In 1954, I was one of the few graduates of Loyola High School in Maryland to elect to do college outside of the Baltimore area. Three of us went to Holy Cross that year. The vast majority of my classmates continued their education at Loyola College, some two miles down Charles Street. Eight years later, as a Jesuit scholastic, I returned to Loyola. By that time, many, if not most of the school’s graduates were pursuing their higher education outside of the Baltimore area. And the school of choice for those looking beyond Baltimore had become Boston College. My experience was a tiny window on the changes occurring at the Boston Jesuit school that were catapulting it from a small commuters’ college to an elite university with a national student body. With the publication of James M. O’Toole’s long-awaited volume, we now have a succinct, incisive history of the institution that has changed so profoundly over the past seventy-five years.
O’Toole, whom President William Leahy, S.J. commissioned to do this history in conjunction with the school’s sesqui-centennial, is uniquely qualified, with his background as archivist of the archdiocese of Boston as well as his volumes on Boston Catholicism and the American Catholic experience as a whole. Accordingly, his treatment of Boston College’s evolution from its beginnings during the Civil War is one masterfully set within local and national contexts.
From 1847, when Bishop Joseph Fitzpatrick invited the Jesuits into his diocese to take charge of a fractious congregation at St. Mary’s in the North End, there was a joint commitment, between the bishop and John McElroy, the leader of the five Jesuits appointed for this New England mission, to open a day college for immigrant boys, which meant Irish teenagers. Municipal and state nativist governments hostile to all things Catholic prevented the pair from securing the clearance to build at a Roxbury site. Finally, in 1857, with the nativists’ demise in Massachusetts, McElroy purchased a three-acre tract on Harrison Avenue in the South End. In August of 1864, the college opened with twenty-two students present for the initial classes in what would later be called “the preparatory division.”
The average age of students during the first decades was fourteen, underscoring the dominance of high schoolers at the college, consistent with the previous preparatory tradition within the network of institutions the Society had begun in Europe. It was a very local student body from parishes in greater Boston, some of which offered scholarships to boys who gave promise of becoming priests. The faculty was heavy with Jesuit scholastics, most barely a decade older than their students. Student activities were heavily centered on religion, with Catholic students expected to be Mass goers, participants in confession, and members of devotional societies.
Debate was among the first student extracurriculars, with an association established in 1868, although the first intercollegiate competition did not take place until 1895, against Georgetown. A literary magazine, the Stylus, began in 1883. The rise of organized sport at Boston College was largely due to student initiative. Spurred by the formation of athletic associations at other Catholic colleges, students formed the Boston College Athletic Club in 1883. Two years later, maroon and gold, for reasons, as O’Toole notes, buried in history, became the official school colors. Baseball was the first organized sport to gain prominence. Regional Intercollegiate play began in the 1880s. It would be another decade before the school played football at that level.
Not until fourteen years after the doors opened did the college award its first degrees. Among the dozen diploma recipients in 1877, seven went on to study for the priesthood. That first class set the trend, unique among Jesuit colleges, for a majority of graduates over the remainder of the century to go on from college to study for the priesthood.
In the last decade of the century, a controversy between officials at Boston College and Harvard University over the quality of Catholic education produced no clear winners. Harvard Law School dropped its list of acceptable colleges, whose omission of all Catholic colleges had touched off the controversy; Jesuit officials, for all their defense of their educational traditions, were forced to the radical alteration of separating preparatory education from collegiate. That change was given unmistakable visibility when Rector Thomas Gasson, S.J. in the early 1900s, moved the college division from the South End to a Brahman estate in Brookline. The legacy of a deceased Jesuit covered the bulk of the cost of the acquisition. What amounted to the college’s first capital campaign raised the remainder, mostly in small donations, particularly from women who looked upon their gifts as investments for the benefit of brothers and sons.
