Inaugural Address
Good afternoon, everyone. Students, faculty, staff, alumni, friends, and honored guests, thank you for being here today. Thank you to the college and university representatives that have traveled so far.
Thank you to the Board of Trustees and Chairman Fakahany. I am grateful for this opportunity and for your partnership, and I am filled with optimism and excitement for what we will accomplish together.
I’d like to thank Governor Healey and Mayor Wu for sending in their kind words of support.
Ken Freeman, you expertly guided this university forward over the past year. Thank you for your support and friendship. You mean so much to the Boston University community.
To my predecessor Robert A. Brown: Thank you for your tremendous stewardship of this institution. You are a wonderful and visionary leader. Bob—you led this institution through an extraordinary transformation during your nearly 20 years as president.
Thanks to you both, I am taking on the leadership of a university riding a wave of tremendous momentum.
Thank you also to the many people who worked tirelessly to make this week’s events possible. Thank you especially to Christine Wynne and Michael Ciarlante.
One of Boston University’s great personalities, the professor, benefactor, and trustee Arthur G. B. Metcalf, once called Tradition and Transformation the two essentials that guide Boston University.
Metcalf was himself a man of many talents. He was an aeronautical engineer as well as a pilot, a painter, a horseman, a mathematician, an inventor, a yachtsman, and an industrialist. Throughout his life, he pursued new areas of interest, but always, he stayed grounded in his love for this great University.
The productive tension between Boston University’s great traditions and the ability to transform itself into something new, distinguishes us to this day.
TRADITION
Our founding president William Fairfield Warren drew from the world’s great scholarly traditions to develop his vision for Boston University.
He created a new paradigm for an institution of higher learning, combining the wide range of offerings of the American liberal arts college, the research focus of the German university, and the commitment to professional studies that was emblematic of the British schools of the day.
Warren said that the university was a society “founded by lovers of wisdom and virtue” and dedicated to “realizing the highest known ideals in individual and social character and life, and of propagating these ideals from one generation to another, and from one land to another, so long as the world shall stand.”
Thus, from our inception we were a place of intellectual idealism and academic rigor. Boston University established the three-year legal sequence that is prevalent in law schools to this day, and created the sequential medical school curriculum that has sustained medical education.
Our tradition of wisdom has made us home to some of the greatest thinkers in the world, from Alexander Graham Bell, to Elie Wiesel, to Howard Thurman, to Nobel Prize-winner Sheldon Glashow.
It has transformed us into one of the world’s leading research institutions. We do research that matters and thus have been willing to invest in big ideas with the potential to change the world for good.
- Our pioneering researchers at Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center have changed the way we understand head trauma, compelling the National Football League and others to reckon with traumatic brain injury.
- Our Black Women’s Health Study is filling a major gap in the medical arena, researching why black women have higher rates of many illnesses, such as hypertension, breast cancer at young ages, diabetes, stroke, and lupus. Prior to its launch in 1995, most of the studies of women’s health included only small numbers of Black women, if any.
- Boston University’s LEXI (Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager) telescope will be rocketed to the moon in a partnership with other universities and NASA, to better understand the impact of solar wind on the Earth’s magnetosphere.
CONVERGENCE
At Boston University, our imagination, our sense of collaboration, and our commitment to society compel us to reach new heights, and this tradition holds the key to our next transformation.
To begin with, over this next decade, we will fully embrace the power of collaboration and the power of crossing disciplines.
We already do this so well. The Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, The College of General Studies, and the Boston University Hub link our colleges, schools, and campuses. Our students combine disparate majors and minors in fantastic ways as they pursue curiosity driven learning. The Photonics Center and Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering are leading the way in convergent research.
Now, let’s go even further. Let’s transform the university by redefining integrated research by enabling the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities to converge, in laboratories, spaces, and in classrooms across our campuses. Let’s focus on external partnerships to accelerate our rate of research translation.
To this end, my administration will provide funding to seed these collaborations.
Further, we will create a multidisciplinary faculty advisory council tasked with identifying and removing unnecessary barriers to collaboration in research, teaching, and learning.
As we pursue inquiry across our campuses, we must maintain our strong foundation in the humanities, which are now more essential than ever. Even as we forge ahead with remarkable advances in science and technology, we cannot forget who we are as people, and the history of where we come from.
By integrating our campuses, colleges, schools, knowledge, tools, and ways of thinking from disparate disciplines, we can create truly transformative frameworks for tackling complex scientific and societal challenges.
SERVICE TO BOSTON
The beautiful, innovative City of Boston is fundamental to who we are as a major urban research university.
However, at the beginning, Boston University was not intended to be an urban university.
We trace our origins to 1839, when a seminary, the Newbury Biblical Institute, was established in a small town in rural Vermont. After a stop in Concord, New Hampshire, the Methodist General Biblical Institute, as it was then called, became the Boston Theological Seminary, and then in 1869, Boston University was chartered by three businessmen—Isaac Rich, Lee Claflin, and Jacob Sleeper.
