Celebrating Our Roots, Planting Seeds for the Future

Dean Stan Sclaroff on CAS' sesquicentennial year

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As we look ahead to our 150th birthday next year, we celebrate our roots. This past summer, the dean’s office enlisted Catherine Devlin (CAS’22)—a history major who was preparing to depart for a Fulbright in Scotland—as an archival intern. Devlin spent the summer in BU’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, delving into materials from 1873 to the present—photographs, letters, maps, newspaper clippings, meeting minutes, and so much more—and learning about our history and origins as a college.

In analyzing her research, Devlin found the following historical themes:

  1. Inclusion—CAS was home to the first woman to earn a doctorate (Helen Magill White in 1877) and the first person born enslaved to earn a doctorate (John Wesley Edward Bowen in 1887) in the US.
  2. Social activism and community engagement—from the CAS assembly adopting a resolution supporting the League of Nations in 1919 to more than 50 percent of students skipping class to participate in an anti–Vietnam War strike in 1970.
  3. Dynamic curricular changes—from a WWII-era update calling for greater academic rigor and improved foreign language instruction to the 2001 launch of the CAS Writing Program, designed to help undergraduates develop the skills essential to their success in the University and in their future personal, professional, and civic lives.

These themes remain true within the College of Arts & Sciences today. We are a large, diverse, and inclusive community committed to interdisciplinary research; to nurturing the discovery, creation, transmission, and application of knowledge and understanding across disciplines; and to building productive partnerships within the Boston community and across the globe. We are positioning graduates to be agile thinkers, skilled communicators, and imaginative problem-solvers, to play an active role in the changing world around them.

We are positioning graduates to be agile thinkers, skilled communicators, and imaginative problem-solvers, to play an active role in the changing world around them.

As we begin this sesquicentennial year, we are also planting seeds for the future—carrying out the initiatives that we set out last year in our 2030 Strategic Plan. (You can read more about these and other new initiatives in “Arts & Sciences Today.”)

  • We welcomed five postdoctoral scholars in our new Society of Fellows, all of whom are committed to interdisciplinary research and fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy.
  • We celebrated the one-year anniversary of our Center for Innovation in Social Science, an intellectual home for faculty and students to collaborate, connect, and learn from one another.
  • We are preparing to launch the Connector, a new resource that will empower undergraduate students to navigate and access all that Arts & Sciences has to offer and provide pathways for experiential learning, professional development, and networking.
  • We are awaiting the opening of the new Center for Computing & Data Sciences building, which will house our Departments of Computer Science and Mathematics & Statistics.

This milestone year, we also want to celebrate our community—our faculty and staff, our students and families, and you, our alums and friends. We want to know where the College of Liberal Arts/the College of Arts & Sciences or the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences has taken you. How did your liberal arts and sciences education make a difference in your journey? What is your favorite Arts & Sciences memory? Please share your story with us.

We hope you will stay connected with us on social media and by reading our email newsletters to learn more about our history and how you can participate in our upcoming birthday celebrations.