Psychology professor Elizabeth Kensinger’s finding that human beings remember sad events with greater clarity than happy events relied, in part, on baseball fans’ recollections of the final game of the 2004 American League Championship Series. Red Sox fans are today fuzzy on the details; Yankee fans remain quite clear. Pollock Matters, which drew international attention at the McMullen Museum this fall, was one of the Boston Globe’s top 10 exhibits of 2007. In a joint venture with the Forest Service (and University Libraries), the Urban Ecology Institute launched an online journal, Cities and the Environment. The most downloaded article from the inaugural issue was “Improving Resolution of Census Data in Metropolitan Areas using a Dasymetric Approach.” The American Academy of Nursing named Connell School professor Callista Roy, CSJ, a “Living Legend” for her work on theories of professional practice. The AHANA Office established an award in the name of its former director, Donald Brown, who spent 27 years at Boston College. The annual honor will be made to a senior who has advanced the well-being of AHANA students. Boston College won its first ACC athletics title courtesy of men’s soccer, which had been picked to finish seventh in a nine-team league and capped its ACC season by beating number one–ranked Wake Forest, 2–1. Richard J. Clifford, SJ, the author of books on Psalms and Proverbs, was named first dean of the School of Theology and Ministry, which will open its doors on the Brighton Campus in the fall of 2008. Using a “Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index” of its own devise, a company that sells benchmarking services to universities announced its discovery that the Boston College English department was third best in the nation, behind only Boston University and Harvard. Members of the English department were publicly and privately discreet about this unexpected panegyric, as were faculty down Commonwealth Avenue. The last National Research Council rankings placed Harvard second in the nation, and neither BU nor BC within hailing distance of the leaders. A select few thousand of the 17 million words that the Back Bay recluse Arthur Inman (1895–1963) poured into his famous 155-volume diary were set to music by faculty member Thomas Oboe Lee for an opera The Inman Diaries that premiered in Boston. Law dean John Garvey began his one-year term as the 106th president of the American Association of Law Schools. The makeshift-looking wood staircase that had for 25 or so years carried pedestrian traffic between the McElroy parking lot and the Upper Campus is gone. Said to have been built for the commuting convenience of academic vice president J.A. Panuska, SJ (1979–82), whose office was on College Road across from the staircase landing, the structure was summarily eulogized by a facilities official as “a slip-and-slide hazard.” Patrick Rombalski, vice president for student affairs at John Carroll University, will assume the same position at Boston College beginning in June, replacing Cheryl Presley, who left the University last spring. Boston Herald editorialists liked Boston College’s recently released 10-year campus master plan very well. Globe editors did not. Headlined “Not a good neighbor policy,” the paper’s unsigned editorial drew part of its steam from what it called Boston College students’ “well-earned reputation for hard drinking and loud partying.” A temperate response from the editor of the Heights subsequently appeared as a letter to the editor. The tale of the $1.6 billion growth plan was reported in newspapers from New York City to China. Fourth graders in the Russian Federation, Hong Kong, and the Canadian province of Alberta led the field in an international study of childhood literacy compiled by researchers at the Lynch School. External research funding reached a record $51.6 million in 2007, supporting some 400 projects. The largest single award was $2.7 million from the Social Security Administration to the Center for Retirement Research. The smallest was $1,560 from the Department of Labor to fund an intern at the Graduate School of Social Work, which itself, it’s only fair to state, received more than $3 million in funding. z “And I got to tell you, Dean Boynton and that management school—those guys are fabulous! How great is he!” enthused Mad Money’s Jim Cramer in a November 9 network shout-out to the Carroll School that was provoked by “a big Boston College boo-yah” from a caller identified as “Jason in Massachusetts.” Cramer taped one of his CNBC shows in Conte Forum in September 2006. The map that accompanied the University’s campus plan proposal (see “Big Picture“) indicated that 14 of the remaining 24 Mods, which began their lives as temporary housing in 1970, will survive the next 10 years. None are expected to survive another 10, which will leave Modland a green commons.

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