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In the ninth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with David Quigley, Professor of History, Provost, and Dean of Faculties at Boston College. As the chief academic officer, Quigley opens by exploring how he seeks to foster cultures reflective of the unique foci held by a myriad of academic units at Boston College while also striving to foster a culture across those units reflective of the charisms of the founding order, the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits. As an example, he discusses Boston College’s commitment to formative education and how such a process is expressed in the reform and advancement of the core curriculum. Ream and Quigley then discuss Quigley’s calling to history, the teachers and scholars who nurtured it, and the ways Quigley seeks to express that calling through teaching, writing, and service. One way Quigley has sought to express that vocation is by exploring the riches in his childhood hometown of New York City, his present hometowns of Boston and Cambridge, and the creation of means on and beyond the Boston College campus for various publics to appreciate those riches. Some of those recent means include walking tours of Boston for new members of the Boston College faculty and for undergraduate students enrolled in the courses Quigley teaches in the core curriculum. Quigley then discusses the discernment process that led him from service as a full-time faculty member to a full-time administrator along with his commitment to continue to teach at least one course a year. Ream and Quigley close their conversation by exploring Quigley’s vision for the academic vocation, his vision for the academic vocation for Boston College’s faculty, and the relationship those visions share with the Society of Jesus and the Archdiocese of Boston.
- Mary Thomas Crane, David Quigley, and Andy Boynton’s (eds.) Curriculum by Design: Innovation and the Liberal Arts Core (Fordham University Press, 2023)
- David Quigley’s Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy (Hill and Wang, 2003)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is David Quigley, Professor of History, Provost, and Dean of Faculties for Boston College. Thank you for joining us.
David Quigley: Thanks so much for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.
Todd Ream: Established during the middle of the Civil War, Boston College has grown to nine colleges and schools, 9,000 undergraduate students, and 5,000 graduate and professional students. In addition to BC’s standing among American research universities, it’s also one of the leading Jesuit and Catholic research universities in the world.
As BC’s chief academic officer, in what ways, if any, do you determine how those colleges and schools should foster and exercise their own cultures? And in what ways should they share in a culture fostered across the Boston College campus and community?
David Quigley: It’s a great question. And I arrived at Boston College almost 30 years ago in the late 1990s as a new faculty member. And so it’s in the middle of my third decade of getting up to speed and learning about the richness of the Jesuit educational tradition. So one of the joys of my job trying to lead the nine schools and colleges across the university is respecting the local particularities, the variousness of not just the schools and colleges, but the departments, the program within them, but also trying to call up using common language to talk about the shared project that we’re called to kind of work together to advance.
And so when we’re working in individual units with the deans and the department chairs and faculty, it’s trying to think about questions of curriculum, public programming on and off campus, ways of supporting research, thinking about how do we continue building the richness of the curriculum, the different elements of the university for our students, for the various publics that we serve, but then also trying to draw in meaningful and powerful ways on the traditions, the local traditions of Boston College, but even more.
And as a historian by trade, as you mentioned, the 500 year project that has been Jesuit Catholic education has been one of the great blessings of my career as, as historian, as professor, and now as provost for going on my 11th year now is to think about how do we pull on those centuries of learning across space and time, the ways in which so many religious lay men, lay women in so many different settings across the globe have committed to this kind of shared project and trying to bring it to meaningful life in the 21st century.
One of my favorite elements of the Jesuit tradition as I’ve gotten to know it better and better is the centrality and kind of the elevation of the imagination as a particularly rich resource for thinking about what we’re doing as individual faculty members or at kind of the more local level, but then also how are we, how do we pull together that sense of the past and heritage and tradition in meaningful and I, one hopes, life giving conversation with the possibilities of the present.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You mentioned the Jesuit emphasis on the imagination. How would you define the charisms that have defined the Jesuits and in what ways has their influence changed over the course of the latter half of the 20th century?
David Quigley: Before I arrived here in the late nineties, I’d never been lucky enough to have been educated at a Jesuit institution, but I had a number of friends who had gone either to high school or colleges. And I was always impressed by especially their Latin and Greek, but the kind of commitment to intellectual rigor that has kind of stood the test of time. So as an outsider and now a bit of an insider, that commitment to the life of the mind and the intellectual scholarly charism within all the various orders and societies in the Catholic Church, I think that’s something that’s quite rich.
The other piece that I knew about, but I’ve been so lucky to be able to take advantage of, is the worldliness, the ways in which Jesuits have done education around the globe, not just in the modern age, but going back to the 16th century. You think of Matteo Ricci, Francis Xavier, the first companions of St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits in the 16th century, who don’t just travel around Europe and the Mediterranean world, but are establishing schools in East Asia, South Asia, Latin America. We see in the 16th and 17th century, an amazing global scale to the Jesuit operation. So those are the two elements, the distinguishing features of Jesuit institutions that I knew about a bit before I came here, so many others that I’d talk about.
And the one that I’ve probably come to most appreciate in my time as a BC faculty member and administrator is the kind of emphasis on reflection and contemplation within the Catholic tradition. I think St. Ignatius stands out for his commitment to retreat, the spiritual exercises that every Jesuit does at least twice in the course of their life in their early formation. And then later on in their career as Jesuit.
