BU's new president is called consensus builder
MIT colleagues praise Brown's disarming style
The man chosen Saturday to be the next president of Boston University, Robert A. Brown, comes from a humble background in San Antonio, where he was raised by a single mother and became the first in his family to go to college.
As provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown has overseen many endeavors that are anything but humble, from a $300 million genomics collaboration with Harvard University to the costly and architecturally bold Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center, to dramatic forays into new disciplines such as computational biology and biological engineering.
''I will say simply that he is the best academic administrator I've ever worked with," Charles M. Vest, who recently stepped down as president of MIT, said in an interview yesterday.
Brown, 53, has spent his entire career at MIT and has never been in the public eye, so little is known about him outside MIT or his academic field, chemical engineering. But colleagues said yesterday that he is intense and extraordinarily intelligent, even by MIT standards, but also down-to-earth and personable.
Brown's experience managing a $2.1 billion budget, raising money, and forging research partnerships with industry and government will all be extremely important at BU, a university where national ambitions far outweigh a modest $770 million endowment.
His high academic distinctions, including membership in his field's most prestigious academies, are likely to reassure those on the faculty who were skeptical about former BU president Jon Westling and former NASA chief Daniel S. Goldin, who was hired two years ago but quickly dispatched with a $1.8 million severance package. Neither Westling nor Goldin held doctorates.
Brown's expertise in science and engineering will also be helpful to a university that is seeking to make great leaps in those fields. BU just opened an $83 million life sciences and engineering building, and when Goldin was chosen, trustees spoke of his science credentials as important to the school's future.
But Brown said yesterday that he did not believe his engineering background was a primary factor in his hiring. He said that boosting the endowment and improving BU's affordability for students will be important items on his agenda, but emphasized that he had not been given a specific mandate by the trustees who hired him in a unanimous decision. ''I don't see myself as being brought there with a specific mission," he said.
He said he would spend much of the summer in ''total immersion," getting to know people at BU. ''The faculty and staff will be my teachers," he said. ''Hopefully, what will come out of that is a sorting out of a vision for exactly how to move forward."
Brown has overseen some controversial projects, most notably the whimsical, 400,000-square-foot Stata Center, which took years to build and ballooned in price. Originally budgeted at $100 million, it ultimately cost $300 million, though with numerous additions, including an underground parking garage. The final product delighted architects but also sprung embarrassing leaks.
It didn't help that the Stata Center was being built at a time of budget crisis. As the university's chief operating officer, Brown had to make painful cuts when the university's endowment plummeted along with the stock market several years ago.
MIT laid off about 90 people and eliminated 140 other positions, and reduced subsidies for graduate students in 2003.
The school's finances are described as healthy, and MIT colleagues say Brown should not be blamed for the lean years. ''The fact that he managed through that difficult time and did it so well is the real measure," said Claude Canizares, an MIT physicist and associate provost. ''He's battle-scarred."
Brown and his older sister were raised in San Antonio by their mother, a department store saleswoman. Although Brown seemed reluctant yesterday to delve into his personal history, he said he was grateful for academic mentors who advised him to consider graduate school and then a faculty career, which ''would not have been something I ever aspired to in my upbringing."
Though colleagues say he works long hours, Brown is also known as an avid golfer, a fisherman, and a military history buff. A Baptist, he has also been active in his church.
His wife, Beverly, is a biochemist and immunologist at Partners HealthCare, he said. One of their sons works in lighting and sound design in Miami, while the other is about to start his senior year studying physics at MIT.
For years, it was a tradition for Brown and his wife to get up early in the morning before the annual homecoming football game to cook a pancake breakfast for their son's high school band, said Lawrence S. Bacow, president of Tufts University and former MIT chancellor.
''That's the kind of person he is," Bacow said yesterday. ''He's got a wonderful sense of humor and a very down-home, disarming style. . . . The faculty at BU are going to love him."
Colleagues said Brown is a quintessential engineer who sees all problems as solvable and is deft at building consensus, even in complex situations such as the creation of the $300 million Broad Institute for genomics, where such high-octane institutions as Harvard, MIT, several hospitals, and the Whitehead Institute, a genetics lab, all had to agree on a framework.
''He was able to bring people along with him because of the staggering respect they hold for him," said MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins. ''When he speaks there's silence. . . . We all sit quietly and listen."
Marcella Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com. 