Boston University

• 1. A School in Vermont

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  Boston University was born not in Boston but in rural Vermont. On April 24 and 25 of 1839, Methodist ministers gathered at the Old Bromfield Street Church in Boston and voted to found a new school. They placed it in Newbury, Vermont, under the name Newbury Biblical Institute. That remote starting point seems improbable for what the institution would become. Today Boston University enrolls nearly 38,000 students. More than 4,000 faculty teach across 17 schools and colleges on three urban campuses. The university ranks among Boston's largest employers. How does a small Vermont seminary become one of America's major research universities? Few institutions have been shaped so directly by a founding document, a great disaster, and a discovery made inside their own walls.

• 2. The Radical Charter

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  The three men who obtained Boston University's charter from the Massachusetts Legislature were Isaac Rich, Lee Claflin, and Jacob Sleeper. All three were successful Boston businessmen and Methodist laymen with histories of involvement in education. Rich was born in 1801, Claflin in 1791, and Sleeper in 1802. Lee Claflin's son William was Governor of Massachusetts when the charter was drafted. He signed the document on the 26th of May 1869. What the founders wrote into that charter set Boston University apart from nearly every other American institution of its time. No instructor could be required to profess any particular religious opinions as a condition of holding office. No student could be refused admission on account of religious beliefs. Every department was open equally to all students regardless of sex, race, or religion, with the single exception of the theology school. At a time when most American universities excluded women, Black students, and non-Christian applicants, the founders of Boston University built the opposite into their document. The Boston Theological Seminary, which had been operating at 23 Pinkney Street in Beacon Hill since 1867, was absorbed into the new university in 1871 as the School of Theology. Lee Claflin, born in 1791, died in 1871, two years after the charter was signed. He never saw the campus along the Charles River that would eventually define the institution.

• 3. Fires and Firsts

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  Isaac Rich died on the 13th of January 1872, leaving the vast bulk of his estate to a trust that would eventually pass to Boston University. His bequest consisted mostly of real estate throughout central Boston, appraised at more than $1.5 million. The historian Kathleen Kilgore, writing in her book Transformations, A History of Boston University, described it as the largest single donation to an American college or university up to that time. By December 1872, the Great Boston Fire had destroyed all but one of the buildings Rich had bequeathed. The insurance companies covering those properties then collapsed. When the trust finally transferred in 1882, its value was half of what it had been a decade before. Plans for a new campus on Aspinwall Hill in Brookline were abandoned, and the land was sold off piece by piece. Street names in that area today, including Claflin Road, Claflin Path, and University Road, stand as the only trace of what was once planned.

  Alexander Graham Bell was a professor at Boston University in 1875. The university gave him a year's salary advance to pursue his research, and he invented the telephone in a BU laboratory. Borden Parker Bowne was appointed professor of philosophy in 1876. Bowne founded a tradition at the university that became known as Boston Personalism, an influential movement in American religious thought. In 1877, classics scholar Helen Magill White earned a doctorate from Boston University. Her thesis was titled "The Greek Drama," and she became the first woman in the United States to receive a PhD. Anna Oliver became the first woman in the United States to earn a degree in theology in 1878. The Methodist Church declined to ordain her. Lelia J. Robinson graduated from the university's law school in 1881 and became the first woman admitted to the bar in Massachusetts. Solomon Carter Fuller graduated from the School of Medicine in 1897 and became the first Black psychiatrist in the United States. He made significant contributions to the study of Alzheimer's disease. The university that produced these firsts still operated from scattered buildings across Beacon Hill and Copley Square, without a unified campus of its own.

• 4. Building the University

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  Lemuel Murlin, serving as university president in the early twentieth century, arranged the purchase of land along the Charles River. That land forms the core of BU's main campus today. Between 1920 and 1928, the university bought 15 acres that had been reclaimed from the river by the Riverfront Improvement Association. Plans were drawn up for a Gothic Revival administrative tower, modeled on what the English call the Old Boston Stump in Lincolnshire. Those plans did not survive. In the late 1920s, the State Metropolitan District Commission used eminent domain to seize riverfront land for the construction of Storrow Drive. The planned riverside quadrangle was abandoned. Murlin never built his new campus.

  Daniel L. Marsh, Murlin's successor, carried on the fundraising effort through more difficult conditions. The work continued despite the Great Depression and the interruption of World War II. By spring 1936, the student body had grown to 10,384 men and women. Harold C. Case became the university's fifth president in 1951. Under Case, the campus tripled in size to 45 acres and gained 68 new buildings. Construction began in 1965 on a new tower at 700 Commonwealth Avenue, later named Warren Towers, designed to house 1,800 students. Between 1961 and 1966, the BU Law Tower, the George Sherman Union, and the Mugar Memorial Library were built in the Brutalist style. This was a sharp departure from the university's earlier collegiate gothic tradition. In 1964, a dispute over editorial policy at campus radio station WBUR-FM grew serious enough that Case persuaded trustees to take direct control. The station, once led by student managers including Jim Thistle, became a major National Public Radio affiliate under university management.

  John Silber arrived from the University of Texas in 1971 and set out to make BU a global center for research by recruiting prominent scholars. Two of those recruits, Elie Wiesel and Derek Walcott, went on to win Nobel Prizes after joining the faculty. Two others, Saul Bellow and Sheldon Glashow, had already won the Nobel Prize before Silber brought them to BU. Silber also expanded the campus physically, overseeing construction of the Photonics Center, a new building for the School of Management, and the Life Science and Engineering Building. In 2012, Boston University was invited to join the Association of American Universities as its 62nd member. A fundraising campaign launched that same year initially set a goal of $1 billion. In 2016, the board of trustees raised the goal to $1.5 billion. The campaign concluded in September 2019, having raised $1.85 billion over seven years. It funded 74 new faculty positions, including 49 named full professorships. On the 1st of July 2024, Melissa Gilliam began her tenure as the university's 11th president. That same spring, in May 2024, the university removed Myles Standish's name from its oldest dormitory, 610 Beacon Street.

