Category: Community
Miracle on Ice
The US Olympic Hockey Team wins the gold medal. Among the team members are four Boston University players: Captain Mike Eruzione, Jim Craig, Dave Silk, and Jack O’Callahan. The winning game is played on February 24, 1980. This game is known as the “Miracle on Ice” and is portrayed in the Disney movie Miracle.
Evergreen Program
The Evergreen Program offers the opportunity for older members of the community to attend Boston University lectures.
Boston Scholars Program Initiated
The Boston Scholars Program is initiated and provides full-tuition scholarships and pre-college courses for local high school students.
Prison Education Program
The Boston University Prison Education Program, founded by labor organizer, tenant activist, and poet Elizabeth Barker, offers its first credit-bearing college courses at MCI/Norfolk prison. The program strives to provide the means whereby, through education, students currently imprisoned can become informed, successful, and contributing citizens. Students who earn 30 to 60 credits can apply the credits towards a Boston University bachelor’s degree and even go on to pursue a master’s degree. In 1991, the Prison Education Program expands to include MCI/Framingham, the only penal institution in Massachusetts for women. Boston University continues to be nationally recognized for its contribution to the lives of prisoners in the program, and by extension, its contribution to the prisons they inhabit, the families they left behind, and the communities to which they will return.
BU Marine Program
The Boston University Marine Program is founded at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
MLK Jr Delivers “I Have a Dream”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Boston University alumnus, delivers his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington, the then-largest civil rights demonstration in US history.
Braves Field Becomes Nickerson Field
The University purchases Braves Field, which will become the site of Nickerson Field, the Case Athletic Center, and the West Campus residences.
WBUR-FM
WBUR-FM goes on the air at 4:00 p.m. on March 1, 1950, as a 400-watt non-commercial educational FM station licensed to Boston University. By 1971, WBUR had enough full-time employees to qualify for status as a public radio station and applied to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for certification. In 1984, the station won three Associated Press (AP) Awards for news coverage. In May 1987, WBUR won the 1986 George Foster Peabody Award—the most prestigious national award for broadcasters—for Liberation Remembered, a four- part series on the Holocaust. Since then, WBUR has won the Peabody two more times, including an award for Car Talk in 1993.
ROTC Arrives on Campus
The US War Department invites the University to become a contracting agency under the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps Pre-Induction Training Program, also known as ROTC.
Aeronautical Engineering Established at Logan Airport
Captain Hilding Carlson and Lt. Arthur B. Metcalf are hired to start the Aeronautical Engineering Department, located at Logan Airport.