Gasson toured campuses across the country to survey academic architecture, then invited bids to design the new site. The local firm of Maginnis and Walsh won with a collegiate Gothic plan to replicate Oxford. With the opening of the multipurpose “Recitation Building” (later Gasson Hall) in the late winter of 1913, Boston College had a new location in the city’s finest suburb. There, over the next half-century, enrollment grew from fewer than five hundred to nearly six thousand. While Irish Americans continued to be a majority, there were growing numbers of Italians and Eastern Europeans, and beginning in the 1930s, a few Blacks and Jews. Although provincial officials of the Society of Jesus maintained control over the curriculum, Boston College began to adapt its education to the standards of the American academy, with the slow expansion of electives, the creation of departments to address the soaring specialization of knowledge, along with the introduction of majors to provide some coherence to the selection of electives, and a variety of degrees to accommodate the diversification of the curriculum. Students were increasingly able to shape their course schedules to match personal interests and ambitions. That growing measure of academic freedom had no bearing on the college’s chronically high drop-out rate (above thirty percent), much of it due to students transferring to the archdiocesan seminary at the close of sophomore year.
By the 1930s, the lay faculty, with a sprinkling of women, outnumbered the Jesuits. O’Toole notes that, because of the Jesuit annual tradition of reassigning a large proportion of its personnel, Jesuit faculty at the college tended to have short stays. In that regard, one would appreciate more data on faculty in general to determine how different was the retention of lay faculty. How much of an outlier, one wonders, was Harold Fagan, an alumnus who taught in the chemistry department for four decades?
Professional and graduate education developed at Boston College as academic propaedeutics for the institutional ghetto which Catholics created in the post-Civil War era as well as to prepare Catholics to participate in the larger society. So, in 1919, a teacher-training program began which three decades later became the School of Education. In 1929, thanks to James Dolan, S.J.’s prodding that there needed to be a Catholic antidote to the utilitarian methodology that prevailed in legal education, Boston College began a law school. In the midst of a Depression that raised Catholic stirrings about social justice, the university established a School of Social Work. In 1938, the Business School began, with concentrations ranging from accounting to industrial management. Then, in the first year after World War ii, Archbishop Richard Cushing pressured Jesuit authorities into beginning a nursing school, even though the institution had no hospital, normally a sine qua non.
In sports Boston College made its mark nationally in football, culminating in the early 1940s, when the team earned hard-to-come-by invitations to three straight bowl games (Orange, Cotton, and Sugar). The school was less successful in rising above the Jim Crow culture that dominated sports as it did most of American society in the pre-Civil Rights Era. Lou Montgomery, the star African American running back of those bowl squads, was not allowed to play against Southern colleges, even when Boston College was the home team. The school could not muster the determination to support Montgomery’s civil rights that its municipal neighbor, Harvard, had for one of its Black baseball players some four decades earlier when its baseball team played Georgetown at the latter’s home field. Georgetown had asked that Harvard not play its African American shortstop in a city where full segregation prevailed. Harvard refused, to Georgetown’s dismay.
World War ii brought an accelerated schedule for the relatively few students ineligible for the draft. Chestnut Hill became one of the US military sites for providing specialized training. That occasioned temporary housing on campus. A fortuitous provision, given the postwar dramatic surge in enrollment, fueled by the gi Bill, which brought unprecedented numbers of non-local students needing housing. The 1946 and 1947 entering classes numbered 2,800 and 4,500 respectively. Such an increase triggered a spate of faculty hiring, along with the rapid development of an academic bureaucracy, including public relations and admissions personnel. William Keleher, S.J., the initial postwar rector-president, realized that, if the institution wanted to become more selective in its admissions, recruiting beyond the Boston area and building dormitories were prerequisites.
But it was Michael P. Walsh, S.J. whose decade-long presidency (1958–68) began the reshaping of Boston College’s identity as an elite national school, which quickly produced the results that I witnessed in a Jesuit prep school far removed from Chestnut Hill. One of Walsh’s first acts was to create a university planning committee to chart out the university’s next decade. In an age in which change was dominating seemingly every segment of society, self-reflection was absolutely essential to survive, much more to prosper. The committee focused on ways and means of improving the quality of both faculty and students, as well as developing a community-wide commitment toward seeking excellence as an institutional hallmark. The introduction of an honors program in arts and sciences proved to be a major selling point for admissions agents who increasingly spread throughout the country seeking applicants.
