“I just felt a little, you know, disappointed that sadly, now a reality is going to be that now there might be even less of a population of students who look like me or come from similar backgrounds as me,” Beato said. “And there’s going to be even less of a population of that in schools that are already predominantly white.”
Like many Boston College seniors hoping to take full advantage of their remaining days on the Heights, Kristen Donnelly said she and her friends have a bucket list to tackle before graduation. This bucket list, Donnelly explained, is particularly important to her because the COVID-19 pandemic prevented her from doing many of the activities and…
“In this weird twist of fate, out of something that was so evil and destructive, I got this glimpse into the really compassionate depths of humans,” Downes said. “It has supercharged me at times when I would otherwise have been really quite down and out. So I would love to find a way to bottle that all up and be able to give it to other people in their times of need as well.”
“I really think for myself, it’s so important to do something that I love,” Hopkins said. “But it’s also so hard because now, money is such a big thing and jobs you actually enjoy aren’t going to pay as well, typically.”
“It was very difficult to get the administration to commit to it,” Claudio said. “We had a few people, you know, on the lower end of the administration really trying to help us out a lot. The problem was getting the higher-ups to commit to it.”
“I’m also really proud that the center is really looking to the future of the church, being young people with a particular focus,” Kiefer said. “Our commitment to having big conversations about roles and relationships in the church and the Catholic intellectual tradition … and constantly creating new opportunities to engage more people in important conversations about the importance of God.”
Across the country and at BC, both abortion-rights and anti-abortion advocates are processing the Dobbs decision, which overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, establishing that the U.S. Constitution does not recognize a federal right to an abortion. Although not physically together on campus, students, alumni, and professors are grappling with what this decision means for the future of abortion in the United States.
“The process is so frustrating, it’s so draining and frankly it’s horrible,” they said. “…it’s so overwhelming because you have some people tell you, ‘yes, report, speak up’… and then other people telling you, ‘yeah, this is gonna take like months or years potentially to get anywhere with it.’”
Title IX—passed on June 23, 1972—prohibits discrimination based on sex within educational programs or activities that receive federal funding in a mere 37 words:
“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
“Obviously you don’t know who people are, but that really allows people to be authentic and kind of bond together over a lot of things,” Valentine said.
