B-CU: Secrecy is one factor distracting the school from accomplishing its primary mission: making sure that its students "enter to learn and depart to serve."

Therefore, your humble writer (and my mother, Julia T. Cherry, who happens to be one of my bosses) wrote a letter to the Board of Trustees. Here’s the relevant excerpt (Mom is "Mrs. Cherry"):

The Board of Trustees and the University should commit itself to complete and total transparency and openness with regard to board meetings, records and documents, and operations.

The state of Florida has a long history of open government meetings and public records. Though the University is a private institution, it serves an important public educational purpose, is the recipient of state taxpayer dollars, and solicits public financial support. As such, Mrs. Cherry and I see no reason that it cannot operate completely "in the sunshine" as does Florida A&M University and other Florida institutions of higher learning. (Florida’s open record laws as applied by the state’s colleges and universities could provide guidance as to the specific details of any new B-CU policy.)

...(T)he Board of Trustees could vote at any time to make openness and transparency a standard operating procedure with regard to all operations of the University. If that were to happen, leaked documents, second-hand conversations, and undisclosed sources would become both irrelevant and unnecessary when it comes to reporting how the University operates.

(We) strongly believe that the University’s official policy of operational secrecy engenders needless hostility from University stakeholders – students, parents, faculty, staff, alumni, and the larger community – who are all completely shut out from watching the decision-making process in action, and who are prevented from giving public comments on the record for board consideration.

Though official secrecy may have served B-CU’s leadership well in the past, it is the polar opposite of well-established best practices in high-performing nonprofit and educational organizations around America in the 21st century. It’s an antiquated policy whose time has come and gone.

So trustees, what’chall gonna do?

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