As a step toward assuring academic autonomy, the university legally separated from the Jesuit community. The granting of a Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1970 was a marker of both expanding academic ambitions and movement toward realizing them. The admission of women in 1970 brought about a huge spike in applications as well as a significant boost to the quality of those admitted. Four years later the consolidation of the Newton College of the Sacred Heart gave the university not only a close-by satellite campus with a well-trained liberal arts faculty, but an eight-hundred-strong female Catholic student cohort, collectively the social and intellectual superiors to the Boston College undergrads they were joining. Women had made up a third of the first-year students in the college in their inaugural year. With the addition of the Newton College students, they became a lasting majority.
At the same time, the proportion of students from outside the New England region, including international ones, grew steadily. By 2013, California was sending more students to Boston College than any other state outside of Massachusetts. A racial transformation marked the changing demographic changes as well. In the late 1960s, the university made a commitment to enroll African American students. As the twentieth century neared its end ahana (African American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American) students made up nearly twenty percent of undergraduate enrollment.
As diversity increasingly shaped the student profile, so did the faculty one. Most notable was the decline in the Jesuit presence, from dominance to a shrinking minority. Among the lay faculty, there was growing diversification in religious affiliation, gender, and race. As the faculty became more credentialed, with PhDs or their equivalents from leading universities becoming the norm for appointments to the various schools, standards for hiring, tenure, promotions, and salaries were set. Departments became more autonomous in electing their own chairs and determining their curriculum. Above the departmental level, however, faculty failed to gain any meaningful share in governance. A faculty senate established in the late 1960s did not last a decade. As O’Toole observes diplomatically, “Faculty involvement in university administration remained less well developed at Boston College than at most other universities” (270–71).
Demographic change and the abandonment of compulsory Mass attendance and annual retreats inevitably produced initiatives aiming at preserving the institution’s Catholic/ Jesuit identity. Questions remained about how many properly credentialed Jesuits Boston College could attract in a rapidly shrinking pool and how many lay faculty were interested in steeping themselves in the Judeo-Christian/ Jesuit tradition in order to maintain Boston College’s intellectual and spiritual heritage. Less problematic in reinforcing the institution’s historic identity was the move to campus of the Jesuit theologate at Weston, the appointment of a vice president for mission and ministry in 1998, and the establishment of several Jesuit centers or institutes.
O’Toole ends his detailed survey of Boston College in 1995, the year the current president, William Leahy, S.J. came into office. By then, he explains, “the university was displaying most of the characteristics” that mark it today: notably a robustly growing endowment and the yearly improvement in the quality of the student body and faculty, epitomized by student success in Rhodes and other fellowship competition (297–98). That may well be so. Still, one would appreciate a closer examination of the most significant developments during the quarter-century of the Leahy era. Two that come to mind are the phenomenal growth of the endowment and the professionalization of collegiate sports. The institution, which, like so many other Catholic colleges, had given little thought to building a fund reserve when it had its unique endowment, the “living one” that the Jesuit community provided, now, by the early twenty-first century, had amassed the largest endowment of any Jesuit institution in the US. How did this remarkable financial development come to be?
One would also appreciate some appraisal of the present-day place of intercollegiate athletics within the university. What have been the fiscal and other consequences of the university abandoning the Big East to join the Atlantic Coast Conference for the prestige and revenue it promised? To what extent has the move put Boston College even more within the prolegiate culture driving sports in the twenty-first century, which enabled athletes to move from institution to institution, in response to opportunities to earn income from advertisements or the other money-making avenues that the ncaa recently approved for “student-athletes?”
But, as someone who reluctantly substituted an epilogue for a chapter covering the recent era of the institution whose history he had been commissioned to write, I am more than happy to simply commend James O’Toole for the fine history that he has produced, no matter what its effective terminus happens to be.
