The university’s mission, reaffirmed
Harvard neighbor Boston College (BC) celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, providing an opportune time for the Jesuit institution to reflect on the enduring, necessary struggle between scholarship for social good and inquiry for its own sake, President Drew Faust said on Wednesday. “At their best, universities maintain a creative tension, tackling the purposeful and the apparently pointless with equal delight,” she told a crowd of trustees, faculty, alumni, and friends in BC’s Robsham Theater. Harvard and BC must keep sight of that goal “in a world where the measure of things so often trumps the meaning of things, and the practical, immediate uses of knowledge so often overshadow the larger, more enduring purposes of education.” Faust had crossed the Charles River to the Heights to kick off the college’s Sesquicentennial Speaker Series and to receive the first of three Sesquicentennial Medals that BC will award this year in celebration of its milestone. She...