Boston College has opened a new small two-year residential junior college for low-income first-generation students. There is so much here to admire: A small supportive cohort, many faculty who were themselves first-generation students. Full scholarships for financial need, transfer agreements to finish four-year degrees at Boston College. A lovely, recently renovated historic campus and a residential experience for students who are too often commuters managing too many responsibilities.
I learned that students have access to the activities on the nearby Boston College campus. Laptops, health insurance, and meal plans are covered for students who can't afford them. The Dean, a Jesuit priest, recruited students from regional low-income communities and describes the school as an extension of the Jesuit founding of Boston College in service of the children of low-income Catholic immigrants.
There is a long history of women's colleges nurturing community and leadership relatively free of the sexism and exclusion still constraining women on conventional campuses. HBCUs nurture multi-generational community and networks on campus built on a shared understanding of how racism undermines success on other campuses and --importantly – will undermine success beyond college. In each, students learn to understand the structural inequalities that work against students like them and to navigate obstacles that they've been taught to better see.
We learn in these articles that the curriculum at Messina College supports students in developing academic skills that their high schools may not have taught and affirms their sense of belonging in college. It seems to do both well.
Yet we do not learn about what the campus is sheltering students from. Boston College was founded by the Jesuits as a welcoming place for Irish and other immigrants at a time of deep religious and ethnic discrimination. Implicit in the glowing descriptions of the students' experience at Messina is a similar goal of Messina is sheltering, but unlike women's colleges and HBCUs, or Boston College in 1863, we do not learn about what makes low-income students otherwise less safe on conventional campuses. I would love to know about what the students are taught about why they'd be less likely to develop to their full potential on the central campus a 15 minute walk away. I'd love to know if they learn about classism or about persistent and growing economic inequalities that mattered in their access to quality schooling and in navigating college. That seems important to the mission, yet even in the excellent press that this new campus is getting, we don't know what students are learning about why campuses like this are so important.
As in so much of the rest of higher education, a campus organized to usher students beyond the obstacles of social class inequalities seems not to be talking about social class inequalities as it rolls out its impressive new campus.
