Boston College: Ever to Excel

When I lived in Cambridge, I once called a Boston cab company to give me a ride to the airport, a whopping eight-mile trip. "Cambridge?" the stunned dispatcher snorted. "That's too far away." I was stunned. Cambridge is across the river from Boston. You could see Boston from my sixth floor window. Too far away? What's that all about?

Two years later, I find myself sitting on a Green Line B train bound for its terminus at Boston College, and I find myself muttering to myself, "Six miles! This is just unreasonably far away." Forty-five minutes after boarding at the Park Street station downtown, I'm grumbling as the train slowly lurches west toward BC in Chestnut Hill. It's not a long way as the crow flies, but it's an awfully long trek when you stop every other block and have a top speed of twelve miles per hour.

To those of us who live in Houston, this is hilarious. My drive to work every morning is four miles; most of you travel more than 30 to come to school each day. The difference is, Houston is big and spread out and built for getting around quickly in cars. Boston is small, dense, and built for getting around on public transit. While the public transit isn't always speedy (it takes about forty-five minutes to cover those eight miles to the airport via the subway), it's the most efficient and reliable way to get around. Otherwise, you risk getting caught in the endless snarls of the very congested Boston street traffic.

Eventually, I arrived at BC, and I'm really glad that I made the trip. As you may know, Boston College is one of the top Catholic universities in the United States, founded in 1863 with one of the largest Jesuit communities in the world. The Jesuit order was founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola and are committed to scholarship, social justice, and cultural studies, and BC is one of the finest examples of that influence. This campus has it all: TONS of brand-new freshmen dorms (not there last time I visited), beautiful gothic architecture, state-of-the-art athletic facilities, new science buildings, and beautiful steep hills (they don't call this place "the Heights" for nothing). What stood out most on my visit was the way the school's motto seems to permeate its every effort. "Ever to excel"--a phrase from early in Homer's Iliad--means that BC students channel their every effort toward excellence. This place is about working hard in class, working hard as student volunteers, working hard as agents of change for social justice. I've seen a lot of schools where the students were all about being smart or all about doing the right thing. BC is notable because its students constantly strive to do both at the same time.

On my ride back to civilization Boston, I read the latest edition of BC's undergraduate research journal, and I can't overstate how impressed I was with its contents. I found hard-hitting, well-annotated work on Native American Casinos, post-colonial British Literature, biochemistry, and political science--all written by rising juniors and seniors on campus. Most impressively, I got the sense that these students were not altogether exceptional: this was the expected level of scholarship and discourse expected of every BC student.

Throughout my visit, I was tempted to draw comparisons to Notre Dame ("both are Catholic universities, both are effectively an hour from the nearest major city"), but the comparisons really aren't apt. Boston College is its own entity altogether, and it manages to marry the resources of the big city just to the east with the core of its Catholic heritage and tradition. Although I've joked throughout this post about the location, Chestnut Hill is, in many ways, the ideal place to go to college if you're looking for a Christ-centered education at a major research university. As I rode the T out along Commonwealth Avenue (colloquially "Comm Ave"), the traffic abated, more people were out jogging and walking dogs, and the sounds of trees and birds overwhelmed the crush of traffic. BC is in a quiet neighborhood where the focus can really be on a prayerful life focused on scholarship and social justice. It's an oasis where students can reach out and engage meaningfully with the high-stress, high-powered world of Boston and beyond while keeping their feet grounded firmly in an intellectually rigorous Christian worldview.