Campus reacts to terrorist attacks
with lectures, seminars, gatherings

Fall commencement was canceled. A Matthews Arena memorial service drew about 1,500 faculty, staff, and students. Lectures, peace gatherings, and coping seminars were quickly planned. Registration spiked for courses in political science, international affairs, and religion. And some students prepared for the daunting possibility of being pressed into military service.
Such was Northeastern’s response to the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., which killed more than 6,000 people.

An event dubbed “Conversation Peace” draws students from countries around the globe.

Fall commencement, which had been scheduled for the evening of the day of the attacks, was canceled outright; the 950 graduates expected at the event were told they could march in the June commencement ceremonies.

A week later, at a program of remembrance in Matthews Arena, the university mourned the more than twenty members of the Northeastern community who died in the attacks. Two students and ten alumni are known to have perished (see page 85). Eleven others with ties to Northeastern also died.

In early October, the campus moved into reflective mode. A forum titled Conversation Peace drew about thirty students from countries around the globe to discuss how to break down barriers of faith, race, and ethnicity. Many of the students shared their personal experiences of living and dealing with terrorism. Future Conversation Peace forums were scheduled.

A special seminar series began to assess the causes and consequences of September 11. The first seminar drew an overflow crowd to the Raytheon Amphitheater, where political science chair Denis Sullivan, emeritus criminal justice professor Edith Flynn, associate political science professor Gerald Bursey, and political science lecturer Irm Haleem discussed the new realities facing America.

Said Sullivan of the overwhelming interest in discussing the attacks, “We haven’t seen anything like this since the 1960s.”

Other seminars were slated to address backlash and intolerance against Arabs, Muslims, and people of color; individuals’ and governments’ reactions to the attacks; the economic impact; legal aspects; the feminist response to terror; and how to rebuild and remake the world in the wake of the attacks.

Northeastern also saw a surge in interest in political science, international affairs, and related courses, and many professors scrambled to rewrite curricula to encompass the September 11 attacks.

Sullivan’s course on Arab-Israeli relations attracted fifteen last-minute enrollees. In all, the number of political science majors jumped by 20 percent, an upswing that drew CNN crews and other media outlets to Northeastern.

Haleem, a native of Pakistan, said enrollments in her international affairs course increased sixfold over last year.

Abdullah Al-Faqih’s class on foreign governments drew eighty students, double last year’s number.

All three professors said they have altered the content of their courses to focus more on subjects related to the attacks.


Freeland calls for renewed vigor
in quest to reach the “top 100”

Raising more money, improving graduation rates, hiring more full-time professors, and raising faculty salaries are all key to propelling Northeastern into the ranks of the nation’s top 100 universities, President Freeland and a faculty leader told members of the university community in early October.

In their annual addresses to the university, Freeland and the chair of the Faculty Senate agenda committee, Robert Lowndes, both emphasized the importance of improving Northeastern’s academic status.

“As a private, high-tuition university, we need to be included in the group [of upper-echelon institutions],” Freeland told about 1,200 faculty, staff, and students in Blackman Auditorium. “Over the long run, Northeastern will flourish only if the perceived value of our degree is fully commensurate with our price.”

While Freeland acknowledged the difficulty of staying focused on the task of improving Northeastern, he noted the university has made important gains since it set out three years ago to crack the second tier of the U.S. News and World Report rankings, widely seen as the most influential barometer of an institution’s stature.

Freeland reported that research and development expenditures surpassed $30 million last year, far outpacing most universities in Northeastern’s comparative set. This fall’s freshman acceptance rate plummeted 16 percentage points from last year, to an all-time low of 62 percent, while combined SAT scores (1158) and cumulative grade-point averages (3.2) showed impressive gains. Freshman-to-sophomore retention rates (80 percent) and six-year graduation rates (56 percent) continued on an upward trajectory. Dependence on tuition dollars eased (now at about 70 percent) as revenues from government contracts, private gifts, and investment returns increased.

But Freeland stressed the importance of increasing philanthropic giving and boosting graduation rates.

Raising a greater percentage of its revenues through philanthropic giving and endowment income would help Northeastern reduce its dependence on tuition, Freeland said. Toward that end, the Leadership Campaign has already raised more than $90 million toward its $200 million goal, and that momentum must continue, he said.

Improving graduation rates is important because it figures prominently in virtually every major national rankings system, including U.S. News and World Report, Freeland added. And it replenishes university coffers to the tune of $1 million per 1 percentage point gain in the graduation rate.

Lowndes echoed Freeland’s emphasis on making it into the top 100, and said doing so will require hiring more full-time professors, raising faculty salaries, and devoting more money to faculty development.

Increasing the size of the full-time professoriate is key to boosting Northeastern’s academic reputation, said Lowndes, who served as arts and sciences dean through much of the 1990s. He also called for hiking faculty salaries, saying Northeastern over the past decade has fallen from 91st place to 160th in average salary for full professors.


