On a bright October afternoon, Conte Forum filled with faculty in academic dress, students in sweaters, and rows of Jesuits in black. The Rev. John T. Butler took the oath and the chain of office and became the Boston College president, the 26th person to hold the title and the first to be inaugurated on this campus in the twenty first century. Outside, the maples along Commonwealth Avenue had started to turn. Inside, the arena that usually hosts hockey and basketball had been dressed for a quieter contest: a university stating, in public, what kind of Catholic institution it intends to be.
An arena turned toward ritual
Conte Forum is built for noise. On ordinary nights the boards shake and the student section stands for an entire period. For the inauguration the floor was covered, the lighting lowered, and the procession entered to organ and choir rather than a goal horn. University officials described the gathering as the first inauguration of its kind at Boston College in this century, a fact that landed with particular force on a campus where many undergraduates were not yet born when the last such ceremony might have been held.
Inaugurations are theater, and universities know it. They are also contracts. A new president accepts a seal, a charge from the trustees, greetings from faculty and students, and the expectation that the words spoken under the lights will be remembered when budgets tighten. Father Butler’s installation followed that old pattern. What distinguished the afternoon was the gap it closed. A generation of students, and a fair number of younger faculty, had never seen the office conferred in this way.
The office, not the personality cult
American campuses have a habit of treating a presidency as a brand. Boston College has usually resisted that habit, at least in public. The Jesuit model asks the person in the office to be visible and also to disappear into the work: teaching, governance, the care of souls, the raising of money, the defense of academic freedom inside a religious mission. Father Butler steps into a role that is pastoral and managerial at once. The ceremony made that double duty plain without pretending the two tasks are easy to hold together.
I have sat through enough academic processions to recognize the script. What stays with a reporter is not the Latin, if any is used, but the faces in the middle rows: parents who drove in from Worcester or Providence, alumni who measure the school against the one they attended, and students who are calculating whether the promises on stage will touch their financial aid, their laboratories, or their chapel.
A Jesuit university in a secular city
Boston College was founded in 1863 by the Society of Jesus, in a city that was then defining itself through immigrant parishes, public schools, and a fierce argument about who belonged. The college moved from the South End to Chestnut Hill and grew into a national research university while keeping a religious name on the letterhead. That combination is the institution’s pride and its recurring argument. Parents choose it for the network and the Mass. Scholars choose it for colleagues and libraries. Neighbors encounter it as a landowner, an employer, and a traffic pattern.
A president in this setting does not get to pick one audience. The inauguration gathered them in one bowl of seats and asked them to applaud the same man. That is useful symbolism. It is not a settlement. Questions about curriculum, campus ministry, speech, and the place of Catholic social teaching in a research agenda do not retire when the choir sits down.
Succession after a long season
Boston College has known long presidencies. Continuity can be a gift. Buildings rise, campaigns close, and a style of leadership becomes the weather. It can also delay a reckoning. When a successor is finally installed, the campus does not only greet a person. It greets the end of a habit. Departments that learned how to win arguments under the previous administration must learn a new tempo. Donors listen for continuity of gratitude and for any hint of a different spending map.
The search that produced a Boston College president is never only a personnel matter. It is a statement about whether the trustees want a caretaker, a builder, or a missionary with a spreadsheet. The public event at Conte Forum did not publish the search committee’s private ranking. It did announce that the board was ready to put a name, a face, and a Jesuit vocation at the front of the institution again, in full view of the city.
Students who inherited the ritual
For undergraduates, a presidency is mostly weather. They feel it in housing lotteries, in the tone of campus email, in whether a controversial speaker is welcomed or quietly discouraged, and in the price printed on a bill. Few of them will attend another inauguration before they graduate. That makes the afternoon less a reunion than an introduction. The students who processed, spoke, or simply watched from the upper seats were meeting the office as a living arrangement rather than a Wikipedia entry.
Student speakers at such events tend to ask for the same things, and the repetition does not make the requests small: affordable study, mental health care that is more than a slogan, a campus where faith is available without being compulsory, and faculty who have time to teach. A wise president treats those requests as the syllabus for the first year, not as decoration for a program.
