Faculty Handbook
Boston University Academy
Boston University Academy Boston University Academy is committed to providing a outstanding secondary education, optimizing the respective strengths of its small school community and its inclusion within a world-class research university.
Boston University Academy welcomes students, faculty, and parents who care deeply about intellectual life. The school atmosphere provides a safe and nurturing community where teachers and students all know and support each other in enthusiastic scholarly inquiry. At the Academy, students take courses in small class settings with master teachers, while enjoying regular lectures by university professors and access to the vast resources at Boston University.
Primary texts, experimental practice, and free discussion drive the curriculum, ensuring that students graduate with strong content knowledge, analytical skills, and writing ability in the humanities and sciences. Students join the conversations that have engaged the great minds of Western civilization for three millennia. Classes conducted in seminar format foster active dialogue among teachers, students, and texts. Students write in every course and develop their own ideas and responses to the material.
Boston University Academy offers students unparalleled preparation for the college experience. With the oversight and support of the Academy community, upper-level students take courses at Boston University, typically graduating with at least one year of university course credit. The core curriculum prepares students to excel in their university-level classes, allowing students to pursue advanced studies in a dazzling array of fields and to engage in individual research projects with university professors. The school’s mission is not to accelerate learning or adolescence but to expand the secondary-level experience for highly capable students to include all the resources of a university within a supportive and caring environment. Students graduate already fully integrated into the modern life of the mind in all its diversity.
Boston University Academy is a place where intellectually passionate students can find a community that supports and celebrates their growth as thinkers and as people. The Academy values the ethical and character development of students in a non-creedal atmosphere, with community service, lectures, and class discussions all playing key roles in encouraging students to think out the ethical implications of ideas and actions.
The Academy offers the satisfaction of a supportive secondary school community of sustained and engaged endeavor, talented and motivated peers and faculty, utilizing the resources of a major research university.