Just three years later, Boston University’s very existence was severely threatened, when the Great Boston Fire destroyed much of downtown Boston, and along with it, Isaac Rich’s fortune.
Founded with one of the largest endowments in the nation, Boston University had to sell its campus in Brookline to survive. Wondering if the University had a future, President Warren invoked the words of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
“Where should the scholar live? In solitude or in society? In the green stillness of the country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, or in the dark gray town, where he can hear and feel the throbbing heart of man? I will make answer for him, and say, in the dark, gray town.”
President Warren decided to continue on — instead of a bucolic campus, he found buildings near Beacon Hill, and the city became our campus, as Boston’s success became our success.
These qualities characterize us to this day. Even as we’ve acquired buildings and relinquished others, being opportunistic when needed, and at other times growing and evolving, we have always maintained a fierce commitment to Boston.
Boston University’s third president, Lemuel Herbert Murlin, described Boston University as “in the heart of the city, in the service of the city.” That tradition continues through the Community Service Center and programs like the First-Year Student Outreach Project, and through our engagement with the Boston Public Schools and City Hall.
Each president has taken the relationship to Boston and the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts extremely seriously. Bob Brown, during your many years of leadership, you transformed Boston University and brought so much honor to our relationship with the city, through clear commitments to sustainability, service, and urbanism.
Today, a modern jewel of our formidable urban campus, the Center for Computing & Data Sciences, with its multiple terraces and rooftops, seemingly defies gravity. It has transformed the Boston Skyline, while leading the city’s charge to net zero emissions with geothermal wells plunging 1,500 feet below the ground.
With partners like Mayor Wu and Governor Healey, we will make this relationship even stronger and even more intentional.
In the coming years, one of our major ways of working with Boston will be to focus on our medical campus where we have leading colleges of dental medicine, public health, and medicine, and we will ensure they thrive.
First, we will renew and reinvigorate our relationship with Boston Medical Center, one of the country’s great safety net hospitals. Looking ahead, together, we will raise our partnership with Boston Medical Center to new heights by continuing to innovate clinical care for the poor and underserved, creating cutting-edge research, and educating students. Doctors Bell and Hollenberg, I look forward to this relationship.
Elevating our partnership with the medical center is only the beginning. We will remove unnecessary barriers between the Charles River Campus and the Medical Campus so our faculty, staff, and students can reap the full benefits of a comprehensive urban research institution.
As we knit our campuses, schools, and colleges closer together, we cannot help but be more impactful and better partners to the city of Boston and the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
GLOBAL IMPACT
From our earliest days, we have admitted students from all over the world. This year alone, about a quarter of our students are international.
In the 1980s and 90s, our tradition of looking outward expanded in earnest, as we built campuses in Madrid, London, and Sydney and sent students studying worldwide. This global tradition gives us a footprint and perspective that few can match.
Today, Boston University Study Abroad offers students from Boston University and over 100 other colleges and universities more than 200 programs, in more than 30 cities in over 20 countries across the globe.
Our Global Development Policy Center works across the globe to achieve financial stability, sustainability, and global development. Our Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases focuses on pandemic surveillance, and our Initiative on Cities, through local and global partnerships, is bringing novel methodologies to urban research.
We have alumni and friends living all over the world, too. Already, I have experienced the gracious hospitality of Boston University families in Dubai—thank you Mahesh and Payal, and I have met with Boston University colleagues in London.
Together we can do so much more.
We recently launched the Ravi K. Mehrotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society as part of the Questrom School of Business to help us better understand the role of business in society.
In the near future, we will expand and improve the facilities for the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies.
Looking forward, we will reimagine our International Advisory Board, expand our global research, and elevate our connections to alumni all over the world who are business partners, parents, and supporters of Boston University.
COMMON GROUND
President Warren envisioned a school in which no person regardless of race, religion, or sex would be turned away from the university. Women were admitted to all schools at all levels, he arranged international exchanges, and enrolled Black and Asian students. In 1877, Helen Magill earned her PhD in Greek from Boston University, becoming the first woman to earn a doctorate in the United States.
My sisters and I grew up in the Mount Pleasant community of Washington, D.C., and my husband Bill and I raised our children Ben and Eve in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. These communities are nationally known as diverse, multi-cultural, global communities.
Diversity of backgrounds, identities, experiences, and perspectives is so important to learning, and that’s part of what attracted me to Boston University, a place that welcomes faculty, staff, and students from all over the country and the world to form a highly diverse campus community.
While I was in Chicago, I served under the leadership of University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer, who taught me so much about many areas of life. Bob, how I wish you were here.
Dr. Zimmer was deeply committed to freedom of speech and to academic freedom, and I carry these values with me.
These values are also foundational to Boston University.
Our inaugural president, William Fairfield Warren, once called speech “given, received, and meditated upon” as our “most distinctive endowment.” To him, speech, when used to educate and enlighten, was the means by which a society exercised its highest ideals.
While we have a proud history of advocacy and protest here at Boston University, we also have a deep tradition of discourse across our differences, in venues such as the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground.
My parents taught me the personal value of loving those who might express hatred towards you, seeing the humanity in each and every person.
