Boston University’s Board of Trustees oversees the university, handles the hiring and firing of top-level university administrators and brings their public experience to the university level.
But since the board moved to reconsider the presidential appointment of Daniel S. Goldin and reached a reported $1.8 million settlement with the former NASA chief, some have called the board’s governing practices and business interests into question and wondered how other schools’ overseeing boards work.
In the Boston area, there are some small variations. At Boston College, trustees have more direct influence than at BU.
‘The trustees own the school,’ said BC spokesman Jack Dunn.
At Harvard University, five university fellows serve on the Harvard Corporation, along with the president and provost. The corporation works with the Board of Overseers, who are elected by alumni and serve three-year terms. The corporation has final decisions on university issues.
‘Harvard is historically decentralized,’ said Joe Wrinn, spokesman for Harvard University. ‘A lot of decisions end at the [individual] schools.’
Ideally, the president and a school’s overseeing board work together, according to Dan Levin, vice president for publication of the Association of Governing Boards, a resource group for university administrators and trustees.
‘The board doesn’t have power over the president per se,’ Levin said. ‘The board’s job is to hire the president and support the president.’
When Harvard began searching for a new president in the fall of 2000, fellows first asked students, alumni, staff and faculty for input. The corporation and Board of Overseers then began narrowing down a list of 200 names submitted before choosing former United States Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers to be the current president. The process was purposely kept as confidential as possible.
‘We did not want simultaneous debate in the press,’ Wrinn said. ‘[The process] was set up to ensure the privacy of all involved and to have the tough questions answered.’
At most private universities, a separate committee of trustees will usually search for presidential candidates, as happened at BU.
According to Clara Lovett, president and CEO of the American Association for Higher Education, a D.C.-based education policy group, the use of an executive search firm also has become ‘very common.’
That same process happened at BU last spring and early summer, though there were a few differences from Harvard’s process. Boston University offered Goldin the presidency in July 2003 and he accepted in late August. Though Goldin’s name was not one that came out of the search firm’s work, the firm did work closely with the university during the spring.
It is practically impossible for trustees to have separate business dealings with public universities, Lovett said. At private universities, practices may vary significantly.
Century Bank CEO Marshall Sloane serves on BU’s Board of Trustees. Century Bank has a branch in the George Sherman Union and ATMs in Warren Towers. Trustee Frederick Chicos’ company the Chickering Group also does more than $5 million in business with BU, providing student health insurance, and numerous other trustees’ companies or affiliated organizations do business with the university.
None of it is considered a conflict of interest, according to BU officials, and the state Attorney General’s Office is not investigating the board.
BC and Harvard officials did not explicitly say the two schools’ board members do not do business with the universities, but said there are rules about the issue in place, as there are at BU.
At BC, ‘there are clearly provisions in place that would prevent trustees from [having] business dealings with the university by which they would profit,’ Dunn said.
Harvard has similar safeguards in place to prevent trustees from having contracts with the school.
‘It is generally wise for [trustees] not to’ do business with the universities they serve, Levin said.
Levin also noted that additional business dealings might not be a conflict of interest, though it is good practice to make such deals public, which BU does though reporting forms required for non-profits by law.
Lovett noted the difficulty of BU’s situation concerning Goldin.
‘I know only what was covered by the national media,’ she said. ‘I have to say from the perspective of higher education, I don’t know everything that happened, but it could not have been a good thing. It certainly could not have been pleasant for Mr. Goldin, or the board or anyone else.’
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