I was lucky enough a year and a half ago to go on a 30-day experience of the spiritual exercises, which is one of the great gifts of my time in academic life. It really, I was 25 years at BC time to the 30th anniversary of my marriage with Megan. It was just a perfect way of stepping back. But what I’ve always been impressed by, in some ways, marvel at with my Jesuit colleagues on campus, Is their regular commitment to usually seven or eight day annual retreats away from campus and how they come back to campus so fueled, kind of animated to return to the work and to bring the gifts of that retreat, that contemplation and discernment to the work of teaching, leading, administering, doing their own research. So that’s been especially important.
And again, I could go on all day about the various charisms and the way in which the Jesuits with A.M.D.G., with Cura Personalis, other key kind of phrases in the Jesuit tradition. The one that really has resonated with me in the last few years is the end of the last decade, the Society of Jesus at the global level articulated four universal apostolic preferences, and they all have real power. But one in particular, and partly because my kids are now close to be 27, 24, 21 year old young men, but we’re in kind of adolescence-into college when they were articulated. And the one that stuck with me is the kind of call to accompany young people in building a hope-filled future. And I just see that is so central to what we’re doing in all aspects of our work at BC, across the 27 Jesuit colleges and universities in the States and the more than 100 around the world.
It was prescient to put that language out before the pandemic and all the various intersecting crises that our young people and our faculty and staffs are dealing with at home in their communities, but to place that absolute emphasis on our responsibility, our obligation to think about how do we in a mature, wise fashion, bring wisdom to the work of thinking about hope in the modern age.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate that.
As detailed in Curriculum by Design, Innovation, and the Liberal Arts Core, a volume you, Mary Thomas Crane, and Andy Boynton edited and published in 2023, Boston College dared to go where faculty often know they should dare to go, but resist going. Curriculum reform. That process began in 2012, two years prior to your installation as provost.
As a Jesuit and Catholic research university, in what ways, if any, did that process seek to honor the cultures that define BC’s nine colleges and schools? And in what ways did it create and tighten the BC community as a whole?
David Quigley: A little bit of biography, autobiography to frame this a little bit. I did not have the courage of my convictions as a 17-year-old high school senior to go to a place that had no core curriculum, a place like Brown University, I suppose. But I chose Amherst College, which was a wonderful undergraduate institution, but it only had one requirement. And if there’s some learning I’ve had in the last 40 plus years, it’s the importance of an institution committing to some kind of shared conversation. Some basic set of commitments, intellectual approaches, disciplinary strengths that will make sense of the place for the young people who are lucky enough to come here. So partly I entered into core revision with that bias towards kind of having come to recognize maybe later than I should have, just how important such a curriculum can be.
I will also add that we’re very lucky to have Father Jack Butler as our university vice president for mission and ministry, a Jesuit priest. And he always talks about In the context of formative education, forming young people, that faculty, the work we do in classes, we’re the primary formators, that the formation that goes on in the classroom enables all other formation at a school like BC. And so I’ve always thought that the curriculum is the primary tool we have, the platform where we can reach students and help them kind of find new ways, new, new, new outlets for their passions, for their talents, new ways of thinking about the world, new, new ways of coming into the fullness of their possibilities to, to move towards the flourishing that Jesuit education is hoping to kind of help students achieve. So I think that that helped fuel what we were doing.
I also can say when I was a young faculty member in the history department back in the late nineties and early two thousands, I was a little naive. I think it’s why I ended up in administration. I always enjoyed the conversations about what we were doing with the major, what our curriculum was. I think my second or third year I was leading a curriculum revision within the department that I remained proud of. I kind of always found it enjoyable, even as there are all sorts of headaches and scars that attach to kind of curriculum revision.
When we got to 2011, 2012, Mary, a wonderful Shakespeare scholar, Mary Crane, Andy Boynton, the Dean of our Carroll School of Management to close friends, we went through a year long conversation about the core and what was frustrating in that year. And again, I just talked about the glory of the imagination in Jesuit Catholic education is the lack of imagination that was being brought to the table. My shorthand for that was so many wonderful, talented, brilliant colleagues who we would go to meetings with all year. And more than any other set of meetings, you knew what people were going to say before they opened their mouths. Their kind of disciplinary commitments or protection of turf or kind of having been worn down over previous curriculum battles, kind of had shut down the sense of what we might be able to do.
And so we went forward. We actually partnered with a local innovation design firm in the area, which I think was a great kind of opening to breathe some new life into the conversations among faculty colleagues. And it created what we’re in the 10th year of that renewal of the core curriculum, a set of courses. I’ve taught around five or six times over the years, kind of new courses for first-year students.
In some ways, the two new designs that we built in, a set of enduring questions courses, taking the kind of fundamental questions that have driven Jesuit Catholic education over 500 years, what is the good life? What is beauty? What is truth? What is our obligation to our neighbors? The fundamentals in the tradition going back millennia in the Catholic intellectual tradition. I think that that has been an essential piece of what we’ve been doing.
In those courses, we brought two faculty members from different disciplines to teach across different areas and to kind of grapple with some of those fundamentals. And we’ve also trying to help our students to think about what the tradition can mean in confronting the great vexing questions of the age, developed a whole set of larger courses, again, interdisciplinary that are around complex problems. A number of courses around challenges related to climate, of course, in this moment in time, the problems of democracy, economics, and inequality. It’s been a wonderful way of breathing energy and imagination into the core.