• 5. Students Who Pushed Back

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  Three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., on the 25th of April 1968, African-American students at Boston University acted. They conducted a sit-in and locked university president Arland F. Christ-Janer out of his office for twelve hours. The student organization Umoja, BU's Black Student Union, presented Christ-Janer with ten demands. He approved nine of them. Those nine included the creation of a Martin Luther King Chair of Social Ethics, the expansion of African-American library resources, the opening of an Afro-American coordinating center, and the admission of more Black students and faculty. No disciplinary action was taken against the students. Christ-Janer described the outcome afterward. "There was no surprise, or feeling of victory on the students' parts," he said. "They had confidence in their demands, and I had a confidence in them. The university, black and white alike, was the winner."

  On the 27th of March 1972, fifty police officers in riot gear arrived at 195 Bay State Road, the BU Placement Office. They came to disperse a demonstration of 150 protesters opposing Marine Corps recruiting on campus. Silber offered a pointed defense of the intervention. "Civilization doesn't abdicate in face of barbarism," he said. The faculty then held a formal vote on his resignation. The motion failed, 140 to 25, with 32 abstentions. Peter P. Gabriel then resigned as dean of the School of Management in protest of Silber's leadership. On the 5th of December 1972, fifteen BU Student Government officers began a three-day hunger strike at Marsh Chapel. They demanded that Silber file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Herbert Amendment.

  On the 16th of March 1978, approximately 900 students gathered at the George Sherman Union. They were protesting a $400 tuition increase and a $150 rise in housing charges. The board of trustees had announced these increases nine days earlier, on March 7. Protesters entered the building from two entrances, trapping forty trustees and ten university administrators for more than thirty minutes. The arrest of a nineteen-year-old student named Joshua Grossman followed. On the 5th of April 1979, several hundred faculty members joined clerical workers and librarians in a strike. Faculty sought a labor contract; clerical workers and librarians sought union recognition. The strike ended by mid-April under terms favorable to the employees. The Daily Free Press, the independent student newspaper that has published since 1970, ranks today as the fourth largest daily newspaper in Boston.

• 6. The Research University

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  In 2024, Boston University reported $579.5 million in total research awards. In fiscal year 2023, it ranked 16th among private American institutions for research and development expenditures. Funding sources included the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Defense, the European Commission, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. The university's primary research focus runs across seven areas: data science, engineering biology, global health, infectious diseases, neuroscience, photonics, and urban health. In 2017, the NSF awarded BU a $20 million grant over five years to establish an Engineering Research Center. The center's goal is to bioengineer functional heart tissue. David Bishop, a professor of physics and computer and electrical engineering, directs the center.

  The National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, or NEIDL, was established after a 2003 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The facility operates biosafety level 2, 3, and 4 labs, enabling researchers to work safely with the most dangerous known pathogens. In October 2022, NEIDL became the center of a public controversy. Researchers there modified the original COVID-19 virus by adding spike proteins from the Omicron variant. The resulting hybrid proved more lethal to lab mice than Omicron itself. It was, however, less lethal than the original strain. Some scientists called the work gain-of-function research; others argued it did not technically meet that definition. Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University said directly: "These are unquestionably gain-of-function experiments." The researchers had secured internal approval and city of Boston approval, but had failed to notify the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which funded the lab.

  In 2016, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services selected BU's School of Law to lead CARB-X. The program is a $350 million trans-Atlantic public-private partnership aimed at developing new antibiotics. Kevin Outterson, a BU professor of law, heads the effort. CARB-X received an additional $370 million in funding in May 2022. In July 2020, Boston University appointed Ibram X. Kendi as a history professor and founding director of the Center for Antiracist Research. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey donated $10 million to the center. Kendi was named a MacArthur fellow in 2021, receiving a grant of $625,000 split over five years. On the 2nd of March 2025, a BU research instrument called LEXI, the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager, landed on the moon aboard NASA's Blue Ghost lunar lander. Brian Walsh is the project's principal investigator. LEXI sends data on Earth's magnetic shield back to Boston University for analysis. In April 2025, BU debuted BEACON, an open-access biothreats surveillance network developed with HealthMap at Boston Children's Hospital. Following the United States's withdrawal from the World Health Organization, several state health departments turned to BEACON. They used it as a trusted source of information on international infectious disease.

• 7. Ice and Championships

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  The Boston University men's ice hockey team has won five NCAA championships, the most recent in 2009. Hall-of-famer Jack Parker coached the team for forty seasons. His program became a significant supplier of talent to the NHL and to the 1980 United States Olympic men's hockey team, which won gold. The Terriers have also won 32 Beanpot titles, more than any other team in a tournament that includes Harvard University, Boston College, and Northeastern University. In January 2010, BU defeated Boston College at Fenway Park by a score of 3-2, a game played one week after the NHL Winter Classic.

  Two BU alumni have been selected first overall in the NHL draft. Rick DiPietro was chosen first overall by the New York Islanders in 2000. In July 2024, Macklin Celebrini went first overall to the San Jose Sharks. He became the second Terrier to be drafted at the top of the NHL draft. The women's rowing program has won two national championships, in 1991 and 1992. The Agganis Arena, named for Harry Agganis, opened to concerts and hockey games in January 2005. It seats 6,224 spectators for Terrier hockey, replacing the smaller Walter Brown Arena. The BU women's ice hockey team won its first Beanpot in 1981 and its second in 2019, thirty-eight years later.