Boston University students in the University Professors Program, which is set to be replaced next year by the University Honors College, said they are frustrated by the lack of support from BU as they finish out the program.
The Board of Trustees approved the decision to implement the program at their September board meeting and will begin the ‘pilot phase’ in fall 2010, President Robert Brown said in a Nov. 16 interview with The Daily Free Press. The University Honors College would be different from UNI, which allows students to create their own interdisciplinary majors, he said.
Though current UNI students can continue on in the program, students said they feel they have been neglected, with resources for the program are steadily declining.
‘We can’t use the UNI [specialty] house as a haven anymore because now you don’t have to be a UNI kid to live there,’ UNI senior Jehnna Lewis said. ‘And our student government doesn’t get much funding because there is such a small population of UNI students left on campus.’
UNI and School of Management junior Nic Girouard said he would like to see more administration assistance.
‘Most UNI students are scholarship students who could have gone to other schools, and deserve to have the things that the administration promised them,’ he said.
UNI professor Anthony Barrand said he thinks the move may have been a way for the new president to make his mark on his new territory.
‘When a new president comes in, it’s like a new CEO, and they have to do things their way,’ Barrand said. ‘I don’t think he ever understood what [UNI] did and why people would bother with it.’
Barrand said he has decided to retire instead of move to the College of Arts and Sciences anthropology department, where he would have been asked to move under the new honors program.
‘I have nothing against the department of anthropology,’ he said. ‘But I loved working with students who wanted to make links between disciplines, and with them not around anymore, it is simply not interesting to me anymore.’
Students said they are also dissatisfied with the communication about the decision, and the way they have been treated in its wake.
‘I feel like UNI has been kept in the dark,’ Girouard said. ‘The UNI student government had to meet with officials to see what was happening, and we got the sense that things weren’t even hammered out on that level.’
UNI senior and president of the UNI student government Jonathan Urbach said the administration seems to have lost track of UNI students.’
‘I was at a student leadership dinner where the flags for all the other colleges were hanging up, but the UNI flag was already taken down,’ he said. ‘It seemed pretty symbolic of how UNI students have felt they are being treated.’
Many UNI students and faculty said they feel they are losing both a unique program and a fulfilling college experience.’
‘This is our only four years in college and we didn’t really get what we came for,’ Lewis said. ‘I wouldn’t have come to BU if I had known this was going to happen.’
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