This is a guest post by Jonathan R. Zatlin, Associate Professor of History at Boston University.
A few weeks ago, in the midst of thinking about our future at BU, I invited BU Today to report on a letter to university leaders by the History Department, which you can find here. The letter asked the university president and provost, as well as the dean of CAS to rethink their approach to reopening the campus, and allow instructors at BU the same freedom as our students: the freedom to choose to teach in person or remotely based on each instructor’s own personal situation. To our surprise, we received answers from all three administrators, first from Dean Sclaroff, and then from President Brown and Provost Morrison. As far as I know, these two letters from the upper administration are unique; they have not responded to other letters or petitions from faculty or graduate students. I suspect there are several reasons that we received responses, all of which have to do with aspects of our letter.
Whatever those reasons, we were encouraged that our concerns were officially acknowledged. Given the administration’s reticence to discuss LfA and its perceived shortcomings, I thought it would be useful for the larger BU community to read our letter and the responses to it. To help apprise our colleagues and students, I invited BU Today to report on the letters and what they mean for BU tomorrow. I turned to BU Today because, according to their website, they are a source for “university news” and include “safety” as one of their reporting areas. I recognize, of course, that BU Today is more newsletter than news organization. Any news that conflicts with its mission to enhance BU’s reputation will present a serious challenge to its reporters. That said, I hoped that BU Today’s willingness to print an op-ed by graduate student Emily Chua represented a readiness to report on the actual news: what reopening BU’s campus will actually mean for teachers, students, and staff. One part of that story that needed reporting, I thought, was that History faculty wanted the same choice as is being granted students and the reasons that administrators continue to choose to deny us that choice.
What I didn’t expect was BU Today’s response. The editor, John O’Rourke, rejected my suggestion that BU Today report on the letters. Worse, he responded by offering a non-solution that is at once telling as it is insulting: “If you wanted to post the letter with a short intro as a comment to the POV that we ran written by Emily Chua, we’d be happy to post the letter in the Comments section of the story.” The story by Emily Chua was published on July 9, and this suggestion was provided on July 20. I wrote, in response, “Placing our letter in the comments section… strikes me as problematic. I’m sure you didn’t intend to suggest it, but your offer … makes me worry that our concerns will simply be swept under the rug, tucked away in comments well after the publication of a different piece. I’d prefer that BU Today report directly on them.” Needless to say, O’Rourke did not take me up on this suggestion. I guess the helpful thing about O’Rourke’s response is that it clarifies BU Today’s institutional position for us: despite sometimes trying to present itself as a journalistic venture, BU Today is not a newspaper, newsletter, or even a newsfeed, for it doesn’t deal in news. Instead, it’s a public relations enterprise, and, as such, it uncritically reflects the views of the BU administration.
See also these earlier posts on BU Today: On the Response to my Open Letter, An Open Letter to the Editor of BU Today, and Where are you BU Today?
