President ad interim Aram Chobanian said Friday that he is pleased with the Board of Trustees’ ad hoc committee on governance’s progress, despite questions raised about the process last week by a trustee.
At the meeting Thursday, Governance Committee Chairman Dexter Dodge, the board’s vice chairman, presented the committee’s progress and announced the committee’s recent decision to hire A.T. Kearney, a Chicago-based business consulting firm, to help in the board’s investigation of its governance practices, Chobanian said.
A.T. Kearney’s work will be headed by Dr. Avner Porat, an emeritus officer of the firm. Trustee spokeswoman Nancy Sterling said at least two other senior officers from the firm will help Porat with the process. Porat did not return calls for comment last week.
Chobanian said Porat made a presentation to the board about his plan of attack for the first few weeks, which will include gathering information about the university through interviews with trustees, administrators and faculty.
The governance committee also sent a questionnaire to the entire board, and Chobanian said about 80 percent of board members responded.
“There’s going to be a lot of that kind of activity going on before recommendations are made,” he said of the committee and firm’s data-gathering process.
There has been some disagreement about how successful the process has been thus far. The Boston Globe reported on Jan. 7 that Trustee Michael Schell wrote a letter to committee members expressing his dissatisfaction with the ad hoc committee’s progress. Though the committee interviewed 15 firms before deciding on A.T. Kearney, Schell told the Globe that committee leaders picked the firm without the approval of all eight committee members.
“This is a very important opportunity for the board, and we need to get it right, to make sure we observe the same governance processes that we could recommend to the board,” Schell told the Globe.
Still, Chobanian said he is satisfied with the committee’s work and that disagreement is not necessarily a bad thing.
“I think there is a dissenting opinion there, but dissent is not bad – it keeps the discussions moving along,” he said. “I’m very pleased with the rate at which the progress is being achieved.”
Sterling said the ad hoc committee’s next meeting will be soon. The full board will not meet again until the spring.
“I know that Dodge has them on a fairly aggressive schedule,” she said. “I would think that it would be within the next month.”
Dodge told The Daily Free Press in December that the search for BU’s ninth president could start this summer. Sterling said the board has not decided whether A.T. Kearney will be involved in the new presidential search itself, though the company is also an executive search firm.
Sterling declined to comment on the 14 other candidates the board researched, but said “it was a very extensive list of some top-level people with a lot of expertise in a lot of relevant fields.”
Sterling could not comment on how much the board will pay A.T. Kearney.
A.T. Kearney, a consulting firm that had more than $1 billion in revenue in 2002, has more than 4,000 employees and operates in 60 cities nationwide, according to the firm’s website.
The firm focuses on “CEO-level concerns – traditional issues such as leadership, globalization, enterprise transformation and product strategy, especially focusing on the challenges of a difficult economy,” according to the site.
A.T. Kearney has also worked with several other educational institutions, including Boston College, Colgate University, New York University and Northeastern University, according to the site.
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