And I think the fundamental insight that we had, which as we continue to renew the core and what we’re doing there, is to respect the disciplines for what they bring to the table, not to go with a wrecking ball and destroy the previous curriculum, throw it entirely out, but respect that the 14 or so courses out of the 40 that undergraduates take here, largely driven by departments and disciplines, actually speaks to our way of celebrating, again, another element of the Jesuit tradition, finding God in all things, that helping students to understand that there are various paths to truth and to wisdom. And by recognizing the importance of holding on to those disciplinary footprints, it allowed us to think about connecting or having intersections between those ways of knowing in novel ways.
It’s been one of the great pleasures of my time at BC. We went into it with a real commitment that we could do better by engaging our students in the great payoff—thanks for holding up the book a few moments ago—is the levels of engagement with faculty. It’s been wonderful, both newer faculty to the university and more veteran folks like me who’ve really been, I think, re-energized around core teaching because of what we’ve been able to pull off.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For others engaged in core curriculum reform or on the cusp of engaging in core curriculum reform at Church-related colleges & universities, what advice would you offer? What practices, if any, would you encourage them to consider?
David Quigley: I think a certain pragmatism was helpful. I mean we wanted to open things up and say basically anything was going to be possible, but then at the end of the day where we had an enormously expansive set of possibilities, we back in 2014, 2015, 2016, really narrowed down to those areas where we thought would have the greatest impact, where we would be able to leverage our faculty talents and capacities in the most dramatic way.
And so trying to be realistic, pragmatic, focused in the early rollout, but then staying on top of it. I think that many, there are moments of curricular energy around these revisions, but then a kind of turning away for five, ten, some cases ten years, sometimes even longer. And I think it’s a kind of regular return. We’re having a few events this September to, this month, to kind of promote the ongoing renewal of the core, drawing new faculty ideas. So continuing to keep a spotlight and coming back with new possibilities, different elements of the core that have been renewed in their own way.
This past year and going forward, we’re really thinking about the experiences of our fourth-year students. And so in a perfect world, we could have waved a magic wand back in 2015 and gone after first-year, early-stage students and the seniors, we knew we weren’t going to be able to do it all quite so well. So taking time but remaining persistent, at least one lesson from the trenches here that seems to have worked.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I wanna ask you now a couple of questions about your development as a scholar. You already mentioned that you studied at Amherst College as an undergraduate studying history in particular, and then earned an MA and a PhD at NYU. When did you begin to discern a calling as a historian? And in particular, discern a calling as a 19th century American historian?
David Quigley: Oh wonderful question. I don’t think I’ve talked about too much in public over the years, but it’s, again, my first love and kind of led me to everything that’s come after.
Part of it, I would go back even before Amherst, I was just at a 40th high school reunion, which was great to get together with friends. Some I’ve stayed in touch with and others I haven’t seen since the Reagan administration, walking around the room about teachers who really moved us. And folks, we were really blessed to kind of connect with back in the early eighties. And the number of really remarkable history teachers. I had some in middle school. I was lucky enough, but especially in high school on the Jersey shore. So I think that was part of it.
Another, whatever you make of it in terms of my psychology, but as a child, as an adolescent, I was always drawn to spending time with elderly relatives, grandparents, great aunts, great uncles, friends of theirs. I would enjoy, it’s peculiar to say, but going to wakes or funerals, and kind of seeing those layers of family history and the kind of connections back over time. And I think I continue to value those kinds of generational points of connection, which certainly is a part of a kind of the depth of my commitment to why history really grabbed me and why it’s held me over these years.
As an undergraduate, I ended up actually majoring, not in history, but in American studies. Um, Amherst was one of the places in the era of World War II, University of Minnesota, Harvard, Amherst, launched what became the kind of American studies movement and became something different as the 20th century progressed. But as I arrived in the mid 1980s, it still had some of that early intellectual energy about bringing the different disciplines together to grapple with some fundamental questions about America, American society, American culture.
Going into undergraduate, I thought I’d be the editor of my high school newspaper. I thought either journalism or economics, I was going to do something along those lines. Economics, I was frustrated by some of the narrowness of how the discipline in my experience was kind of taught to undergrads, whereas a whole set of fascinating intellectual, but also moral questions kept popping up in doing undergraduate history.
There was a sophomore introduction to American studies course, I guess the second American studies course I took, which was New England. And it was just a wonderful class with someone who’s remained one of my great mentors for 40 years, Bob Gross, who writes a great deal about Concord, Massachusetts, both in the age of the Revolution, but also the transcendentalists.
And a series of wonderful materials, including Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas, his study of Boston during the busing period was just released then, and he was a visitor at Amherst for a week or two during that stretch and visited class. Confirming, meeting one of the great journalists of that age, but he was becoming more of a historian as he was, as he had worked on that project.
I remember reading Emerson and the other transcendentalists. And as a Catholic kid, an Irish-Italian kid from New Jersey, encountering Emerson and the other mid-19th century voices, grappling with their own faith traditions, the possibilities of American intellectual culture, coming to their own kind of conclusions, really set me on fire with the possibilities of what history could be.
