Education: Boston Beacon

Boston College is the folk school of the Boston Irish—a Jesuit beacon that in the past century lit the lowly immigrant’s way from the first landfall to the last hurrah. Now the tiny city school that got its charter in 1863 counts 11,000 students, most of them on a sweeping 200-acre campus in suburban Chestnut Hill. With six graduate and professional schools, coed B.C. is one of the nation’s biggest and best Catholic universities. Boston College watered the roots that grew the first Irish-Catholic U.S. President, and last week Himself was on hand to celebrate B.C.’s looth birthday, along with admiring scholars of other faiths and other universities, from Oxford to Berkeley to Harvard. President Kennedy expressed his confidence that Boston College would go on responding “to the new needs of the age.”

If Boston College does not happen to be Kennedy’s alma mater, it does boast some distinguished alumni: Cardinals William O’Connell and Richard Gushing, Massachusetts Governors Maurice Tobin and Charles Hurley, Theologian John Courtney Murray. Yet for years many an old grad preferred to forget that he ever went to Boston College. Socially it was an Irish C.C.N.Y. without that school’s academic status. And then during World War II enrollment plummeted clear down to 200.

Two factors saved the school: the G.I. Bill, which at last supplied paying students (current tuition: $1,250), and lavish fund-raising by Cardinal Gushing. At war’s end, B.C. had eight lonely Gothic buildings; now it has 31 (and plans nine more), including the Joseph P. Kennedy School of Education and an indoor hockey rink bigger than Boston Garden. To shed its commuter image, it is rapidly raising dormitories that now house 2,000 students from 37 states.

Catholic Conant. B.C.’s drive stems from its 22nd president, Father Michael Walsh, 51, a no-nonsense biologist sometimes called “the James Conant of Catholic education.” Walsh has run B.C. since 1958 with the aim of proving that a Catholic college can produce impressive numbers of Catholic intellectuals. To get better students for its all-male liberal arts school, B.C. is scouring the nation’s blue-chip Catholic high schools for bright kids. The payoff is an honors program of students with average college board scores in verbal and math aptitude of 707 and 712. This year’s overall freshman class tops rival Holy Cross with average scores of 605 and 625. To lure its whiz kids, B.C. last year shelled out more than $1,000,000 in financial aid.

To lure professors, Walsh unabashedly raids other schools, offering salaries as high as $16,000, plus a climate of intimate scholarship and access to the riches of nearby M.I.T. and Harvard. Clerical interference is apparently no B.C. problem. All of its controlling trustees are Jesuits; the faculty has 143 of them, the world’s biggest Jesuit teaching community. But the total faculty of 750 is full of non-Catholics, and free expression is the B.C. fashion. Washington’s Catholic University recently banned a proposed speech by Germany’s liberal Theologian Hans Kiing; Boston College warmly welcomed him, having invited Kiing to the U.S. in the first place.

Weak in sociology, B.C. is strong in classics, math and linguistics, perhaps strongest in economics and English. Star scholars include Jesuit Geophysicist Daniel Linehan and Critic Edward H. Nehls, Episcopal author of a recent definitive study of D. H. Lawrence. Theology is required for all Catholic undergraduates, but leans heavily on Bible studies rather than moralizing. A major supplier of New England public-school teachers, B.C. also trains Peace Corpsmen and even runs a Montessori nursery school. Best known of its graduate schools is law. Years ago, Harvard Law School refused to take B.C. graduates; now they are welcome, and to top the irony, B.C.’s law school takes in many Harvardmen and turns out 20% of all practicing lawyers in Massachusetts.

Healing Hatred. Though compulsory chapel is gone, B.C. at undergraduate level remains a toughly disciplined school. Cuts are limited; liquor on campus is banned for resident boys, who are supposed to be in their dorms by n. The sternest academic criticism comes from B.C.’s bright new students. They see B.C. as still too much geared to average students, criticize the all-Thomist tone of required philosophy courses. They want more undergraduate controversy, more contact with other faiths and ideas. They demand Harvard quality at B.C. But such is the fertile fission wrought by Father Walsh, who imported the critics himself. “If you broaden the scope of the college,” says one junior cheerfully, “something’s bound to happen.”

What can happen is clear from B.C.’s best broadening to date—the “B.C. seminars,” which in recent years have all but razed Boston’s last Irish-Yankee barriers. B.C. set out to right Boston’s wrongs by organizing campus huddles between citizens with names like Adams, Lowell, Kelly, Hurley and Pappas. Bankers, dockers, priests and doctors have since overhauled Boston with everything from a new port authority to a better transit system. Says Yaleman Edward J. Logue, head of the Boston Redevelopment Authority: “What Boston College does is to knit together what hatred and contempt had kept apart. In the whole country, this is the only Catholic college that has tried to be responsible for the entire community. And out of this, Boston College has gotten something—a status in this town.”