INDEX
INSIDE
Vol. CIII, No. 18 © 2021, The Heights, Inc. www.bcheights.com Estalished 1919
THIS ISSUE
NEWS...........A2 ARTS...........A6 METRO........A4 OPINIONS.....A8 MAGAZINE....A5 SPORTS.........A9
www.bcheights.com
Monday, November 8, 2021
Chestnut Hill, Mass.
SPORTS
ARTS The Bostonians commemorate 35 years of a capella, making it the oldest group on BC’s campus.
Men’s hockey fails to follow a win, losing its second game of the weekend against Merrimack 4–3.
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A10
BC Mourns Former CSOM Professor Kent Wosepka HALEY HOCKIN Special Projects Editor
GRAPHIC BY OLIVIA CHARBONNEAU
Kent Wosepka, a former finance professor at Boston College who died on Oct. 31 after a bicycle accident in Texas, was a greatly respected teacher and colleague, according to Ronnie Sadka. “He was a truly fantastic teacher,” Sadka, a professor in the finance department, said. “He made a difference and will be dearly missed.” Wosepka taught at BC for three years, from 2017 to 2020. As a part-time professor, he taught the graduate level course
Management of Financial Institutions. “He was referred to us from a friend and trustee at BC and we had worked with him in the past,” Sadka said. “He decided that he wanted to retire from the banking industry and do something different, and one of the ways he talked about giving back [was] maybe teaching part time.” Shruthi Sriram, Ethan Raye, Grace Beneke, Spencer Daniszewski, and Sofia Laboy contributed to reporting for this story.
See Wosepka, A2
BC Falls In ‘Forbes’ Ranking
NEWS
NINA KHAGHANY Heights Staff
Boston College fell nine spots from 2019 in this year’s Forbes America’s Top Colleges list to No. 56, dropping out of the U.S. top 50. Forbes also placed BC at No. 37 for private colleges, and No. 26 for colleges in the Northeast, excluding it from the top 25 after its return to this margin in 2019. BC competitor schools also saw significant drops in rankings. The University of Notre Dame ranked No. 41, a significant decrease from its previous ranking at No. 18 in 2019. Georgetown University is now No. 21—compared to No. 15 in 2019—and Boston University dropped
nine spots to No. 83. This year’s list saw a shift in spots for many colleges and universities, as Forbes’ compilers decided on a new methodology to account for low-income student outcomes. Unlike 2019, the new methodology features seven metrics instead of six. These seven categories are weighed in percentages to correlate to each category’s relative importance. Alumni salary accounted for 20 percent of the score, comparing each school’s average alumni salary for the first six to 10 years after graduation. Fifteen percent portions of the total score can be attributed to average federal student loan debt per alumni borrower, average time students
spent paying their college costs—or their “return on investment—” average graduation rate, and the number of alumni who are placed on a Forbes American Leaders List. The college’s retention rate accounts for 10 percent, and the final 10 percent is the average students’ academic success. Forbes noted that the 2021 list would see a significant shift in tradition, for the first time placing a public university—the University of California, Berkeley—in first place, dethroning Harvard University. Forbes reiterated that this change was due to its attempt to re-evaluate colleges and universities amid COVID-19 in 2020. The new list aimed to reflect the marginal difference in higher education in the emerging post-COVID-19 world.
SPORTS
Irish Studies, Smith Host Book Launch ERIN SHANNON Copy Chief ELIZA HERNANDEZ For The Heights
In 2008, James Smith received a phone call from a woman who had just read his book, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment, which describes the history of the Roman Catholic Church’s institutions for “fallen women” throughout Irish history. Recognizing her own story in the text, the woman asked Smith, an associate professor of English and Irish Studies at Boston C, “What are we going to do about this?” “So suddenly, an academic intellectual project took on a different character, [a] more advocacy and activism role,” Smith said. “At each turn, as the five of us began
working to try and affect justice, and to bring about redress and an apology.” On Thursday, Nov. 4, BC Irish Studies department hosted a virtual book launch for Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice, a new book co-authored by Smith. This book, according to Smith, is a record of the campaign that a group of academic activists fought on behalf of women—an estimated 30,000—who endured human rights violations while housed in the infamous Magdalene institutions. Speculation about the laundries began in 1993, when 155 unmarked graves were discovered on the grounds of one of the secretive institutions. The laundries were said to house “fallen women,” a term that included prostitutes, women who had sex outside of marriage, and pregnant, unmarried
Jurkovec Returns To Alumni
See Ireland, A2
See Football, A9