My senior undergraduate thesis project, which in many ways confirmed what my path would be, became a study of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers. I studied the first Catholic worker project, Mary House in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1930s and a lot of the biography of Dorothy Day but in the context of the immigrant communities, both ethnic Catholics, but also the substantial Jewish community and other faith traditions that were swirling around the workers.
And so again, I was traveling back and forth from western Mass. down to some of the archives in New York City, listening to oral histories for some of those folks who were kind of my grandparents generation, describing what that was like and trying to figure out, okay, how do you do history? How do you write something? It was an imperfect project, but I’ve always been proud of it.
I went from there to teach in the New York City public schools and as a high school teacher for a few years. And in the course of that wonderful first job, I realized that I really had a burning passion to go on and do graduate school and eventually become a historian of all things.
Todd Ream: You began teaching history eventually at BC. And then shortly after being promoted to associate professor, you accepted some administrative duties, which eventually led you to serve as dean of what’s now BC’s Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences. What discernment process led you to make the transition from serving as a full-time faculty member to eventually serving as a full-time administrator?
David Quigley: I did a lot of things in my early years as a faculty member that the usual playbook for what you should do to get to tenure and beyond tells you not to do. I said yes more often than no folks from around campus who had interesting projects or initiatives. And for me, stepping into a university, the whole fun is the rich buffet of possibility. So as I said, I had taught in public schools and remain committed to teacher training in Boston, Cambridge, neighboring communities. So when the Lynch School of Education got a big grant from the Carnegie Foundation for the Teachers for a New Era, I rolled up my sleeves and partnered with them.
As I said, in the department, I had worked both on the undergraduate curriculum, ran the graduate program, worked on a wonderful partnership with the law school and the college of arts and sciences when I was an assistant professor, the U.S. government, first as USIA and then Fulbright, funded for the study of American democracy, bringing over 20 to 30 early career scholars at international universities. So people close to my age. Some people I visited around the world, in South America, in Europe, in Asia, a wonderful network of scholars. And so I would bring those groups down to New York City and do walking tours of some of the great sites of Lower Manhattan. And that, for me, was a lot of the fun.
Andy Boynton, who we talked about earlier, the Dean of the Carroll School, when he arrived as a new dean, he wanted to breathe some new life into the first year curriculum for business students. So I was one of two arts and science faculty who he brought in, and I was always drawn to that. And so, some of my favorite faculty colleagues at BC and at other universities are the folks who stay very much departmentally focused and on their own work. And thank God that universities and academic culture thrives because of that. We also need folks kind of like me who are drawn to kind of looking for connections and partnerships across campus.
The other thing that I’d say in terms of how I, I can’t quite say I was discerning it, but I was kind of beginning to see the possibilities in administration is there were just some wonderful academic administrators on the Boston College campus. I go back to my time teaching in New York City public schools, folks who really did the right thing, helped younger faculty do their best work. Some of the administrators I most admired folks who enjoyed stepping back and letting other colleagues really come to full flourishing in their scholarship, in their work on campus.
It was interesting to see some of those models. I should say, both back at John Jay High School in Brooklyn and my early years at BC, those administrators I knew who I most admired also always kept one foot in the classroom. So for all my years as dean and now as provost, I always teach at least one course a year, and I’m thankful for it.
I’m also especially exhausted in those semesters when I’m grading those papers in addition to the day job that I’m trying to hold down, but that’s the one commitment that I’ve made is as I’ve worked in administration, I draw such energy from working with students, and it’s just a such a powerful reminder of why we do the work we do.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Before you move on then, if I may, what course have you taught most recently and what did you enjoy the most about that course?
David Quigley: The course that I’ve taught the last two falls has been one of the enduring questions courses. The question we’ve cooked up a good friend of mine, Carlo Rotella in the English department, the meanings of Boston. And so we’ve always taught an upper class student interdisciplinary course history in English together, but in enduring questions. I do three credits of the meanings of Boston, meaning of what a city means from 1600 to basically yesterday, history and memory. Carlo does it, literature and film. And then we bring them together in various settings.
Two things I’d say, the walking tours have been powerfully instructive for me. Whenever we teach, Carlo and I, the larger class, we would always pick up around the Civil War because other colleagues did the earlier material in a pair. When we’ve done it together, starting the history in 1600, it’s bracing to see Catholicism arrive in Boston around 1800. It, it, I’d always known it and I’d always had it as a shorthand in my courses, but Boston, the entire project in so many ways was premised on a Puritan bastion in the North Atlantic and in so many ways, anti-Catholic, the entire vision of Boston in the 17th and 18th century gives way to something so different as you move on to the 19th century where Boston becomes one of the most Catholic communities and Boston College emerges from that.
So bringing students down to the original buildings, run six miles from where I’m sitting today where the college was founded in 1863, which for a Civil War historian is just such a powerful statement about a leap of faith that the founders of BC made back 161 years ago. It’s also informed in, in our work of trying to engage faculty around mission and thinking about how faculty are, as I said earlier primary format tours.
We’ve built for the first time this year, an instance in our new faculty orientation, of bringing new faculty around the city of Boston, a kind of version of that tour that out of the first-year course we’ve been doing the last couple of years.
