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03/10/2026 | News release | Distributed by Public on 03/10/2026 17:52

BU President on How the University Community Is Helping Shape BU’s Future

BU President on How the University Community Is Helping Shape BU's Future

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BU President on How the University Community Is Helping Shape BU's Future

Melissa Gilliam says the strategic framework is "an invitation for all of us to contribute to our future together"

March 10, 2026
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In late February, Boston University President Melissa Gilliam unveiled a set of shared goals and "guiding principles" that she said will shape and define the University for generations to come.

"This strategic framework will help us harness our many strengths, achieve our ambitions, and address critical challenges facing our University and other institutions of higher education," Gilliam said in her letter. Gilliam, who took over leadership of BU in the summer of 2024, answered a series of questions from BU Today about the importance of laying out her strategic vision for the University.

Q&A

With Melissa Gilliam

BU Today: Why was it important for you to publicly lay out this strategic framework that's being called, "Charting Our Future"?

Gilliam: Charting Our Future helps us harness our many strengths, focus our efforts, and address internal and external challenges. For many reasons, it is a complex time in higher education. Quickly changing realities in technology, social and civic structures, and the general erosion of trust in institutions bring us to an inflection point. These realities can be difficult to hear given our critical mission, and the effort we make in service to our students and our scholarship.

In moments of change, there is also opportunity. We must think about the role of this institution within the landscape of higher education and determine how we can make the greatest impact on our students, our community, society, and the world. We must adopt new practices and let go of others. As we do so, we also need to remind an increasingly skeptical public that universities exist to improve lives and create breakthroughs that benefit everyone.

Success requires clear goals for what we want to achieve, now and in the future. My conversations with students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends of Boston University have helped reveal our distinct strengths, and how our history and values have led us to this point. We now build upon that excellence to further our impact in greater partnership with others working toward the greater good.

Charting Our Future is intentionally high-level. It is a starting point. It provides a strategic direction that is designed to be flexible and collaborative, while guiding us towards a common purpose. To those who are used to traditional strategic plans, a framework may be a new concept. To make it a reality, we need the members of our community, our schools and colleges, to contribute their ideas. Think of it as an invitation for all of us to contribute to our future together.

BU Today: You also recently presented your North Star vision for BU during your presidential address. Can you explain more about how the North Star and strategic framework are related?

Gilliam: The North Star enables us to cast our minds far into the future. There are certain questions that require us to think forward to a time we cannot yet see. For example, decisions about the built environment of our campuses last for generations. These questions are particularly difficult to consider given the uncertainty of the current moment. As I said during my address, the power of the North Star is that it guides our path, even over unfamiliar terrain. It serves as an enduring point of light to keep us steady in pursuit of our objectives.

Our skills in convergent research-deeply integrating distinct disciplines to address societal challenges-distinguishes us; at Boston University, we have already expanded the concept of convergence to apply it to more than just research. As an institution, we have struggled, at times, to work with unity, and convergence is also a metaphor for removing barriers that divide parts of our community.

Now, we have an opportunity to think more broadly about how we can work together in new ways to further our goals, and to apply this idea to learning, external engagement, and impact. In short: convergence lights our path, illuminating the new expertise and bold problem-solving we can achieve by combining disciplines and integrating ways of thinking.

Which brings me to the strategic framework: Charting Our Future is designed for the current moment, enabling us to work collaboratively to move the institution forward. It will help guide us in pursuit of our North Star and help us prepare future leaders, so that the work we're doing now is sustainable for many years to come.

BU Today: You talked about how students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends of BU have helped to lay the groundwork for the North Star and the framework. Can you say more about this?

Gilliam: Charting Our Future puts a framework around activities that the campus has already been engaged in over the past year and creates goals and opportunities for new ideas to come forward. Boston University's schools, colleges, and administrative units, for example, have been hard at work on strategic planning that serves their individual priorities and those of the broader University, while aligning their distinctive academic strengths, research agendas, and student-centered initiatives with the University's shared aspirations. Our schools, colleges, administrative units, and students have great ideas, and local leadership is needed as we drive towards common goals around excellence in research, teaching, learning, creative expression, and external engagement.

The initiatives we have launched since I arrived at Boston University-from the Task Force on Convergent Research and Education, to the AI Development Accelerator, to the Institute for Excellence in Teaching & Learning, to the Boston University Arts, to our initiative on student careers and internships, and I could go on-also integrate the expertise, perspectives, experiences, and hard work of Boston University community members across the University. Thank you to all who have already stepped up to participate and lead.

Again, this marks a starting point. Ultimately, all of us are invited, and encouraged, to participate in the work of putting our framework into action!

