Boston University: Get Out and Change the World

Boston University--colloquially "BU"--was the largest university I visited during my trip. With 32,000 students, you'd think that means that it's gigantic and sprawling and fragmented. So you'll be stunned to know that one of my tour guides--a boistrous sophomore from tiny Aurora, Nebraska--is dear friends with STES '08 alumna Jennifer Wang, a current student at BU. While that was a happy coincidence, I got the sense that those kind of connections happen more often than not: this is an active, interconnected campus where students are deeply involved in a lot of things.


As you know, there are more than 60 colleges and universities in the Boston area, and few make as good a use of--and as great a contribution to--the city as BU does. BU occupies a narrow strip of land south of the Charles River and just west of downtown Boston, and its heart is Commonwealth Avenue--Comm Ave--where the Green Line T rattles by and shuttles people in and out of the city. BU is all about movement: there's the T, there's the river, there's Comm Ave, there's the risk of fly balls soaring over the walls at Fenway Park during a Red Sox game (the Citgo sign in the photo is a hallmark of Fenway Park). Even BU's most interesting student organizations seem to be about getting out and about in innovative ways: the school has a Quidditch Team, a People Watching Society, and a Medieval Reenactor Society. The BU life is a deeply urban lifestyle: students live and work in historic brownstone-style buildings; what might constitute a residential neighborhood elsewhere in Boston is a series of professors' offices, sorority and fraternity houses, and department headquarters in the streets of BU.

One thing that was a little weird was that the BU info session did have a lot of references to the "other Boston schools" and "the other schools you're looking at". This seemed unnecessary, because BU has a lot to distinguish itself without such comparisons. BU has always admitted both women and men of all races (a little dig at that Ivy-covered school across the river, perhaps?), and the university has long been a leader in the arts, humanities, and the sciences. The most pointed dig was about undergraduate education in the Boston area was the following: "Like other Boston schools, we have big-name professors. But here, you'll actually see them in class." Two of the biggest names here are historian Howard Zinn and Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, and both teach undergraduates every year. BU is part of a consortium of local universities that allows students to take courses on other campuses; the admissions officer didn't mention the schools involved, but I know from experience that the schools central to this partnership are BU, Tufts, Harvard, and MIT. The admissions officer noted that "Other schools' students tend to take more advantage of this option than BU students do, simply because BU has so many resources on its own." I'm not sure about the truth in that remark, but BU really does have a lot going for it on its own campus: strong engineering programs, a conservatory-style fine arts program, exceptional communication programs, strong humanities programs, a great ed school, and close partnerships with the Longwood Medical Area just south of the campus, one of Boston's two medical centers. BU even has its own beach on the Charles River (see picture). In a lot of ways, BU felt like a big state university: it has tons of resources because of its size and status.

BU is very proud of one of its most famous alums: Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. The photo at left honors him on campus: it's a sculpture of fifty doves (representing the fifty US states) the form a single larger dove, and it represents the triumph of peace in the American civil rights movement.  I think the centrality of this monument on campus speaks to what I like best about BU. This is a place that is all about the drive to get out and do things. With Boston on its doorstep, BU students run an NPR-afilliate radio station. They teach in local schools. They intern in law firms and non-profits. They volunteer in underserved communities. There are some schools out there that are more concerned with saving the world than saving their own neighborhood, and BU is emphatically not that school. BU students see themselves as citizens of Boston, not guests removed from its problems and challenges, and they do what they can to give back.