The Issue: Class of 2013 has no commuter students
What we think: A new age of campus culture has begun
This spring, 146 years after Boston College opened the doors of its South Boston campus to working-class Boston immigrants, the University announced that the sesquicentennial freshman class of 2013 has no students intending to commute from home to school. While the number of commuters has severely dwindled in recent years, this year marks a once unimaginable point for a school that at one time hosted 100 percent commuter students.
This gradual shift from a commuter school to a residential one has redefined BC as not just a university, but as a community, where students, along with teachers and administrators, live, work, and interact with one another.
At one time, BC fostered a strictly intellectual connection through class lectures, a classroom environment governed by classical curricula; now, this University has become a place where we speak of scholastic and social networks. This community now offers students a web of friends, mentors, and colleagues, in addition to a type of residence-hall camaraderie.
Many students use the term "BC bubble" to describe the insularity that comes with living at this school. However, what some take as insularity, others may understand as fostering some of the very qualities that make a university experience: passion for academics, concern for a collegiate environment, and a vibrant campus life. A university community is not meant to be completely synced with the "outside world." Academia is a place in which study and self-actualization are ends in themselves rather than means to something else.
What BC and other resident universities do share with society at large is the involvement required of its citizens.
It is important to take part in student life and to become involved in the community in which you are living for four years. In the past, when students shuttled between home and campus, they had valid reasons for not engaging in campus life; now there is no excuse. Just as people expect you to vote and be involved in community affairs outside college, people expect you to be civically involved at BC. Other rules apply as well. Just as you would not disrespect your neighbor at your off-campus house, you should not disrespect fellow members of the University and the community that surrounds it.
With the arrival of the class of 2013, we should acknowledge the place commuter students have had in BC's history. What we should also observe, however, is the progress that BC has made to create a living community for students.
With the passing of the Institutional Master Plan (IMP), the University hopes to expand that community, and house 100 percent of students in University-controlled housing. What we hope is that University will be able to use this new infrastructure to meet the same goals of personal expansion and academic involvement for which BC has always striven.
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