Faculty, research, and a Catholic argument
Boston College’s academic ambition is no longer a regional footnote. Laboratories, law, nursing, education, theology, and the humanities all claim a share of attention and of scarce new lines. A Catholic university that wants serious research must protect inquiry that does not flatter the chapel. It must also be able to say, without embarrassment, why theology and ethics are not guests at someone else’s party. That balance is the intellectual work of the presidency, and it is harder than a capital campaign because it cannot be solved with a single gift.
Faculty will judge Father Butler less by the prose of an inaugural address than by appointments, tenure cases, and whether disagreement is treated as disloyalty. The Jesuit tradition has a vocabulary for this: discernment, the presupposition of good will, a preference for depth over noise. Those words earn their keep only if they survive contact with a contentious department meeting.
The price of a degree in this city
No serious account of a university inauguration in Boston can skip cost. Families across the country already treat private higher education as a wager. In this metro area the wager includes rent, transit, and a labor market that rewards credentials and still leaves many graduates anxious. A president does not set the national price of college alone. He does set priorities: how large the aid budget grows relative to buildings, how transfer students are welcomed, how frankly the university speaks about debt.
Alumni who remember earlier decades said a Boston College president is both pastor and executive, which is a polite way of saying the job includes asking for money and deciding who is spared from paying full fare. The moral claim of a Jesuit school is weakest when it celebrates service in the abstract and leaves access to chance. The strongest version of the mission treats financial aid as a work of justice, not as a marketing line.
The city as neighbor, not backdrop
Chestnut Hill looks leafy from the lawn above the reservoir. The university’s footprint is wider than the postcard. Employees commute from Dorchester, Quincy, Waltham, and beyond. Students rent in Allston and Brighton. Political leaders in Boston and Newton watch expansion plans the way they watch any large institution with land and ambition. No Boston College president can treat the city as scenery. The relationship includes taxes and payments in lieu of them, construction, policing, and the ordinary frictions of a residential neighborhood beside a campus that comes alive in September and goes quiet in May.
An inauguration is a chance to invite mayors, pastors, and neighborhood representatives into the official story. Whether that invitation becomes a practice depends on the calendar after October. Office hours in the community, not only in the tower, are how a president learns which complaints are chronic and which are new.
Athletics and the public face
Holding the ceremony in Conte Forum was practical and also telling. Sport is one of the ways Boston College enters living rooms that will never read a theology journal. Hockey, basketball, and football carry alumni emotion and a measurable share of the brand. They also consume attention that academic leaders sometimes resent and sometimes need. A president who ignores athletics misunderstands the culture. A president who lets athletics define the culture misunderstands the school.
The inauguration borrowed the arena and then asked it to behave like a church for a few hours. That borrowing is a small parable. The university’s public stages, athletic and academic, are the same institution. The task is to keep the educational purpose audible when the crowd is loudest.
What the first months will reveal
The test of a Boston College president arrives after the tents come down. Early choices are read as doctrine even when they are provisional: who remains in senior posts, which capital projects keep their place in line, how the president speaks when a national controversy lands on a Catholic campus, whether students can get a straight answer about safety and speech. Silence is also a choice, and campuses are skilled at interpreting it.
Father Butler does not need to reinvent Boston College in a semester. He does need to show that the office is occupied by someone who can listen without vanishing and decide without theater. The 26th president inherits a university with a strong name, a religious spine, a costly model, and a city that will not wait politely forever. The chain of office is light in the hand and heavy in the calendar.
A century’s first page
Calling the day the university’s first inauguration of this century is more than a scheduling note. It marks a reset in public memory. The people who will teach, study, and give during this presidency will tell the story of the institution from this afternoon forward, at least until the next procession. That is a burden and a mercy. Old arguments do not disappear, but they no longer have to be conducted entirely in the grammar of a previous era.
Father John Butler left Conte Forum as the president, not as a candidate. The maples will finish turning. The hockey season will reclaim the floor. What remains is the ordinary, exacting work of a Jesuit university in Boston: to educate, to argue in good faith, to keep the poor and the seeking in view, and to make the promises of an October afternoon true in February.