A website that began with a petition drive to keep Daniel S. Goldin’s as the ninth president of Boston University has changed gears to become a watchdog on the governance of BU and the school’s search for a new president.
The website located at bufuture.net first attracted attention with a petition drive from Oct. 28 to 30, but it will now be called BU Watch and focus on disseminating information about the university, site administrators said. The new site will also give members of the university community a place to post their thoughts regarding the current happenings and the next presidential search.
The Faculty Committee for the Future of Boston University runs the website, and according to the site, the small group ‘believes that only an informed and outspoken BU community will be able to guarantee a better future for our university.’ The focus of the website has shifted from the presidency to Board of Trustees reform, highlighted by a new petition that should be available for people to sign soon.
Professor James Iffland, a committee spokesman, said the website changed its name from BU Future to BU Watch to reflect the group’s ‘current watchdog stance’ regarding the Trustees.
‘My colleagues and I decided to change focus and use the site as a mobilizing tool for our future efforts,’ he said. ‘Since we ultimately believe that deep reform is necessary on the board, we thought that the website would be a means for the greater BU community to inform itself on the way the Trustees have been conducting their business over past years.’
The website shares detailed information concerning the Board of Trustees, members’ connections to the university and to each other, as well as their histories in the press and as active members of the board.
Media articles are linked to each trustee and especially focus on financial matters. For example, Richard B. DeWolfe, a trustee since 1995, is a real estate executive and philanthropist from Milton. An article on the site describes a $1 million contribution to BU from the DeWolfe Family Fund and $1 million contributed by other trustees to former President Jon Westling as the recipient of an endowed chair in history.
‘Information is gathered through prior press coverage, but we also use the web as a research tool much of the information is in the public domain,’ Iffland said. ‘Surprisingly, you can get it after a bit of effort if you go to the right websites.’
The website includes information regarding the salaries of BU administrators and faculty in comparison with other universities across the nation. It also addresses student issues by following tuition increases and supplying a link to the Tenant Rights Housing Code checklist for Massachusetts.
BU spending on property for administrators is also published on the website with excerpts from a Boston Globe article reporting that five executives pay no rent to live in houses ranging in value from $820,000 to $4.5 million.
The site also includes information about money paid for court settlements or judgments, such as the $10 million breach-of-contract suit against BU that the company Linkage, which was hired to run a satellite program for the university, filed in 1997.
Also published on the site is a history of the Massachusetts attorney general’s 1993 investigation of BU for conflicts of interest and the resolutions of the case. A presidential succession timeline tracks events from 1970 to the recent cancellation of the presidential inauguration scheduled for Nov. 17.
Iffland said the response to BU Watch has been positive and well-publicized.
Professor Carol Neidle, another member of the faculty committee, said the site had more than 32,000 hits in November.
The website has yet to receive any response from administrators. President ad interim Aram V. Chobanian said he was not yet acquainted with the site and was unable to comment on it.
Throughout the website, visitors can submit feedback or provide corrections concerning the information presented, and several anonymous comments and responses are posted.
‘I believe that this is a critical time for the voices of the BU community to be raised, loud and strong, as we struggle to clean up the university governance whose inadequacy was so dramatically demonstrated by the presidential fiasco,’ one anonymous faculty posting reads. ‘I am hopeful that we can work effectively through both grassroots efforts such as this and the more official channels like the Faculty Assembly/Faculty Council.’
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.
