State of the University, Fall 2012
Dear Colleagues,
The last month has been the busiest start to a semester that I can recall at Boston University. In addition to beginning our academic year by welcoming the best freshman class in our history, we have held a series of events marking the historic public launch of our first comprehensive fundraising campaign—the Campaign for Boston University. As I imagine you have heard, the campaign was publicly announced after a two-year quiet phase in which we have secured over $420 million in gifts and commitments toward our goal of raising at least $1 billion for the University.
The beginning of this school year has included more somber elements. On September 10 we gathered at the George Sherman Union to remember and celebrate the lives of our three undergraduate students killed in the automobile accident in New Zealand just before Commencement last May. And, as I reported to you, John Silber, long-time president of Boston University, died on September 27.
Over the course of his presidency, which began in 1971, John worked tirelessly to transform the University into the major private research university that we know today. He left an indelible imprint on Boston University and set us on the course to greatness that we are steering today. John’s legacy has been extensively described in a variety of media outlets, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and, of course, BU Today. We plan to celebrate John’s life at a public event that will be held on November 29. As you reflect on today’s Boston University, I hope you will recognize the remarkable impact this man had on this institution.
In August, we began implementing the recommendations of the Task Force which had been formed to assess the culture and climate of our men’s hockey program. The Task Force was formed as a result of the charges of sexual assault brought against two members of the team. (The charges against one player were dropped and the other pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.) As I have reported in other communications, the report of the Task Force identified elements of team culture, including a sense of sexual entitlement, that are inconsistent with the standards we seek to maintain. The Task Force made fourteen recommendations, which I have accepted and endorsed. The recommendations are intended to address shortcomings that were identified and to reinforce clear standards for student-athletes consistent with those that we seek to maintain for all our students.
There is one point I wish to emphasize. The Task Force offered our community a variety of opportunities to comment and provide information both in public forums and in confidential interviews. During the information-gathering phase of the group’s work, assertions were made that both University and NCAA rules had been violated. These claims included allegations of grade changes for athletes and other improper academic advantages. As described in the Task Force Report, an independent, outside firm was hired to investigate these accusations. The firm’s investigator concluded there was no evidence to support any of these allegations of academic misconduct.
We are now focused on implementing the recommendations of the Task Force. First, the Sexual Assault Response & Prevention Center opened on August 27 at 930 Commonwealth Avenue. The dual mission of the Center is to help students who are victims of sexual assault and to educate our community about how to prevent or forestall sexual assault, and a training program on sexual assault prevention has been implemented specifically for the men’s hockey team.
In addition to restructuring the reporting lines of our athletics administration, we are revising the Student-Athlete Code of Conduct to ensure that it aligns fully with the University Code of Student Responsibilities. Violations of the Code of Student Responsibilities will be adjudicated through the office of the Dean of Students. The University leadership is committed to creating and maintaining an environment in which our elite athletes can be successful members of our academic community.
Our efforts to address such issues shouldn’t cause us to lose sight of the public launch of our campaign to build a bright future for Boston University and coming generations of students the institution will serve. I cannot overstate the importance of the campaign to our aspirations as a great private research university. Philanthropic support from our alumni, friends, foundations, and corporations is beginning to play an important role in our financial operations by giving us the additional funding to enhance and nurture the excellence of our faculty, to bolster our educational and research programs, and especially to keep Boston University accessible to all qualified students, through expanded funding for financial aid. In addition to the general announcement of the launch of the Campaign for Boston University, we have made several specific announcements that demonstrate the impact of the campaign for our faculty and students:
- In a transformative act of generosity to the University and the School where he once taught, Sumner Redstone (Hon ’94) has donated $18 million to name the new addition to the Law School campus the Sumner M. Redstone Building. The building will be the focal point for educational programs and will provide new classrooms, study space, public space, and a library addition.
- As part of his exemplary and expanded commitment to the University and the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Honors College, Rajen Kilachand (GSM ’74) has pledged an additional $10 million to renovate Shelton Hall to serve as the programmatic and residential home for the students of the Honors College. This brings his commitment to the University to $35 million, the largest gift commitment in the history of the University.
- Trustee Stephen Karp (CAS ’63) and his wife Jill have pledged a $5 million gift to the University.
Andrew Lack, (CFA ’68) CEO of Bloomberg Media Group and Boston University Trustee, has established the Andrew R. Lack Professorship in Journalism and the Business of Media in the College of Communication.
