An Open Letter to the Editor of BU Today

Dear BU Today Editor (John O’Rourke),

I am a BU faculty member, and this is an open letter. As a member of the BU community that BU Today at times appears to wish to represent, I have a question to ask about the present editorial policy of your publication. Is it the policy or practice of BU Today, at this important time, to not publish or link to articles or opinion pieces written by BU faculty members that criticize or raise highly critical questions about the university’s policies regarding the Fall? 

I offer the following as evidence that this appears to be your policy or practice. If you wish to claim that it is not your policy or practice to prevent critical faculty views of plans for the Fall from being aired on your website, you may wish to explain why the following choices were made by your team at BU Today. And you may wish to start publishing or linking to pieces written by faculty that you have so far declined to publish or link to.

First, Professor Neta C. Crawford, chair of Political Science at BU, recently published Ethical Challenges Loom Over Decisions to Resume In-Person College Classes in The Conversation. My understanding is that The Conversation receives support from the university, and articles from this publication are regularly linked to in your Voices & Opinions section. However, BU Today chose not to feature or link to Professor Crawford’s excellent and thought provoking piece. Why?

The second example has more of a story behind it. Before we had finished writing our much publicized open letter to our BU leaders at the beginning of June, my department colleague Russell Powell and I were informed by one of the people on your team that BU Today might be interested in publishing it. We sent it to BU Today on June 2, and received a reply that told us that it had been decided that the letter was not going to be published as is, but that, if we were to shorten it considerably, it would be published in one week’s time, as part of a collection of short opinion pieces by faculty. It was surprising to us that BU Today was planning to wait a week before publishing a collection of faculty opinions, as we thought many faculty members might like to have these opinions made available to them to consider during the period in which they were completing the faculty survey sent to us by the Provost’s office. Still, we dutifully shortened our letter to produce a document less than half the length of the original (but very similar in content), and immediately sent it back to BU Today on June 3. More than a week passed and the promised compilation of faculty opinions had still not been published. We asked BU Today for an update on June 11. BU Today responded the same day, saying that they had now decided not to use our text, as it was still too long (even though they had previously said that that its length was fine), and that they would instead use some select quotes from it, alongside quotes from other faculty (“…abbreviating the statements of contributors in ways that are faithful to the originals. That process was completed last night. I intend to run all quotes by all contributors…”). We politely told BU Today that this would be fine, not wishing to complain or provide any excuse for the quotes not to be published. More than a month later, we have not heard anything more from BU Today. No article collecting faculty opinions has been published (although an article focusing on the Provost responding to faculty concerns was published). Again, why is this the case?

A third example: back in May, BU Today asked Russell Powell if he could check with Inside Higher Education whether they would provide permission to reprint The Misguided Rush to Reopen Universities, an article Russell coathored with Irina Mikhalevich (who is also a professor, although not at BU). Russell subsequently informed you that IHE was willing to allow you to reprint this article. He has since heard nothing more from you about this. I wonder why.

As far as I am aware, there has been no piece published by a faculty member that is critical of BU policies regarding university plans for the Fall, despite considerable faculty unrest at this time. Also, as far as I am aware, there have been no stories in BU Today reporting on criticisms of BU’s policies that have been discussed by journalists elsewhere, such as in the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and, just a few days ago, NBC News. 

In case you are interested in featuring or adding a link to a recent article by Russell Powell and myself, loosely based on our original open letter, we hereby submit to you our Colleges Must Not Compel People to Teach In Person During this Pandemic . Medium allows authors to freely reprint articles elsewhere, so you should feel free to reprint it in full.

Yours sincerely,
Daniel