B.U. President Attacks Dean's Role in Afghan Media Project

Boston University president John Silber last week renewed a two-year-old conflict when he accused a former dean of misleading the national media over the school's controversial Afghan Media Project.

At a faculty meeting of the College of Communication, Silber said that Bernard S. Redmont, who resigned as dean of the college in the summer of 1986, had "fostered and continued to foster the myth" that he had stepped down to protest the ethics of the Afghan Media Project.

The project sent BU faculty to train Afghani rebel journalists in Pakistan to provide Western media with alternative information to the news from Sovietinfluenced sources.

The project's ties to the United States Information Agency (USIA), which funded the $500,000 project, initially raised concerns for some BU faculty over the possibility of government interference with the university's academic independence.

Redmont spearheaded the opposition to the project, and gained national media attention when he resigned, a move which was viewed as a protest against the project.

In his January 12 speech to the faculty, Silber attacked the truthfulness of Redmont's account of his resignation, saying that the former dean had damaged the university's reputation.

Silber said that in fact he asked Redmont to resign not because of his position on the Afghan Media Project, but rather because of his "unfair, improper and unethical treatment of Associate Dean Ronald S. Goldman," whom Redmont temporarily relieved of his duties in 1985.

Silber told the faculty that Redmont had removed Goldman because of his active campaigning against Redmont's attempts to stop the Afghan Media Project. He added that Redmont later refused to rescind his charges against Goldman after an investigation by the university's general counsel found the dean's actions unjustified.

"Over the last eighteen months, Mr. Redmont has studiously done nothing to correct the false impression which he, and perhaps others, have created," Silber said.

"Because he has continued to pursue this strategy, the false and misleading claim that Professor Remont was martyred because of his principled opposition to the Afghan Media Project is no longer treated in the press as an unconfirmed rumor but as an established fact," Silber told the faculty.

Redmont, who is still teaching at BU, issued a memorandum to the faculty two days after Silber's speech, and stated that Silber was misrepresenting why he had left.

The memo stated that Redmont left his post because of "the position I took on the [Afghan] project and related matters of administration."