The Army calls it an "after-action" interview—the gathering of first-hand recollections from combatants, conducted by the service's own military historians in the wake of battle. The purpose is to preserve a record of events when more formal documentation seems scant or inadequate. For the past year, in a program sponsored by the University President's office, Boston College has been collecting "after-action" accounts too, from faculty and staff who served BC in the pivotal, sometimes tumultuous, two and a half decades from the end of World War II through the student protests of the early 1970s.

The oral history project, entitled "The Critical Years," has so far produced 23 taped and transcribed interviews with retired or current BC professors and administrators. The interviews are being preserved in the University archives at the Burns Library. Interviewees were given the option of imposing a 10-year embargo on their accounts, but some have opted for immediate release. The project will continue into the coming year.

A corps of six graduate history students carried out the interviews. Half are at work on dissertations set in colonial New England, and at first they found the prospect of putting questions to a historical subject who could talk back somewhat daunting.

But the experience in fact proved refreshing, according to interviewer John Dennehy. He's researching "Post-Revolutionary Massachusetts under Governor James Sullivan" for his dissertation, but says he now wants to start an oral history program in his town of Braintree, Massachusetts. Associate professor of history Deborah Levenson-Estrada prepared the students with a series of training sessions (including one where they practiced on each other), held in the third-floor conference room at Hovey House. "Oral history is probably less fluff than you might think," she told the students accustomed to mining terse documents and sparse correspondence. "It's just as subjective as census reports. In fact, all objective sources are more interesting for their subjectivity: Why, for example, did the census ask about race this way? In oral history, you're right on top of it. You can ask."

Before the students set out into the field, the University Historian Thomas H. O'Connor '49, who has been a member of BC's history faculty for some 50 years, briefed them on the period to be covered--and served as their first interviewee. O'Connor portrayed the years 1958-68 (the term of the Michael Walsh, SJ, presidency at BC) in particular as a time when colleges everywhere, and Catholic ones especially, were asking the big questions: "What do we want to be? Where do we want to go? Holy Cross made a conscious decision," he said, "not to become a university. BC made a different decision." That decision was to place a new emphasis at BC on graduate and professional programs and to attract a national student body. O'Connor described the fractious two-tier faculty that resulted: "The old style, excellent teachers with terminal M.A.'s; the incoming hot-shot Ph.D.'s, teaching fewer hours, doing research." He talked about tight money and financial naíveté in the face of ambitious campus construction goals. And he recounted "the Troubles" at the dawn of the 1970s: "Student upheaval, the feminist movement, the black civil rights movement," and, of course, the student strike in the spring of 1970. "Some say Fr. Seavey Joyce [BC's Jesuit president from 1968 to 1972] wasn't equipped to cope with it. Well, who was?" said O'Connor rhetorically. "They spit presidents out by the minute. Look at Clark Kerr at the University of California."

It was an era that began with a relatively small crew of faculty and administrators filling multiple jobs. Middle management was virtually nonexistent, and much that happened went unrecorded.

Good oral history, it has been said, preserves not just what people did but also what they wanted to do. And so the oral history of Boston College will contain ideas that failed to catch on and arguments that didn't carry the day: Tom O'Connor's preference, in the 1950s, for example, for renaming the institution Campion University; Vincent Nuccio's proposal in the 1960s for a BC off-ramp from the MassPike. The former executive assistant to Fr. Walsh and professor in the School of Education recalls another idea that was floated, whereby BC would be the centerpiece of a Catholic University of New England, formed by mergers with local schools. Romance language professor Rebecca Valette remembers her suggestion in the late 1960s (deflected at the time by a dean) that women faculty be paid the same as men. Economics professor Harold Petersen registers the deep disappointment he shared with some others on the faculty at the decision to eliminate ROTC in 1970.

Their differences notwithstanding, the 23 individuals who accepted the written invitation to participate in the oral history project comprise a self-selected group. They saw Boston College's potential, embraced its essence, and elected to commit themselves to making it grow.

At a simple ceremony held in the Thompson Room of Burns Library on May 7, their collected memories, encased in a dark wooden box from a store called Hold Everything, were handed by University President William P. Leahy, SJ, to librarian Robert O'Neill for preservation. Most of the participants were there, an assemblage dressed mainly in dark suits and clerical collars, with a rare skirt and splash of pink, seated together in a special section before the podium. "Through your cooperation and remembering," Fr. Leahy told them, "you've given us a way of looking at this institution and by extension at this nation." Three students, members of the Class of 2002, read excerpts from non- embargoed transcripts. Afterwards, the participants milled about, laughing and talking, greeting one another with pats on the back. Overheard in snatches of conversation were phrases tantalizing to the oral historian:
"We used to . . ." and "You would never be able to get away with . . . ."

Anna Marie Murphy

Interview excerpts that were read at the May 7 event appear in The Full Story, at the BCM Web site.

Oral history contributors, with University President William P. Leahy, SJ. From left: James P. McIntyre, Leahy, Vincent Nuccio, Albert Folkard, David Twomey, Donald White, Thomas OÕConnor, Robert Daly, SJ, James Skehan, SJ, Mary Hawes, William McInness, SJ, Joseph Appleyard, SJ, Edward Hanrahan, SJ, John Mahoney, and Harold Peterson

Photo by Lee Pellegrini


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