You didn’t ask this, but the next course that I’m doing, I’m going to do, I’ve got to say, because I’m nailing down syllabus this week to get it in for the spring semester, is in our prison education program, which we launched a bachelor’s program at MCI-Shirley in 2018. I’d never been in a prison until 2019. And I’ve taught out there once three years, two and a half years ago, we’ll be teaching there in spring of 2025, a new course on American urban history. And it’s been a wonderful way of connecting to Jesuit Catholic values and mission in some, and, tradition in some really powerful ways.
Todd Ream: Thank you, thank you. I want to ask you before we move on and talk about some of your writing, your appointment as provost and the process of discernment you went through in terms of accepting that appointment and then what you find most edifying in terms of the role that you fill and serve there at Boston College.
David Quigley: It was a wonderful moment, oh, ten and a half years ago in March of 2014 when Father Leahy, our president, decided to appoint me as the provost and I’ve greatly enjoyed the job. A great reminder of the importance of humility as a cardinal kind of academic virtue is when I called home to my parents proud graduates of Brooklyn College public school, part of the City University of New York. And both of them very proud as they were going through the conversation. But my dad took half beat and said, what exactly is a provost?
It’s just a really important reminder when I talk to friends off campus in range of different settings, it’s a great job. I tell folks all the time, there’s so much fun in kind of helping to chart the course for the academic units at Boston College for the core elements of who we are. But again, it’s not always recognized. I think I could say that when I got here, we didn’t even have a provost at Boston College in 2005. The position had been academic vice president. There had been one at NYU when I was in graduate school there. I’m not sure I knew what a provost was until I was on the faculty track. So that, that’s a little bit of that humility, I think goes a long way.
I had thankfully those six years of experience as dean, as dean of what is now our Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, worked with a number of good colleagues across campus. And really what helped me make sense of the rightness of the fit for the position and who I was, was those six years on the job, the emphasis at Boston College on discernment. And we have a number of retreat experiences, some funded by the Lilly Grant that we received over 20 years ago that created a set of intersections and retreats, which and halftime experiences for vocational discernment for undergraduates.
And I found both when I was thinking about the deanship and then, especially as I was thinking about the provostship, going on those discernment retreats for undergraduates was invaluable in helping me think things through, especially for my, our kids at that point, and when I became provost, our youngest would have been what? Fifth, sixth grade, our oldest was going into senior year of high school. By then, I had figured out as best I could work-life, work-family balances, but it still was going to be a challenge.
What I would say though, was the provost ship plays out differently on each and every campus. Is it a strong provost? Is it a weak provost? How do provosts relate to the rest of the administration? Could go on and on about that all day. What I’ve loved about doing the work at BC is in the strategic plan I inherited when I became provost that had been drafted back in 2007 and then the plan that we still operate under that I helped chair and lead drafting in 2017, the first and emphatic direction for the university is a commitment to the liberal arts.
And in an age around American higher ed, around American society, where there is too much of a defensive crouch, a kind of gnashing of teeth, an existential crisis about the future of liberal art, it speaks powerfully to what I most value as a historian, as an educator, and the fact that BC throughout the, the 28 years, 27 years that I’ve been at the university, has been so focused on building faculty strength and reaffirming our commitment to being a particular kind of university that has actually made it to be a job not with a few headaches or difficulties along the way but a really fun job to have for 10 and a half years at this point.
Todd Ream: Great to hear, thank you. You’re the author and editor of four books, one of which we’ve already discussed, and the other three books more directly reflect your expertise as a 19th century Civil War era American historian.
In addition to the period of American history you consider, you also ask what the history of two American cities, Boston and New York City, offer in terms of insights that are uniquely their own, but also have something to say about the larger American story. Thank you for noting the course that you’ve taught there about the many ways to understand the history and cultures of Boston. Would you begin by describing how you approach the craft of history?
David Quigley: History can work on so many different levels for so many different students. And it’s, when I was a younger faculty member, I would very often give the department’s talk to admitted students who are making the choice about whether to come here. And I always emphasize that regardless of the field or your interest, there was a history that one could connect to.
I think of two of my students that I had in my early years at the university. One was committed to dance, had done very high level ballet before she got to BC and had an injury that derailed her. She would eventually go on to working in art as an arts administrator, writing reviews of dance, and she wrote a brilliant senior thesis on the Boston Ballet. Nothing that I ever could have anticipated, but kind finding her own voice by looking at the material.
One of my beloved students who’s become something of a national figure marked on, we’re taping this interview on September 11th the anniversary of his tragic passing, Welles Crowther, who the man in the red bandana who heroically helped many to their to safety on that day, even as he perished at World Trade Center. But he was in my first New York City history class that I taught in the spring of 1999. And he’ll, as a senior, and I’ll always remember Welles for many things, but he partly, I hit it off with him on the first day of class because I noticed his last name was Crowther and as a fan of New York City journalists and also of movies, his grandfather, Bosley Crowther, you’ll never forget that name, was the New York Times lead film critic for many years.
And so we hit it off talking about newspapers, his interest, he was eventually going to go on to Wall Street as where he would eventually tragically pass away. But he was interested in combining his family history with journalism with his interest in the financial sector in New York. And he wrote a great study of pre-1929, the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper, how it along, how it all came to life. It was so much fun to read.
