Boston University
Boston University traces its roots to the establishment of the Newbury Biblical Institute in Newbury, Vermont in 1839, and was chartered with the name "Boston University" by the Massachusetts Legislature in 1869. The University organized formal Centennial observances both in 1939 and 1969.
On April 24–25, 1839 a group of Methodist ministers and laymen at the Old Bromfield Street Church in Boston elected to establish a Methodist theological school. Set up in Newbury, Vermont, the school was named the "Newbury Biblical Institute".
In 1847, the Congregational Society in Concord, New Hampshire, invited the Institute to relocate to Concord and offered a disused Congregational church building with a capacity of 1200 people. Other citizens of Concord covered the remodeling costs. One stipulation of the invitation was that the Institute remain in Concord for at least 20 years. The charter issued by New Hampshire designated the school the "Methodist General Biblical Institute", but it was commonly called the "Concord Biblical Institute."With the agreed twenty years coming to a close, the trustees of the Concord Biblical Institute purchased 30 acres (120,000 m2) on Aspinwall Hill in Brookline, Massachusetts, as a possible relocation site. The institute moved in 1867 to 23 Pinkney Street in Boston, and received a Massachusetts Charter as the "Boston Theological Institute".
In 1869, three trustees of the Boston Theological Institute obtained from the Massachusetts Legislature a charter for a university by name of "Boston University". These trustees were successful Boston businessmen and Methodist laymen, with a history of involvement in educational enterprises and became the founders of Boston University. They were Isaac Rich (1801–1872), Lee Claflin (1791–1871), and Jacob Sleeper (1802–1889), for whom Boston University's three West Campus dormitories are named. Lee Claflin's son, William, was then Governor of Massachusetts and signed the University Charter on May 26, 1869 after it was passed by the Legislature.
As reported by Kathleen Kilgore in her book, Transformations, A History of Boston University (see Further reading), the founders directed the inclusion in the Charter of the following provision, unusual for its time:No instructor in said University shall ever be required by the Trustees to profess any particular religious opinions as a test of office, and no student shall be refused admission... on account of the religious opinions he may entertain; provided, nonetheless, that this section shall not apply to the theological department of said University.
Every department of the new university was also open to all on an equal footing regardless of sex, race, or (with the exception of the School of Theology) religion.
Early years (1870–1900)
Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone at Boston University
688 Boylston Street, the early home of the College of Liberal Arts, the precursor to the College of Arts & Sciences
The Boston Theological Institute was absorbed into Boston University in 1871 as the BU School of Theology.In January 1872 Isaac Rich died, leaving the vast bulk of his estate to a trust that would go to Boston University after ten years of growth while the University was organized. Most of this bequest consisted of real estate throughout the core of the city of Boston which was appraised at more than $1.5 million. Kilgore describes this as the largest single donation to an American college or university to that time. By December, however, the Great Boston Fire of 1872 had destroyed all but one of the buildings Rich had left to the University, and the insurance companies with which they had been insured were bankrupt. The value of his estate, when turned over to the University in 1882, was half what it had been in 1872.[citation needed]
As a result, the University was unable to build its contemplated campus on Aspinwall Hill, and the land was sold piecemeal as development sites. Street names in the area, including Claflin Road, Claflin Path, and University Road, are the only remaining evidence of University ownership in this area. Following the fire, Boston University established its new facilities in buildings scattered throughout Beacon Hill and later expanded into the Boylston Street and Copley Square area before building its Charles River Campus in the 1930s.[citation needed]
After receiving a year's salary advance to allow him to pursue his research in 1875, Alexander Graham Bell, then a professor at the university, invented the telephone in a Boston University laboratory.In 1876, Borden Parker Bowne was appointed professor of philosophy. Bowne, an important figure in the history of American religious thought, was an American Christian philosopher and theologian in the Methodist tradition. He is known for his contributions to personalism, a philosophical branch of liberal theology.The movement he led is often referred to as Boston Personalism.Helen Magill White, the first woman to receive a PhD from an American university.The university continued its tradition of openness in this period. In 1877, Boston University became the first American university to award a Ph.D. to a woman when classics scholar Helen Magill White earned hers with a thesis on "The Greek Drama."
Then in 1878 Anna Oliver became the first woman to receive a degree in theology in the United States, but the Methodist Church would not ordain her.Lelia Robinson Sawtelle, who graduated from the university's law school in 1881, became the first woman admitted to the bar in Massachusetts.Solomon Carter Fuller, who graduated from the university's School of Medicine in 1897, became the first black psychiatrist in the United States and would make significant contributions to the study of Alzheimer's disease.
