B.U. Exposure

The b.u. exposure was a student newspaper at Boston University during the 1970s and 1980s that received national press coverage for exposing the moral, fiscal and managerial irregularities that characterized the administration of the university under President John Silber.

John Silber was appointed president of B.U. in 1971 and immediately began to attempt to quash the dissent that made the campus known as "Berkeley East" by implementing an authoritarian management style alien to most top American universities and colleges. He began scaling back the freedoms enjoyed by the students and faculty, and one of the areas he targeted was the student press.

Harvard University Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz advised Silber to cut all funding for student newspapers. By denying all funding to a student-run press, Silber could prevent university money from going to one of his harshest and most effective critics while hedging the issue of the students' First Amendment rights. (Silber would later do a similar end-run against Title IX by eliminating B.U.'s football team.) The other mainstream student newspaper, The BU News, had its funding cut off after it published a cover story in April 1976, "Has Silber Gone Too Far?" The article described how the Silber administration diminished the power of the BU student body. Silber cut off all University advertising, and the News folded within 18 months.

A newer, kinder-to-the-Administration version of The Daily News was reconstituted and allowed to rent office space on campus and to accept ads placed by the university and student organizations. The bu exposure, however, was forbidden any support. Silber went so far as to have any allocations made with student funds by student organizations to the bu exposure vetoed by the appropriate college deans. This went as far as to forbidding any student organization from buying advertising in the exposure.

The exposure, through its BU Friends of the exposure organization, fought back against the Silber Administration. In October 1977, the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (CLUM), in a letter to John Silber, threatened to take legal action for withholding exposure funds in response to the paper's criticism of the BU administration. Stephen M. Kohn of the Friends of the exposure cited CLUM's letter as "probably the most significant factor in student rights in years." (The Daily Free Press [independent B.U. student newspaper, established, 1970], November 1, 1977). CLUM followed through, filing a lawsuit in January 1978. The student-run bu exposure collective also filed a lawsuit against Silber, the B.U. Board of Trustees, and Dean of Students Johan A. Madson, charging that their First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of the press had been abridged.(Boston Evening Globe, January 30, 1978)

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