And again, I would just talk about students like my own self, as I said, finding a way of going into history, but also reconciling different parts of my own identity in writing about Dorothy Day, with my emerging political interests, my desire to be in the city, my own family’s kind of ethnic trajectory in the country. So history becomes a wonderful resource for thinking. thinking through larger issues, but also sometimes very personal.
So my approach as a scholar is to really think centrally about the voices of the past. I love to bring in documentary collections, to bring in rich texts, both from actual primary sources but also fiction that American studies training is so important. I think of voices like William Dean Howells, the great 19th century novelist, a Westerner who comes East and is both in Boston and then makes his way to New York and is one of the great observers of both of my cities, Boston and New York, but just writing about cities.
I think of Walt Whitman. I talked earlier about the Emersonian moment, but Whitman, his crossing Brooklyn ferry, which is perhaps my favorite text of any sort to teach and how he conjures up this sense of connecting time of neither time nor distance avails that sense of moving on a ferry across what the Brooklyn Bridge now covers and that sense of speaking to or communing with generations into the future.
And that sense of the transcendent possibilities of the study of history for me is, is what brings me back again and again and again and the ways in which one is constantly drawing on the richness of the past, the elements of what you think you know, but finding these new rich possibilities and surprises as you go dig deeper and deeper and deeper into these materials.
Todd Ream: Yeah, I want to ask you a little bit now about one of your books in particular, and speaking of New York City, your book in particular, Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy. What led you to tell that story?
David Quigley: So many pieces come together in that story. When I went off and started thinking about writing a dissertation in grad school, I thought I was going to more focus on the kind of urban history of places like New York in the 20th century. And the more I got into graduate school, I was drawn further and further back into the 19th century as setting a certain set of fundamental constraints and also laying out some possibilities for what, as I was writing in the 20th century, but now how we in the 20th century have inherited from that moment.
And I think that second founding framing that I use there, that decades later, Eric Foner has picked up on, but that sense that in the 1860s and 1870s, something fundamental was shifting in American life. And so much of the best history on the Reconstruction period, the Civil War and Reconstruction period really does focus on the South. And this is not to dismiss what goes on in the South and especially in the postbellum and even post-Reconstruction South, but the relationship between New York and the larger nation is something that I was grappling with as I came to the topic, as I wrote and as I continue to teach.
And as a proud son of Brooklyn New York is a place I hold dear, near and dear. New Yorkers, like Bostonians, can be quite chauvinistic and simple minded sometimes in the glories, the enlightenment, the pure progressivism of their beloved hometown. As you dive deeper and deeper into the history of New York City, there are unsettling elements. There are features of the city’s past that, again, are to be celebrated, but the others that are challenged.
And the one that I had confronted a bit in earlier studies, but it was only late in graduate school. And as I started on the road that would lead to second founding, grappling with the New York City draft riots. The three days, hellacious days, in July of 1863, just after Gettysburg, when basically a series of race riots rock the neighborhoods of Manhattan and target, in particular, the African-American community, but other vulnerable communities, the colored orphan asylum that gets burned to the ground, several lynchings on the streets of Manhattan. It’s a wrenching moment. That is not the entire centerpiece of Second Founding, but it is the framing.
The first chapter is after, after the riots. How does the city begin to grapple with, and of course, what is the Lincoln administration, and then eventually on through Reconstruction. In focusing on the Grant years, how does the nation, which is trying to come out of Civil War and knit the country come back together, struggling with a city like New York that is rising up for the first time?
We’re gonna have a city with a million people eventually by the end of the century, you’ll have the five boroughs coming together and you’ll have a metropolis. But as New York comes together, it places important breaks on the possibilities of national reconstruction. So thinking about the ethnic, racial, political history, but also the religious history of the city as it evolves through that 1860s, 1870s moment.
Again, one of the heroic figures as I got deeper and deeper into that study is Grant as president. Grant’s tomb as a kind of coda at the end of the book, and what does that mean, the kind of forgotten experience of Grant and his Justice Department trying to bring down a fuller realization of Reconstruction’s possibilities, but then also how New York starts to spin in some fascinating new ways as you move into the 1870s and 1880s and beyond. So the relationship between the first great American city and a nation that has nearly fallen apart becomes the kind of pulse that drives so much of that book.
Todd Ream: Yeah, that’s fascinating, thank you. In what ways, if any, do the lessons from that story you told in Second Founding help us understand the challenges and opportunities that presently define the relationship shared by race and democracy in New York, but also perhaps even in America?
David Quigley: Certainly. I think that there is an amnesiac quality to some of the cities in general, American society to some degree, but I would say New York is especially guilty of this. I think of my adopted hometown of Cambridge and Boston, where we, to some degree, fetishize the past and you can walk all over town and see the oldest restaurant and the oldest everything as you make your way around town. Although I don’t want to overshadow other important historic sites around urban America.
New York has prided itself and this goes back to the 19th century of every 10 years, everything solid turning to dust that you are always turning over the city that. Just when you know a neighborhood, everything’s gone. You’ve got a few exceptions, McSorley’s Ale House in the East Village from that 19th century moment, one of the few, but so much of the city is always turning over, which just further plays into an uncritical, and I would say naive, understanding of New York as the the leader of the enlightened north or the ways in which the north in dealing both with that 19th century legacy.