An important and innovative component of the Campaign is the Century Challenge, a mechanism for donors to leverage gifts made to support undergraduate scholarships. Under the Century Challenge, if a donor contributes $100,000 or more to establish an endowed undergraduate scholarship fund, the University will use funds from its existing financial aid budget to match the income generated from that fund every year for 100 years, up to a maximum total of $100 million. Over the course of a century, a $100,000 gift will grow in value to more than $5 million. So far, we have received 21 Century Challenge pledges totaling nearly $7.2 million, and six scholarships are being awarded this year.
The Campaign also engages the entire Boston University community in building the future of the institution. We are making great progress toward broader participation. During the last academic year, more than 52,000 alumni came out to over 900 Boston University events held worldwide. By comparison, approximately 5,000 alumni participated annually in BU events as recently as 2005. Our Alumni Leadership Weekend alone, held in conjunction with the campaign announcement last month, drew more than 5,800 alumni and friends to our campus for the two-day event. Also, during the last year more than 30,000 alumni made financial contributions to the university, up 18 percent from the previous year. This total includes a record 2,559 seniors who contributed to their senior gift campaign.
Overall, in the last fiscal year we raised more than $170 million in gifts and pledges, a record for the university. Although there is much to do to increase our fundraising to a level in keeping with the quality and impact of the University, we have new momentum, even in today’s uncertain economic times.
Indeed, the University continues to make progress toward our academic goals, including the enrollment this fall of the best undergraduate class in our history. Some brief highlights are included at the end of this letter. I hope you sense that we are entering the academic year with great momentum on many fronts and with a focus on our tradition of executing quality education programs, on providing an exceptional student experience, and on efficient operations in all areas of the university. These efforts are critical to our success. We need to concentrate on recruiting the strongest students to all of our programs and on critical measures of student success, such as retention and graduation rates, as well as students’ strong launch into careers. We continue to make progress in key undergraduate quality and performance measures. This year we retained our sophomore class at a rate of just below 92 percent. Our six-year graduation rate for the freshman class entering in 2006 was 83.5 percent, up from 74.7 percent for the class entering in 1996.
Our new Center for Student Services (more on this below) will play a major role in helping our students succeed at Boston University. The Center for Career Development, also located at 100 Bay State Road, is expanding its programs to better help students with career options early in their time here and to prepare them for their post-BU lives of work or graduate study.
Simultaneously, we are working on some of the most important issues that are confronting research universities, such as our role in global higher education and the possibility for advanced technology to enhance education for our on-campus students, to help us reach new student cohorts, and to help control costs. This final issue (cost) is our greatest challenge, as research universities are facing declining revenues on almost every front.
For example, federal sponsorship of research has declined and is unlikely to rebound in the near term. Teaching hospitals, such as Boston Medical Center, are experiencing declining subsidies from the state and federal government. These reductions constrain the teaching and research missions of our clinical faculty, while we simultaneously work to lead the drive toward outcome-focused healthcare delivery.
Finally, there is growing concern about the cost of higher education, its implications for educational opportunity for all qualified students, and the level of student debt. At Boston University these concerns translate into the need to moderate tuition increases and to increase financial aid.
Graduate professional programs are not immune to these same cost pressures and also are very sensitive to the job market for new graduates. With the start of this academic year, a number of our graduate professional programs have not met their enrollment projections, resulting in a revenue shortfall that will adversely affect fiscal outcomes for this year.
Most importantly, there is no reason to believe that any of these pressures will not carry over into the next fiscal year. We begin the budget process for Fiscal Year 2014 (the year starting July 1, 2013) with a significant gap between revenues and expenses. Consequently, it appears that very few resources for new initiatives will be available. Moreover, we will need to either reduce expenses or increase revenues by restoring graduate enrollments to recent levels.
Accordingly, we have started an initiative to increase administrative efficiency by streamlining processes and services and achieving economies of scale to deliver quality services to our students, faculty, and staff at reduced cost. The success of this initiative is critical to achieving a balanced budget and maintaining our momentum.
