees made a hasty choice of Goldin after only one full board meeting, and were so eager to get a new body in the top office that they did not take enough time to make sure he was the right candidate. Whether Goldin’s qualifications for the job were solid or insufficient is irrelevant the Trustees rushed him in without properly getting to know him, and the price for their approach is $1.8 million of BU’s money and a national embarrassment. The more the community at large learns about the full scope of the Goldin affair, the more it is obvious that the Trustees screwed up every step of the way, not just in the final weeks. They failed to take enough time and do a more careful, involved search. They rushed a candidate in, touted him as their ‘golden boy’ and got ready to move Silber out. They ignored early warning signs of problems to come and inadvertently built a rift between themselves and their Goldin boy. They lost the chance to explain themselves before the community got wind of it. And now, for all these screw-ups, it isn’t just the Trustees that have to pay it’s the entire BU community.