BU Today: You've emphasized the collaborative nature of a strategic framework. Can you explain why this is important to its success?

Gilliam: A strategic framework differs from a strategic plan, in that it is not designed to give us turn-by-turn directions for how to get to where we want to go. Instead, it provides a structure for us to determine those details together. But it also puts stakes in the ground as it claims the primacy of research, teaching, and learning, people, and external impact.

Three strategic pillars (intellectual and academic destination, world-class community of talent, globally and externally engaged), and a commitment to operational excellence across all that we do, will guide our activities throughout the University and serve as the foundation. They are intentionally broad, as schools, colleges, and administrative units will have local goals and priorities related to these strategic pillars, and we need to hear and support those ideas.

There is no time to wait-the issues of the moment are real, and imminent. Some things we cannot control, but there is a lot within our power.

For many reasons, Boston University is uniquely positioned to provide the ideas that society and the world need right now. And there are also many opportunities in front of us to make our University function even better. These opportunities come through collaborating and asking ourselves how we can collectively improve what we do for students and others we serve, and how we better engage with our communities, our stakeholders, and our world.

For many reasons, Boston University is uniquely positioned to provide the ideas that society and the world need right now.
Melissa Gilliam

BU Today: Sometimes it's hard for big institutions like BU, with more than 38,000 students and more than 10,000 employees, to be nimble and flexible. But that seems to be something you view as important. Can you talk about why, and what steps you're taking to help BU be more nimble?

Especially given that we are so large, and boast such diverse strengths, we must be able to adapt. Building our organization's resilience to respond to unexpected shocks requires alignment on our purpose, and true operational excellence.

People already work very hard; the key now is to find greater efficiency and effectiveness. If we are going to reach our goals, our policies, practices, systems, technology, and facilities must be updated and able to support all that we do.

To this end, I've appointed Chris Sedore as the University's first chief transformation officer to help us move collaborative projects forward.

There are many ways in which we are looking at transformational operational change at BU that relate to our strategic pillars-such as how we can streamline access to data, simplify payroll, or accelerate contracting and partnership workflows, to name a few.

And the community's ideas will guide us here, too. Let us think together about how we can reimagine our own work, in ways that benefit our community, and our hopes for what we can become.

BU Today: There are three pillars in the framework. And two words that seem common to all three are "global" and "world-class." Can you talk about why it's so important for Boston University to be seen as a global institution?

Boston University has always been open to all people from all backgrounds. Our identity as an academic institution has its origins in international education and scholarship, thanks largely to our first President William Fairfield Warren, who created first-of-their-kind international exchange programs with the National University of Athens and the Royal University of Rome. Our founding faculty studied abroad and spoke multiple languages. Today, we have 170-plus study abroad programs, in 20-plus countries worldwide. Our faculty, staff, and students are engaged in important global research and projects.

These traditions mean that we have alumni, parents, friends, and collaborators across the country and around the world. Together, we must think intentionally about how we can realize the full potential of this legacy.

We have truly grown this remarkable University into what William Fairfield Warren envisioned for us all those years ago-as a leader in forging international collaboration that makes for a better world.

BU Today: BU, like so many institutions of higher education, is facing financial challenges. How will the strategic framework aim to tackle those?

Financial challenges are very difficult to manage. The framework provides strategic direction, which will be essential as we make decisions about where to focus our efforts. I look to our commitment to operational excellence, which will help us build better processes and make our activities more strategic.

To begin with, we are homing in on the limitations of our current budgeting processes, including the need for technology upgrades, elimination of duplicated efforts, and more data and modeling for better planning. This issue will be a topic of upcoming conversations across the University.

And if you look more broadly, our strategic framework includes a variety of priorities that will help to assure our financial sustainability. To name just a few:

- Under the leadership of our new senior vice president for advancement, we are already implementing new programs to better engage our 400,000 alumni in the US and around the world.

- Rather than wait for our upcoming capital campaign, we launched You Are Why, the first in a series of small campaigns that has already helped us raise money for research, graduate education, and undergraduate research.

- And through our third pillar on external engagement, we have already grown our connections with industry, foundations, and other partners.

There are no easy answers; solutions will be multifold and will require us to pursue new opportunities, as well as identify things that no longer serve us given the rapidly changing financial model for our sector.

BU Today: Do you have any closing thoughts you'd like to offer?

It is a difficult time. On a regular basis, I see and hear about the many ways that our community members are dealing with the current challenges facing higher education. And the world is rapidly changing; the challenges of tomorrow may look very different than those we face today.

Now, we have a long-term vision in place, and a framework to help us get there. It calls upon the collective power of our community to guide us, and to adapt when necessary, always with the greater understanding of who we are and what we aspire to become.

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