20th century and establishment of the Charles River campus
Marsh Plaza and its surrounding buildings were one of the first completed parts of the Charles River Campus
Commonwealth Avenue in the 1930s
John Silber
Seeking to unify a geographically scattered school and enable it to participate in the development of the city, school president Lemuel Murlin arranged that the school buy the present campus along the Charles River. Between 1920 and 1928, the school bought the 15 acres (61,000 m2) of land that had been reclaimed from the river by the Riverfront Improvement Association. Plans for a riverside quadrangle with a Gothic Revival administrative tower modeled on the "Old Boston Stump" in Boston, England were scaled back in the late 1920s when the State Metropolitan District Commission used eminent domain to seize riverfront land for Storrow Drive.Murlin was never able to build the new campus, but his successor, Daniel L. Marsh, led a series of fundraising campaigns (interrupted by both the Great Depression and World War II) that helped Marsh to achieve his dream and to gradually fill in the University's new campus. By spring 1936, the student body included 10,384 men and women.Sert's buildings expanded the campus in the 1960s In 1951, Harold C. Case became the school's fifth president and under his direction the character of the campus changed significantly, as he sought to change the school into a national research university. The campus tripled in size to 45 acres (180,000 m2), and added 68 new buildings before Case retired in 1967. The first large dorms, Claflin, Rich and Sleeper Halls in West Campus were built, and in 1965 construction began on 700 Commonwealth Avenue, later named Warren Towers, designed to house 1800 students. Between 1961 and 1966, the BU Law Tower, the George Sherman Union, and the Mugar Memorial Library were constructed in the Brutalist style, a departure from the school's traditional architecture. The College of Engineering and College of Communication were housed in a former stable building and auto-show room, respectively.Besides his efforts to expand the university into a rival for Greater Boston's more prestigious academic institutions, such as Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (both in Cambridge across the Charles River from the BU campus), Case involved himself in the start of the student/societal upheavals that came to characterize the 1960s. When a mini-squabble over editorial policy at college radio WBUR-FM – whose offices were under a tall radio antenna mast in front of the School of Public Relations and Communications (later College of Communications) – started growing in the spring of 1964, Case persuaded university trustees that the university should take over the widely heard radio station (now a major outlet for National Public Radio and still a B.U.-owned broadcast facility
The trustees approved the firing of student managers and clamped down on programming and editorial policy, which had been led by the late Jim Thistle, later a major force in Boston's broadcast news milieu. The on-campus political dispute between Case's conservative administration and the suddenly active and mostly liberal student body led to other disputes over B.U. student print publications, such as the B.U. News and the Scarlet, a fraternity association newspaper.
The Presidency of John Silber also saw much expansion. In the late 1970s, the Lahey Clinic vacated its building at 605 Commonwealth Avenue and moved to Burlington, Massachusetts. The vacated building was purchased by BU to house the School of Education.After arriving from the University of Texas in 1971, Silber set out to remake the university into a global center for research by recruiting star faculty. Two of his faculty "stars," Elie Wiesel and Derek Walcott, won Nobel Prizes shortly after Silber recruited them.Two others, Saul Bellow and Sheldon Lee Glashow won Nobel Prizes before Silber recruited them.
In addition to recruiting new scholars, Silber expanded the physical campus, constructing the Photonics Center for the study of light, a new building for the School of Management, and the Life Science and Engineering Building for interdisciplinary research, among other projects.[29] Campus expansion continued in the 2000s with the construction of new dormitories and the Agganis Arena.
President Robert A. Brown
The 21st century
Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering (CILSE)
Robert Brown's presidency, which started in 2005, has sought to further the consolidation of campus infrastructure that was commenced by earlier administrations. During his tenure, Brown has strengthened the core missions of undergraduate, graduate, and professional education, interdisciplinary work, and research and scholarship across all 17 schools and colleges. In 2007, Brown introduced his 10-year strategic plan, which articulates BU's core values in a set of institutional commitments and defines goals to be met to establish BU as one of the largest private research universities. Brown committed the University to investing $1.8 billion in the completion of this ten-year strategic plan,[30] allocating new resources to inter-college opportunities for undergraduates, improving the campus's academic and residential facilities, and recruiting new faculty. One overriding goal has been to break down the barriers between the University's 17 schools and colleges that had evolved over the decades and find ways to combine different fields and researchers within interdisciplinary research centers. This philosophy of creating new knowledge from a variety of corners of the University extends to undergraduate education, as well, which has been overhauled to expose students to new fields and ways of thinking and problem solving. This includes requiring course work outside their majors, development of personal communications skills, and cross-school collaborations. That new curriculum, called the BU Hub, goes into effect in 2018.
The strategic plan also called for increasing the annual budget by $225 million per year.The FY2016 operating budget was $2.2 billion and the FY2017 budget is $2.4 billion.In FY2016, the research enterprise at the University brought in $368.9 million in sponsored research, comprising 1,896 awards to 722 faculty investigators.In 2012, the University was invited to join the Association of American Universities, the organization of the 62 leading research universities in the United States and Canada. BU, one of only four universities invited to join the group since 2000, became the 62nd member. In the Boston area, Harvard, MIT, and Brandeis are also members.
That same year, a $1 billion comprehensive fundraising campaign was launched, the University's first-ever comprehensive campaign, with the primary focus on financial aid, faculty support, research, and facility improvements. In 2016, the campaign goal was reached. The Board of Trustees voted to raise the goal to $1.5 billion and extend through 2019. To date, the campaign has funded some 74 new faculty positions, including 49 named full professorships and 25 Career Development Professorships.In February 2015 the faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.
In 2016, Times Higher Education (THE) named Boston University to a list of 53 "international powerhouse" institutions, schools that have the best chance of being grouped alongside—or ahead of—THE's most elite global "old stars," a group that includes the University of Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Princeton.The Charles River and Medical Campuses have also undergone notable physical transformations since 2006, from new buildings and playing fields to dormitory renovations. The campus has seen the addition of a 26-floor student residence at 33 Harry Agganis Way, nicknamed StuVi2, the New Balance Playing Field, the Yawkey Center for Student Services, the Alan and Sherry Leventhal Center, the Law tower and Redstone annex, the Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC), the Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering (CILSE), and the Joan and Edgar Booth Theatre, scheduled to open in fall 2017. The Dahod Family Alumni Center in the renovated BU Castle will begin in May 2017. Development of the University's existing housing stock has included significant renovations to BU's oldest dorm, Myles Standish Hall and Annex, and to Kilachand Hall, formerly known as Shelton Hall, and a brand new student residence on the Medical Campus.