But another project that I’ve been kicking around for so many years is Boston in the period of desegregation of the schools, the ways in which the Boston busing crisis but other urban phenomena of the late 20th century have now, have now given way to an age where the vast inequality in American cities continuing, political challenges in cities in the North, Northeast, in the Midwest, around the country, play out in unpredictable ways. And I am always drawn back to those moments in the 19th century where a certain set of possibilities are closed off because of the way in which Reconstruction ultimately concludes.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to transition now to our last set of questions for today and talk in particular about the academic vocation. When you think about your own development as a historian, what characteristics came to define the academic vocation for you? You mentioned the importance of the virtue of humility you know, in your work. But what are some of the characteristics that define it as you understand it all?
David Quigley: I’d start with two of my undergraduate mentors Bob Gross, who I mentioned earlier, a wonderful historian of the history of Concord and the peoples of Concord. I always point to him as an important mentor and friend now for decades. The way, the amount of time and care that he put into writing responses to our papers, my papers did not merit the amount of time care that he put into them, but beautiful multipage responses. I haven’t always lived up to that ideal, but that sense that we are in a conversation, that we owe it to our students to hear them out. Listen to kind of take stock of where they’re at and help them find their own voice. That has always stayed with me.
Earlier this year, my senior thesis advisor David Wills, a historian of African-American Christianity, a wonderful figure, passed away, but he worked with me even though he didn’t have expertise on the history of the Catholic Worker Movement or kind of early 20th century ethnic Catholicism. But his accompanying me through that thesis project and helping me kind of find any great project or imperfect project, you’re going to have those moments of great productivity and then those other moments of writer’s block and struggling through and kind of that sense of community.
And I always tell my students, undergraduates or graduate students, find your writing community, even if it’s just two or three other people that you’re talking to, that you’re processing it, and getting out of that kind of sole practitioner, doing it alone. I mean, there’s a lot of delight in kind of being in the archive and spending time alone and thinking of what you’re writing but making sure that you’re in conversation with others about the work that you’re doing and getting feedback.
My graduate school, I was lucky with so many wonderful faculty members in graduate school. Tom Bender, who was my thesis advisor, is a great urbanist self, having trained son of a Jewish-American politician in San Francisco in Redwood City, California, but a basketball player who played at Santa Clara, a Jesuit Catholic school. So an irony that I never could have anticipated, who very much valued the core curriculum he had as a kid in the sixties at Santa Clara.
He similarly brought these groups together and helped me really to kind of think through both the work that I was doing, helped me really figure out how to tell a 19th century story, but the way in which he taught and kind of really engaged communities of graduate students over the years was wonderful. I think that those are absolutely critical.
For me, finding the delight in being part of an academic community, whether it’s the department, a program, the larger university and finding ways of moving back and forth between the local culture of your own institution and then the really nourishing communities of the learned societies, historical associations in my context, AHAOH, we can rattle those all off. But then also, I mean, it’s one of the blessings of being in Boston and Cambridge, the kind of local historical societies, local museums, always trying to figure out what are the ways in which the work of the ivory tower of the university can speak to public audiences.
And I’ve, I’ve found that from work that I did both as a high school teacher with the New York Council for the Humanities back in the 1990s, to a range of settings in more recent times. Both incredibly energizing and kind of life affirming, but also really important, I think, in holding, pushing back on some of the kind of what I find to be worrying on both sides of the aisle critiques of the academy these days.
I think there are problems. This is not to say higher education is perfect by any means. We’ve got issues of our own, but I think that there’s a lot that we can lean into in terms of the value that we bring, not just to our students, but the communities that we serve. The public that we try to engage. And I think continuing to try and find new imaginative ways of bringing the life of the university to the broader public is critical in my mind.
Todd Ream: Thank you. When you think about those faculty who come to Boston College, particularly those assistant professors who come out of graduate school, what characteristics of the academic vocation do you seek to cultivate in those faculty members across the disciplines? And in what way are those characteristics linked to or an expression of the Jesuit charisms?
David Quigley: It’s a great question, and it’s one that the deans and I and the department chairs were always working on as we think about individual positions, as we think about the the interview process, who we select, how we bring them on board, as we help lead them through the, we hope, successful promotion and a long career here. So we take this very seriously.
So partly we’re competing with the very best universities around the country, and to some degree internationally, for folks across fields. So we’re looking for folks who are going to be able to, both in the classroom and with their scholarship, compete with the very best around the universities, folks who are typically coming out of the best graduate programs, a broad range of both public, private, faith-based U.S. and in some cases international.
But we are looking in particular for folks who see the ways of connecting to that kind of teacher/scholar identity. I think our emphasis on the teaching/advising/mentoring piece is probably more noteworthy than at other places. And one of the delights of my job over, both as dean and provost over 16 years, is having done hundreds, I don’t know if I’m 1000 interviews, of faculty candidates over these years. And you can tell right away those folks who are just fully alive to what they’ve done in the classroom and what they might do here and others who kind of, it’s tough to get them to talk for more than a few moments about what they might do in the classroom. So we really are looking for that, that sense of the vocation of a teacher.
