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Elizabeth "Ma" Barker, a labor organizer, a tenant activist, a CAS and MET associate professor emerita, whose greatest passion was educating the inmates of Massachusetts prisons, died on February 16. She was 89.

	Elizabeth "Ma" Barker. Photo by BU Photo Services

In 1969, as a BU professor, she took the University's team for television's popular quiz show, the GE College Bowl, to MCI-Norfolk, a medium-security prison, for a practice session against a team comprised of prisoners. Impressed by the intellectual abilities of the inmates and their interest in learning, Barker asked the University to sponsor college-level classes for the prisoners.

Her initial request was rejected, but Barker persisted and permission was granted by BU's new president, John Silber, in 1972. Barker initially taught prison classes as a volunteer and enlisted other academics as instructors. In time, and with the support of the University, the Boston University Prison Program allowed inmates to earn college degrees while doing time.

Barker's rapport with the inmates and her social and political activism -- including working as a labor organizer with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union during the Depression and as an advocate for the Spanish Republicans resisting fascism in the '30s -- earned her the nickname "Ma" Barker. (Ma Barker was a fugitive and folk hero who led a band of criminals across the Midwest during the Depression.)

Beginning in 1970, Barker organized poetry readings in Norfolk Prison and the Bay State Correctional Center, attended by recognized poets and teachers and featuring readings by prisoners as well as guests. Barker's own poems, which won awards and appeared in anthologies, were collected in her 1988 book Poems in Passage.

Barker became a passionate advocate of higher education for prisoners not just for their personal development, but also for the contribution she felt such education made to the creation of a safer and more civil society. She rejected the easy solutions of tough-on-crime politicians and expounded her views that education reduced the incidence of recidivism. "Prisons that don't help people change their lives," she said, "aren't tough on crime. They are tough on society."

"Professor Barker was a visionary teacher," says BU President Jon Westling. "She dedicated her life to transforming the commonwealth's prisons, and she leaves a legacy of having contributed to the genuine rehabilitation of thousands of inmates."

A memorial service honoring Barker's life was held on Saturday, February 24, at Marsh Chapel. Barker leaves three children, eight grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and a brother.

James C. Higgins, former COM professor of journalism, died on February 16. He was 84.

James C. Higgins. Photo by BU Photo Services

Higgins first came to the College of Communication as a lecturer in journalism in 1974. He became a visiting associate professor and then a full-time associate professor of journalism at the college. He left BU in 1980.

BU Chancellor John Silber, one of the speakers at a memorial service for Higgins, held on Friday, February 23, at the Memorial Church at Harvard University, said, "Among the extraordinary array of persons I have known in my 30 years at Boston University, Jim Higgins was among the most interesting, informative, inventive, and eccentric."

Higgins was remembered as having an impulsiveness and a curiosity that contributed to his fascinating persona and his extraordinary career in journalism. "Students in the College of Communication admired and adored Jim Higgins," said Silber. "I believe he was an easy grader, but nevertheless a demanding professor who insisted on mastery of the English language -- a language he deeply loved and in which he could write with beauty, clarity, and punch. Only on rare occasion has the field of journalism produced individuals capable of such accurate and penetrating observation, such remarkable insight, and such power to convey what the reporter has seen and felt."

9 March 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations