On the Roots of Boston College and Similar Institutions

[Editorial Note: In mid-September of 2020, Fr. Arthur R. Madigan, S.J., long-time philosopher, Greek scholar, and much-acclaimed professor at Boston College, suffered a severe stroke that left him aphasic and unable to continue his academic labors. Undaunted by his setback and determined to remain connected, he, in his usual good spirits, sent a colleague, in April of 2024, a short, but wonderfully pellucid essay on the complex inheritances of Boston College, one that he had written in 2009. Its clarity of expression and sharp focus on the subject matter make it, in its own way, a classic. It is a pleasure to offer this little gem here for the edification of our readership, with our deep gratitude to its author.]

One way to understand Boston College is to consider its roots, the different institutional forms to which it is heir: the Renaissance Jesuit collegium, the modern American college, and the modern research university.

The Jesuit collegium was developed in the sixteenth century, and its practices were codified in the Ratio Studiorum of 1599. Its ultimate aim was the salvation of souls. Its proximate aim was to give a rigorous training in language broadly understood (grammar, rhetoric, logic, and even music and drama), along with catechetical instruction, moral discipline, and religious formation. Education in the collegium was intended to prepare young men to assume the responsibilities of family life and civic life. The collegium’s educational ideal was eloquentia perfecta: the ability to influence and persuade people, in line with moral and religious principles. The collegium’s basic assumption was that humanistic studies and moral-religious formation support and reinforce one another.

The Jesuit collegium has undergone all sorts of transformations over the centuries. The unitary program of instruction has yielded to the split between high school and college. The concentration on language and eloquence has given way to a broad variety of subjects. At the college level, the older catechetical presentation of Christian faith has been replaced by the academic study of theology. But something of the old commitment to moral and religious formation still survives, as witness the emphasis on concern for each individual (cura personalis), the encouragement of participation in service programs, and the ideal of preparing “men and women for others.”

The American college is heir to the traditions of the colleges that made up the medieval universities and especially to the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. The history of the college is complicated, but we can distinguish three stages in its evolution: the original English college, the classical American college, and the contemporary American college. The medieval English universities were founded to prepare men, especially clerics, for administrative responsibilities in the church and the civil government (the ordinary priest would not need a university education), and so elitism and access to privilege were built into the universities from the start. The original colleges were founded to provide residences and tutorial support for university students. The typical college was governed by a master and a self-perpetuating group called socii (“fellows”). Faculty and students ate together in common refectories and prayed together in college chapels—phenomena that may be observed in Oxford and Cambridge to this day.

The English college system was brought to America by the founders of Harvard, Yale, and other such institutions, and in the nineteenth century colleges multiplied across the land. Many American colleges were started by Protestant denominations. Harvard, for instance, was originally founded for the training of Congregationalist ministers. A prominent feature in many colleges was the practice of a senior course in ethics, often taught by the college president. Over the years, however, the originally Protestant colleges have tended to evolve towards non-denominational Protestantism and then towards a purely secular position. A milestone in this development was 1936, when Harvard shortened its motto Veritas pro Christo et ecclesiae, “Truth for Christ and the church,” in favor of the simple Veritas, “Truth.”

The classical American college was a relatively elite institution, catering to students who could afford to spend four years studying the unremunerative humanities. (The original Jesuit collegium, by contrast, was intended to be funded by endowments, with the education free of charge.) It was only in the twentieth century that a bachelor’s degree became a prerequisite for training in the skilled professions and for admission to many forms of gainful employment.

Many factors led to the shift from the classical American college to the contemporary American college. The land grant universities of the late nineteenth century placed colleges side by side with more practically oriented programs such as agriculture and engineering. The colleges themselves turned away from their classical unified programs of instruction to the elective system. (Boston College and other Jesuit foundations were slow to make this move, and when Harvard announced in the early 1900s that it would not recognize the B.C. B.A., there was a brouhaha for a while; but eventually the Jesuit schools went along with the elective system.) The G.I. Bill of 1944 vastly expanded access to higher education. Perhaps most importantly, American colleges took over many of the attitudes and practices of research universities.

The contemporary American undergraduate college has no one dominant end or purpose. It offers multiple possibilities, among which students select which to emphasize: studying the traditional humanities and sciences; preparing for specialized professional programs; establishing or confirming their membership in the middle or upper class; and living through the interstitial period of late adolescence and early adulthood. If today’s American college has a guiding principle, it is “Make of us what you will.”

The contemporary American college is often understood on the model of a business: trustees are owners, administrators are management, faculty are employees, students and their parents are consumers. This is a far cry from the original English college and the classical American college. Still, there are traces of the older forms. Look inside a book published by Harvard University Press and you will find that it is copyrighted “by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.” If you meet faculty who bristle at the corporate model—who expect the faculty to be a community across the lines of departments and schools, who see professors and students not as employees and customers of an educational corporation but as members of a university—you are meeting the college tradition in the flesh. (The college tradition’s emphasis on community is a point of contact with the Jesuit tradition, but with a significant difference: the English and American college tradition places great value on group discussion and group decision-making, whereas the Jesuit tradition insists on strong central governance.)

By contrast with the Jesuit collegium and the American college, the research university is a creation of the nineteenth century and especially of nineteenth-century Germany. Its ultimate aim is the generation of new knowledge. Its proximate aim is the training of those who will develop the new knowledge. The research university tends to take the natural sciences and their methods as the paradigms that all disciplines ought to follow. It tends to assume that history (and any discipline with an historical aspect) can and should be practiced in a scientific manner. The first research universities in the United States—Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago—were distinguished from the start by the clear priority that they gave to graduate education (the training of researchers) over undergraduate education. Theirs was initially a minority position, but the idea that all universities should be research universities is now virtually universal in American education, as is the idea that teachers in undergraduate liberal arts colleges ought to be qualified as researchers and ought to conduct research.

The ethos of the research university has had a powerful influence on the American college, including the Jesuit college—a measure of how far the American Jesuit college has evolved away from its Renaissance forebear. The Renaissance Jesuit collegium was focused on the formation of persons. The research university focuses on the development of knowledge. The Jesuit collegium had essentially the same curriculum for everyone. The research university offers students a wide range of disciplines and invites them to take their pick. The ideal teacher in a Jesuit collegium was a broadly educated generalist who could help students integrate their studies; if he also did research, that was his business. The research university professor is expected to be a qualified and productive specialist; if students want to integrate their studies (whatever “integrate” may mean), that is their business. Perhaps most importantly, the premise of the Jesuit collegium was that the deepest purpose of education is to instill moral and religious values, whereas the ethos that prevails in the research university advocates neutrality with respect to moral and religious values, as in the ideal of “value-free science.”

The students and faculty of Boston College are heirs to the Renaissance Jesuit collegium, the classical American college, and the research university—heirs to their institutional forms, their typical practices, and their prevailing attitudes. This helps explain both the amazingly rich opportunities that we have in Boston College and the mixture of messages that we sometimes send and receive. Depending on the speaker and the season, faculty will hear that their primary responsibility is excellent teaching, personal attention to each and every student, the generation of new knowledge, or all of the above. Students may be exhorted to develop their persons by studying the sciences and humanities; to prepare for their careers; to celebrate the diversity of the human family; to serve those most in need; to make the friends of a lifetime; and to get to know God. We are heirs to multiple traditions with different educational ideals. Each of these ideals has its attractions. It is easy to proclaim that they are all compatible. It is another thing to combine them in practice. As students, faculty, and (I would say) members of Boston College, it will be good for us to face up to the challenge of our diverse inheritance.

APA

Madigan, A. R., S.J. (2025). On the roots of Boston College and similar institutions. Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 1(3), 521–525. https://doi.org/10.51238/gyFLZum

CMOS

Madigan, Arthur R., S.J. 2025. “On the Roots of Boston College and Similar Institutions.” Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 2nd ser., 1, no. 3: 521–525. https://doi.org/10.51238/gyFLZum. 

MLA

Madigan, Arthur R., S.J. “On the Roots of Boston College and Similar Institutions.”Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 2nd ser., vol. 1, no. 3, 2025, p. 521–525. https://doi.org/10.51238/gyFLZum. 

Turabian

Madigan, Arthur R., S.J. 2025. “On the Roots of Boston College and Similar Institutions.” Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 2nd ser., 1, no. 3: 521–525. https://doi.org/10.51238/gyFLZum.