This call to find love in the face of hate is fundamental to the work of former Marsh Chapel Dean Howard Thurman (Hon.’67), and the graduate school student he mentored, the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59).
Thurman once defined compassion as:
“…the awareness that where my life begins is where your life begins; the awareness that the sensitiveness to your needs cannot be separated from the sensitiveness to my needs; the awareness that the joys of my heart are never mine alone – nor are my sorrows.”
Creating a community in which each of us can fully contribute to the life of this campus requires each of us to commit to regarding one another with dignity and respect.
Boston University, our tradition of diversity, speech, and community, will transform us once again.
Today, I’m announcing a new initiative in which we will focus on living our values and building our skills in discourse. This initiative will serve as a platform for deepening our commitment to free expression and discourse across our differences. Thank you Kim Howard and Sue Kennedy for your leadership.
Thank you Muhammad Zaman and Nancy Harrowitz for your support.
Given our long history of openness and institutions such as the Howard Thurman Center, Boston University can be a model for how to do this well, and I look forward to working with the campus to make this a reality.
THE ARTS
I have been so fortunate to have been raised surrounded by the arts, and to feel their transformative effect in my daily life.
My own dear father, Sam Gilliam, who was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933, was inspired by the improvisation of jazz music, the most original of American musical forms, and he transformed painting into sculpture by draping canvases from ceiling to floor and along the outside of buildings, gracing museums around the world.
At times when the logic, beauty, and grace of science fail to convince minds, I can think of nothing more salient, more penetrating than art.
Boston University’s artistic traditions run deep:
Boston University Tanglewood Institute alumni grace the world’s great orchestras; 11 current members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic studied here at Boston University.
10 of the past 14 films from Disney Animation Studios (think Frozen)—a staggering 72%–were executive produced by, directed by, or starred in by College of Fine Arts alumni.
Nearly 30,000 people attend Wheelock Family Theatre productions every year, including 14,000 children on school trips.
We will build on our strong foundation in the arts, to make them front and center across our campuses.
Today, I’m announcing the formation of a President’s Advisory Council on the Arts led by Dean Harvey Young. Together with faculty, staff, students, and external advisors, Dean Young will create an ambitious vision for the arts at Boston University.
At a time when our hearts are made heavy by the world’s sorrow, art and creativity can connect us and help us see our shared humanity.
ACCESS
President Warren said the university should be accessible to anyone who could pass the rigorous entrance exam. Thus, ensuring access to the transformational power of education has been a hallmark of Boston University from the beginning.
My own mother Dorothy Gilliam was the first Black woman to report for the Washington Post. A pioneering journalist covering stories from the integration of Little Rock to the integration of the University of Mississippi, she would race across the city to file her stories on time, taking buses when her colleagues had the luxury of taxis that stopped for them.
Education provided my mother with this opportunity, and her own resilience and strength allowed her to flourish. She always kept up, despite working in a world where her colleagues would go so far as to cross the street, rather than having to stop and say hello to her in public.
From Boston University’s earliest days, it has been our tradition to provide a transformative education for our students. Time and again, I’ve heard from alumni who say they owe their very wellbeing to Boston University.
This year alone, one in five students entering Boston University will be the first in their family to go to college.
Our Menino Scholars program, which awards four-year, full-tuition scholarships to graduating seniors from Boston’s public high schools, has awarded more than $200 million in merit scholarship aid to more than 2,000 students since 1973.
Each year Boston University commits over 500 million dollars in financial aid, so that today we meet 100 percent of students’ demonstrated need through AffordableBU.
As we look forward, we must continue to ensure that Boston University provides a singular and transformative educational experience, and that all qualified students, regardless of their background, can have the opportunity to access it.
We must find ways to address the rising costs of higher education, while also ensuring that our students are prepared for life after graduation, so they can see a return on their significant investment.
To this end, today I am announcing a new vision for student career advancement, to increase internship participation, improve career outcomes, and increase access to careers across all academic programs, while at the same time, offsetting the cost of education.
Funding for working in laboratories and workplaces will be widely available for students to complete career-building internships. There will be more to come on this, as with all the initiatives I am introducing today.
Thank you Amie Grills, David Cotter, and Steve Koppi for your leadership.
IN CONCLUSION
Our founding president and benefactors envisioned establishing and leading a beautiful, wealthy, remote university, and instead we grew through scrappiness, opportunism, and ingenuity guided by our wonderful people and amazing ideas.
Since our humble beginnings in a small town in Vermont, Boston University has been:
A place for courage in the face of challenges;
A place of openness in a society that was often closed;
A place of optimism during times of hopelessness;
And a place that has been open to an increasingly global world, when many others could only see what was directly in front of them.
To Boston University’s faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends: Now is our moment.
Let us use our traditions of intellectual courage, academic rigor, service, openness, art, and creativity to drive our next transformation.
It is our time to, together, build that research institution through integration, discourse, engagement, and impact.
Let’s look to our traditions for new ways to transform our great University, once again.
Thank you.
As delivered by Melissa Gilliam on September 27, 2024