Boston University President Robert Brown addressed the Student Union and some 60 attendees Tuesday evening, addressing campus matters through a positive lens. First, he highlighted points from his Strategic Plan ‘- his vision for improving and enriching the university through the additional recruitment of highly qualified faculty, an increase in the quality of residential experience and a push for students to explore different curricular disciplines through choosing new minors.
After he spoke volumes about BU’s sparkling future of progress and promise, the more contentious issues came to the forefront. A proposal to increase the print quota for undergraduates was raised before Brown, who responded with a statistic that one million fewer sheets were printed during this September than the same month last year. That being true, it doesn’t mean that those sheets weren’t printed elsewhere just because they weren’t printed on campus. And if they were printed at a retail printing service, that means that students spent thousands of extra dollars on printing thanks to the quota adjustment. This qualifier of the statistic, Brown strategically left out.
Brown was frank about one thing ‘- that the administration mishandled the implementation of the quota reduction for faculty. He took responsibility for the fact that professors weren’t properly notified about the change and had no way of altering their syllabi appropriately, nor any way to increase students’ quotas on an individual class basis for courses with heavier reading in their curricula. This disservice to the very faculty that Brown applauds in his Strategic Plan is one he clearly regrets, and it was a welcomed surprise that he admitted these regrets.
But when the audience broke out with questions regarding the Biosafety Level-4 lab to be built in South End and owned by the university, Brown wasn’t so forgiving, dodging the questions outright. He claimed that it wasn’t the time nor place to discuss such things ‘- suggesting, perhaps, that matters of the world’s deadliest pathogens marked with the BU brand were too heavy to be discussed at the Union forum. Unfortunately, Brown undermined the intelligence and savvy of his students. The biolab is a patently BU matter, one that students have legitimate opinions and concerns about, and in his glossing-over of the issue, Brown loses the credibility he established by speaking so candidly about the print quota revision.
Students deserve the right to voice their questions at Union meetings and have them addressed by the administrative figures that stand behind them. If this right is ignored, then Union General Assembly meetings may prove to be just as useless as the thousands of BU students who don’t attend them believe them to be.
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.
The Roxbury Safety Net and the STOP the BU Bio-Terror Lab Coalition would like to thank all of the BU students presently and over the past 7 years who are and have fought for community Justice in our neighborhood, the city and State. Your internal opposition has strenghten our voices. BU students have taken more time to listen and understand our plight than any BU admin. <p/>Your Voices along with Our voices create a choir for TRUTH!!!<p/>Thank You,<br/>KXA