Gasson Hall renovators presented William Cunningham, Jr.’57 with a 125-pound block of stone that they had removed from the bell tower and on which Cun­ningham’s late father had once-upon-a-time penciled “Bill Cunningham BC ’26.” Barbara Hazard, nursing dean since 1991, will retire in June. Athletics has designed a hockey and basketball ticket-sales “point system” that will advantage students who attend games against Sacred Heart and Duke (for examples) with equal fidelity. “Barack Obama leads the way in BC donations” from faculty and staff, according to Heights reporter Reeves Wiedeman’s reading of this fall’s Federal Election Commission report on presidential campaigns. Obama’s campaign take was $5,510 from donors who claimed Boston College as an employer, while Chris Dodd received $3,800. On the Republican side, Sam Brownback earned $2,300. An air-conditioning system for Conte Forum is being designed following the second annual late-fall cancellation of an ice hockey game due to heavy fog. A “Police Blotter” note from October 14 read: “A report was filed at Greycliff Hall regarding an oven fire caused by a pizza box, which had been placed in the oven in order to heat the pizza.” Greycliff used to be the Honors Program dorm but clearly is no longer. The band Hellogoodbye broke UGBC’s four-year fall concert drought with a Conte Forum performance in September, but it was not a universally celebrated breakthrough, the Heights reporting that while the band is popular, “it just isn’t popular at BC.” Vanderslice Professor of Chemistry Ross Kelly was elected a fellow of the American Associ­ation for the Advancement of Science in recognition of “demonstrated excellence in research and teaching,” while Carlo Rotella, a professor of English, received a $50,000 Whiting Writers’ Award (a first for Boston College) for his 2003 book Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology, earned another BC first: an NIH Pioneer Award, which is made to scientists who are “well-positioned to make significant—and potentially transformative—discoveries.” The honor comes with $2.5 million in research support. Barrett studies emotion, and her most recent research includes a study of 101 money managers, published in the Academy of Management Journal, which showed that hot-headed investors made more money than did investors who proceeded with icy logic. A Homecoming Dance may be taking root as a Boston College tradition, with 1,300 students turning out for the third annual event, held in tents in the parking lot adjacent to the Mods (the Modlot to initiates). Men and women who earned doctorates from the economics department have recently landed faculty posts in Turkey, the Georgia Republic, Spain, and Canada, as well as the United States. The University’s e-mail servers suffered a collapse in October and could not be revived for two days, resulting in what some celebrated privately as an e-mail holiday. Approximately 50,000 messages were dammed up in the lines and later released in a flood that washed away all merriment. The profile of CSOM in BusinessWeek’s Best Undergraduate B-Schools (2007) featured two entities—Roggie’s Brew and Grille and the John F. Kennedy Library—under the heading “Anything to Do Nearby?” which likely challenges Einstein­ian notions of time and space but certainly marks the first time these two significant cultural institutions have nuzzled in one thought. The student government has hired a shuttle bus to carry students and their paper or plastic bags to and from the Beacon Street Star Market on Sunday afternoons. The locks in the Claver-Loyola-Xavier-Fenwick complex of freshman dorms were speedily replaced after a set of master keys was reported missing late one night in October. An investigation is ongoing. CSOM’s finance program, rated 13th in the country by U.S. News, was rated number one by the 855 Boston College undergraduates who chose a finance major this year and pushed the program past communication as the area of academic concentration most favored by BC students. Finance’s popularity notwithstanding, the College of Arts and Sciences this fall recorded its highest enrollment ever, 6,041, while the number of students enrolled in pre-med programs stood at 1,497, up 60 percent since 2000. Following the very public tasering of a University of Florida student, the Boston College Police Department disclosed that it does not employ tasers. Fueled by funds from the Gates Foundation, BC’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy has launched a study of philanthropic deeds and motives within households with net worths of $25 million and more. Following the fires of late October, the Alumni Association e-mailed the 2,650 alumni living in the San Diego area and invited them to report on their circumstances via the association’s website.

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