Even with improved administrative efficiency, our delivery model for quality education—with its emphasis on student-faculty interaction, through small classes for undergraduates or mentor-based education of Ph.D. and M.D. students—poses cost challenges. This approach does not lend itself to improvements from technological advances or economies of scale. We need to challenge the assumption that this is our only route to quality education by conducting innovative and thoughtful experiments, both by using technology in education for our residential students or by reaching new student cohorts through distance education. I believe we need to try innovative ways to improve the quality of education and expand our reach. This is the goal of our emphasis on technology in education.
In my recent email, I announced the formation of the Council on Educational Technology and Learning Innovation (CETLI). The charge to the Council is to assess the impact of educational technology, both on our traditional, residential-based programs and on new student cohorts, and to advise University leadership on how we can best use technology to improve learning outcomes and ensure that we have a sustainable model for quality higher education. We hope to be able to bring the deliberations of the Council to the faculty in the spring.
All the best for a wonderful fall semester,
Sincerely,
Robert A. Brown
President
Appendix
Highlights of Academic Year 2011-2012
Undergraduate Admissions
Our freshman class of 3,877 students, by plan the smallest in over a decade, is the best in our history with a median three-test SAT of 1948 and a median high-school GPA of 3.61 for the matriculants into our four-year schools and colleges. Our selectivity (the fraction of applicants admitted) in recruiting our freshman class was 45 percent, also the lowest in our history. The academic quality of incoming students and our improving retention and graduation rates are all promising indicators of the increasing quality of our undergraduate programs.
Student Athletics
Two topics relating to our athletic programs deserve special mention. First, this academic year marks the last year Boston University’s NCAA Division I athletes will compete in the America East Conference. Beginning with the fall of 2013, most of our teams will move to the Patriot League, a conference of like-minded, high-quality private institutions (which also includes the U.S. military academies at West Point and Annapolis), that focus on a student-athlete model for their sports programs. (Rowing, hockey and wrestling are in separate leagues.) A regrettable side effect of our leaving America East was the League’s decision to sanction our teams by not allowing participation in championship competition during our last year in the league. I vigorously appealed (regrettably to no avail) to the presidents of the America East schools, pointing out that this sanction was unfair and principally punitive to our student-athletes. Nonetheless, I strongly believe that our move to the Patriot League will produce multiple benefits.
Finally, with construction well underway of the New Balance athletic field on west campus, we are moving toward establishing our first men’s Division I lacrosse team under the leadership of our new coach, Ryan Polley, who joins us after serving as assistant coach at Yale University.
Faculty
Faculty hiring on the Charles River Campus continued at the robust pace of the last several years with 37 new members joining our ranks this fall. This includes faculty appointed to 14 newly created positions. I should also point out that another nine faculty positions were filled last year subsequent to my fall letter to you.
A notable senior appointment this year is that of Kim Mueser as executive director of the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation and professor in the Department of Occupational Health at Sargent College. Dr. Mueser comes to us from Dartmouth Medical School. His clinical and research interests include the treatment of co-occurring psychiatric and substance use disorders, psychiatric rehabilitation for serious mental illnesses, and the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Two new chairs of departments in the School of Medicine joined us during the past year. In January, Gerald Doherty became chair of the Department of Surgery in MED and chief of surgery at the Boston Medical Center, coming to us from the University of Michigan. His clinical focus is endocrine oncology. He has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed articles and has held a number of leadership positions in national and international professional organizations.
Brian Jack, who has been on the faculty at the School of Medicine since 1997 and was promoted to professor last year, has been appointed chair of the Department of Family Medicine and chief of Family Medicine at Boston Medical Center.
Several of our faculty members have been honored during the last year:
Last month we awarded Peter Paul Professorships to four junior faculty members: Kathleen Corriveau, a School of Education assistant professor of human development; Valentina Perissi, a School of Medicine assistant professor of biochemistry; Cara Stepp, a Sargent College assistant professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences and a College of Engineering assistant professor of biomedical engineering; and James Uden, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of classical studies.
Karen Antman, provost of the Medical Campus and dean of the School of Medicine, was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies late last year, and earlier this week the Institute announced that James Collins has been elected to this year’s group. The Institute advises policy-makers and professionals on medical and health issues. Election to the IOM is one of the highest honors in medicine. Jim Collins, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and a College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering, was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last spring.
James C. McCann, a history professor, and James Winn, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, director of BU’s Center for the Humanities, and a former chair of the CAS English department, were among 181 scholars, artists, and scientists chosen last April from a field of nearly 3,000 applicants as recipients of Guggenheim fellowships.