NU Press book on bin Laden
shoots to New York Times bestseller list

A Northeastern University Press book on Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect behind the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has skyrocketed from relative obscurity to become one of the most-requested books on Amazon.com and claim a place on the New York Times bestseller list.

Huge demand for The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden, and the Future of Terrorism, by English journalist Simon Reeve, led the Press to order three new printings of the book, totaling 65,000 copies.

Before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., the book, first published in 1999, had sold just 4,000 copies.

“This is the largest reprint order we’ve ever seen,” said Press director William Frohlich.

The Press also has plans to print the book in paperback next spring, with a new epilogue by the author.

By mid-September, the book had become the third-most-requested book on Amazon.com, staying in the top ten through the second week of October, said Jill Bahcall, associate director of the Press.

As of the week of October 28, the book was number nine on the New York Times bestseller list. No Northeastern University Press book has ever made it to the list before.

Frohlich said a London book agent offered him the manuscript two years ago. Long fascinated with the subject of international terrorism, Frohlich felt the book would fit neatly into the university’s criminology offerings and would sell to students and a select general audience.

Now, mainstream retail outlets like Costco are placing their orders, he said.

The book is a double biography, profiling both Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and bin Laden, head of the shadowy al-Qaeda terrorist network, said Bahcall.

“It discusses how this network of terrorists is so well-financed, how there is a new breed of terrorists who are willing to sacrifice their lives for their cause, which is fueled by their hatred of the U.S. and Israel,” Bahcall said.

The book warns of different acts of terrorism, including the hijacking of commercial jets, which are then flown into well-known buildings, a scenario that became horrific reality on September 11.

“From our perspective, the book has become more chilling than when we first published it, because what it warned of has come to pass,” Bahcall said.


NU names vice presidents in
institutional advancement, co-op

Northeastern named two vice presidents in September, bringing new leadership to institutional advancement and solidifying existing leadership in co-op.

The university also named new deans for its libraries and for Bouvé College’s School of Health Professions.

Robert Cunningham, associate vice president at Boston College for the past three years, was named senior vice president for institutional advancement, succeeding Richard Meyer, who held the post of senior vice president for development for six years.

Cunningham, 41, will oversee the staff, budget, and operations of all alumni and development activities at the university and lead Northeastern’s $200 million Leadership Campaign, expected to be publicly launched next spring. With provost David Hall and senior vice president for administration and finance Larry Mucciolo, Cunningham will serve as one of President Freeland’s top advisers.

During his three years at Boston College, Cunningham comanaged that institution’s $400 million Ever to Excel campaign and oversaw all development programs, staff, and budget. Before that, he served for nine years in various capacities in the development office at Harvard Law School, and for two years in the alumni relations office at New York University. He also worked at two advertising agencies in New York.

In co-op, Northeastern made permanent the vice presidential appointment of Richard Porter, who had been serving in the post in an acting capacity for three years. Freeland credits Porter with helping spearhead substantial organizational and programmatic changes in co-op as well as the full integration of co-op experiences and classroom studies—key initiatives for Northeastern. Porter joined Northeastern in 1975 as a member of the mathematics faculty and served as chair of the department from 1993 to 1998.

In August, Northeastern named Edward Warro as dean of university libraries. Warro oversees the collections, research services, electronic resources, computer labs, and instructional programs in both Snell Library and the Burlington Campus Library.

Before joining Northeastern, Warro was dean of libraries at Chicago’s Loyola University, where he oversaw seven libraries across five campuses and led the way to a more appropriate balance between electronic and print resources in the libraries. He also held other library posts at Loyola, Southwest Texas State University, and Simmons College.

In Bouvé College’s School of Health Professions, Mary Watson, who had been serving as interim dean, was appointed to the post full time. A respiratory therapist specializing in health education and counseling psychology, Watson is overseeing the seven departments within the school.


Take a bow!

Ed Bullins

Hot Feet, a new musical by award-winning playwright and Northeastern theatre professor Ed Bullins, has been optioned for a Broadway production for the upcoming 2002– 2003 season.

Hot Feet deals with the life of Leonard Harper, a director-choreographer and innovative showman during the Harlem Renaissance and the big-band era in jazz.

Bullins has received Obie Awards for In New England Winter, The Fabulous Miss Marie, and The Taking of Miss Janie, which also won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. He was recently honored with the Living Legend Award by the National Black Theatre Festival.

Kudos to Northeastern’s newest Presidential Scholars. These juniors, who have excelled in their professional studies, liberal learning, and cooperative-education experiences, earned full-tuition scholarships for the remainder of their undergraduate careers. Recipients include Kelsey Anderson, Rebecca DerGarabedian, Danielle Dieckmann, Carolyn Elliott, Maxim Hendrick, Richard Hillis, Emily Keeler, Julie Leis, Jared McBride, Riddhi Mehta, Chrystal Tam, and Chen Zhang.