Noonball: A Love Story
Broken bones, surgeries, even the occasional on-court collapse.
Photo: Lee Pellegrini
Campus Digest: Spring 2020
Happenings from around Boston College.
Spring 2020
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Boston College is a new member of QuestBridge, a nonprofit that matches high-achieving, low-income students with forty-two top-ranked colleges and universities throughout the country. “This partnership will enhance BC’s ability to identify and enroll gifted students from a wide range of communities,” said Director of Undergraduate Admission Grant Gosselin. “For many low-income students, access to highly selective institutions such as Boston College has often seemed unattainable. QuestBridge has changed that.” To be eligible for the program, students must have an SAT score over 1310 or an ACT score over 28, and come from a family earning less than $65,000 per year. Students selected through the matching program, a binding early decision plan, will have their education fully funded for four years. In 2019, more than two thousand students were admitted to elite schools—including Amherst, Williams, Duke, Stanford, and Yale—via QuestBridge.
Allison Adair, a professor of English, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize for her manuscript The Clearing. Competition judge Henri Cole described Adair’s writing as “a lush, lyrical book about a world where women are meant to carry things to safety and men leave decisively.” Adair will receive $10,000 and her work will be published by Milkweed Editions in June 2020.
BC Safe is a new mobile app that includes bus schedules and weather alerts. The app also allows for real-time location tracking, so users can authorize a friend or family member to monitor their walks and alert authorities if necessary. It’s available for download on both Apple and Android phones.
The Boston College Club Figure Skating Team took first place in both the Boston Synchronized Skating Classic, in November, and the Eastern Synchronized Skating Sectional Championships, in January. The squad swizzled and spun to music from the soundtrack of the 2013 movie The Great Gatsby.
The 2019 Sustainable Campus Index report from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education recognized Boston College with a Silver rating in its Sustainability, Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS) program. BC’s “Social Justice Through Hydroponics” project, which teaches Boston-area middle and high schoolers how to grow vegetables without soil and then sell their crops at local farmers’ markets, was highlighted in the report as an “innovative and high-impact” initiative.
Bruce Springsteen rocked out at the iconic Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, in November to raise money for need-based financial aid at Boston College. The Boss played a private two-hour, twenty-two-song show on behalf of the university, according to Backstreets magazine. Springsteen’s son Evan James Springsteen graduated from BC in 2012.
Boston College Law School Dean Vincent D. Rougeau was named
president-elect of the Association of American Law Schools at the organization’s annual meeting in January. Rougeau, who has been dean since 2011, will become the third BC Law dean to serve as AALS president, joining Richard Huber and John Garvey.
El Mundo’s 2019 Latino 30 Under 30 list included three members of the BC community: María Piñeros-Leaño, an assistant professor of social work; Oscar Zepeda, a Woods College of Advancing Studies graduate student; and Antonelli Mejia ’14.
In memoriam
Neil Wolfman, a professor of the practice in the chemistry department who earned teaching awards from two Boston College honor societies, died in January. He was sixty-six. Wolfman had been on medical leave for most of the past year after being diagnosed with cancer. “I feel like my job here is to enable the success of as many kids as possible, however they define success,” Wolfman said in a 2014 interview with The Heights. “I can get no greater satisfaction than that.” The Wolfman family requests that pictures and fond memories of Neil be sent to neilwolfmanlegacy@gmail.com.
Jeanne Harley Guillemin, a medical anthropologist and former professor of sociology at Boston College who helped bring to light the untold story of a deadly anthrax outbreak in the Soviet Union, died in November. She was seventy-six. ◽
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