I think that that sense of how one is going to contribute to the mission of the university has been a really rich source of conversation, both at hiring and at promotion. And it’s been some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had in my time as an academic administrator. How do we use that conversation to say that there’s not one template that we’re looking for? It would be a miserable faculty if all 900 of us were serving and advancing mission in exactly the same way in all of our work.
There are a multitude of ways, the variousness of the ways in which individuals can connect to mission. So I’m always certainly drawn to people who might have previous connection to Jesuit or Catholic education in some meaningful way. Very often, although not always, that offers some interesting possibilities for that initial conversation.
But then at much more often, it’s talking to people who very often have not had that experience before and looking for an openness. We share a set of materials with prospective hires, thankfully in the Jesuit tradition, and especially here at BC, we have some wonderful materials talking about the charisms, the approaches we take, what does undergraduate education, what do we mean by formative education.
I think the Jesuits, what I’ve learned from them is the, the invitation, that, that invitational mindset to draw people into a conversation about what, what we care most about and finding that common ground, how do we help people to find that they can do their own best work in this context over time?
And one of the great satisfactions as an academic administrator is seeing folks who you’ve drawn in, who as initial hires demonstrated that openness, but still had a long way to go to kind of learn how they could contribute in meaningful and authentic ways to our to particular mission and who become leaders on campus who kind of are alive to the possibilities and open up new possibilities that you never could have seen.
One who I mentioned at the administrative level, Stanton Wortham, who joined us, a distinguished education scholar, had been Associate Dean at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate Education School of Education, joined us had actually taken a high school language course here because he was at an independent school in the area that in the late 70s and 80s did not teach Spanish, which tells you a lot about how much has changed in American society over the last 40 years, but had gone to Swarthmore as an undergraduate, University of Chicago graduate school, comes to us from the Ivy Leagues.
And in the course of hiring him and in his early years on campus, he he basically has created a department there now of formative education, helped to really refine a lot of what we were doing here at BC, sometimes implicitly, but talk to the ways in which the larger crisis in K-12, and to some degree in higher education around purpose, meaning what we need to communicate to our students, that there are resources in the Jesuit tradition that we could be a little bit more explicit about in kind of delivering the value that’s some in the tradition, but many outside of the tradition didn’t even know that they were looking for.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For our last question then today, I want to ask in what ways, if any, do you believe the health of the academic vocation and this formative instinct that hopefully gets developed within teachers and in scholars is dependent upon the health of the relationship that the university shares with the Church?
David Quigley: Let me begin with a quick digression through local political history. When I became provost, we were in the fortunate position of two main municipalities in 2014 that we operated within were Boston and Newton. And for the first time in our history, both had Boston College graduates as mayors. And there was a fortunate little moment and for a few years, I talked about that. And then as things happened, that changed.
All by way of prefacing the fact that in my entire time as an administrator, not my entire time at BC, but since over 20 years, we’ve been blessed to have Cardinal Seán O’Malley as the leader of the Archdiocese of Boston. He arrived and has been a great partner. And Cardinal Seán has done many things well. It’s one of the reasons I think Pope Francis has leaned on him as probably his most important American partner in the work over these last, in Pope Francis’s case, last 11 years.
But Cardinal Seán, partly because of his time at the Catholic University of America, I think just his temperament as well, developed a strong relationship, not just with Father Leahy and other university leaders, but with a respect for the work that our faculty, that our campus ministers, that the range of faculty we’re able to provide, that the health of the Church in his mind in many ways depended upon a healthy, robust Catholic university like Boston College. And it’s been a wonderful 20 years. I’m not saying anything about what’s going to come after October 31st, but there is a certain melancholy about Cardinal Sean. Well deserved retirement that’s coming his way.
And we will have a new archbishop coming in from Rhode Island, Richard Henning, kind of very much looking forward to having him as our new partner in the work that we do in supporting Catholic education in the city of Boston, but also in, in the nation. I think that that will be an important relationship for those of us at Boston College and for those within the archdiocese.
It’s certainly clear that the Catholic Church in Boston today looks different from when I arrived at BC in 1998 from what it would have looked like 50 years ago. I think those of us in Catholic education believe that the Holy Spirit is always at work where we’re going to be. 20 years from now, if I’m lucky enough to be still at this work, 10 or 20 years from now, I’m looking forward to seeing what new challenges, but even more, what new opportunities present themselves.
And again, trying to figure out the right relationship with the leadership of the local church in the Catholic context, but also with the Vatican is critical. I guess I can’t let this interview wrap up without pointing to the fact that the first and only Jesuit Pope in our history is of course, Pope Francis, Cardinal Bergoglio, as he arrived in 2013, which has made for an interesting context to be doing our work of Jesuit Catholic education.
It’s been it, it’s led to some closer connections between Jesuits at the Curia in Rome and the hierarchy just across the way at St. Peter’s. But it’s an interesting moment of flourishing for the Society of Jesus and where this will lead is, I guess, one of the points of excitement as we look on to the future.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you, thank you very much. Our guest has been David Quigley, Professor of History, Provost and Dean of Faculties for Boston College. Thank you for sharing your insights and wisdom with us.
David Quigley: That was a lot of fun. Thanks so much.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