Political Science Department Chair Graham Wilson received the Ulrich Kloeti Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Study of Public Policy, Administration and Institutions this past July. The award, from the Structure and Organization of Government Research Committee of the International Political Science Association, is presented annually to a scholar who has made exceptional contributions to research in the field through a sustained career.
Last May, School of Public Health Professor Jonathon Simon was named the first Robert A. Knox Professor, an endowed professorship designed to support a faculty member who has an outstanding record of scholarship and teaching in public health and management. The professorship was established by a $2.5 million gift from Robert (CAS ’74, GSM ’75) and Jeanne Knox. Robert is chairman of the BU Board of Trustees and Jeanne heads the BU Parents Leadership Council.
Research
The National Institutes of Health announced last month that it awarded the University $10 million to establish an Autism Center of Excellence. The five-year grant will fund research devoted to the least-probed aspects of the increasingly common disorder, which remains baffling for scientists and parents hoping for guidance in helping children with a broad range of social and learning deficits. Helen Tager-Flusberg, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of psychology, will serve as director of the new center. Professor Tager-Flusberg has studied language acquisition and autism for three decades and is president of the International Society for Autism Research.
This past April, work focused on tuberculosis began in the Biosafety Level 2 labs at the NEIDL on the Medical Campus. And in April of this year, the Blue Ribbon Panel of the National Institutes of Health issued its final supplementary risk assessment for the facility, concluding that it can be operated safely and does not pose a public health risk to the community. We will be pursuing the permits that will enable us to commence research at the Biosafety Levels 3 and 4 so that the NEIDL can finally begin to fulfill its intended purpose in the fight against the most deadly diseases.
New Facilities
Several new facilities have opened in the last several months. The new residence for medical students opened in July with 208 medical students becoming the first residents. By being able to provide housing to so many medical students within close walking distance of the classrooms, labs, and clinical facilities of the Medical Campus, we are able to ease their financial and logistical burdens, foster a sense of community, and offer a richer educational experience.
Our new Center for Student Services, located at the corner of Bay State Road and Deerfield Street, opened on time for the beginning of the semester. The Marciano Commons, a three-level dining facility that features 14 separate food stations and, on the lower level, a café, bakery and late-night kitchen, was an instant hit with students, serving 40 percent more people each week than anticipated. On the top four floors, we have brought together six University-wide and CAS student service offices in one location. They include.
- Center for Career Development
- Educational Resource Center
- CAS Center for Writing
- CAS Academic Advising
- CAS Pre-Professional Advising
- CAS Student Programs and Leadership.
I hope each of you will visit this lively addition to our campus and enjoy a meal with students and colleagues.
The fall semester also saw our students return to campus to make use of over $70 million worth of new construction, renovations, and technology upgrades. Most notable is the complete renovation of Rich Hall on West Campus and the brownstone residence at 60 Bay State Road. The renovation of Rich Hall, the last West Campus residence hall to undergo such work, included the replacement of all three elevators and the fire alarm system, upgrades to the first-floor common spaces, and installation of new furniture, lighting, floors, and wall finishes in all 330 student rooms and four faculty suites. Work on new laboratory, office, and research space was undertaken for Translational Synthetic and Medicinal Chemistry at 712 Beacon Street and Biomedical Engineering at 36 Cummington Street.
Ongoing and planned construction
Three other major construction projects are underway. Construction on the New Balance Athletic Field has started and can be watched over the web from a live-feed camera here. Renovation of 233 Bay State Road as a new Admissions Reception Center has begun. Finally, the renovated facility at 750 Commonwealth Avenue will house the new Engineering Product Innovation Center as part of the College of Engineering. This state-of-the art teaching facility will help all our engineering disciplines stay at the leading edge of design education. All three projects are scheduled for completion in summer 2013.
The long-awaited expansion and renovation of the campus for the School of Law has begun with site preparation work underway adjacent to the Law Tower to make way for the new Sumner M. Redstone Building. Construction will commence next semester, with the erection of the building frame starting next summer.
Finally, programming has been completed on a major new academic building on Commonwealth Avenue (adjacent to Sargent College). The building will be a highly visible facility on the Charles River Campus and will house a classroom complex, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, the Department of Computer Science, and the Hariri Institute for Computational Sciences. Preliminary design of the building will begin shortly; our hope is that our fundraising will make it possible to move forward on this project in the next several years.