Dean Andy Boynton

Welcome to the premier edition of the Carroll Connection! This is an online publication by and about Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. It is geared especially to alumni of our School as well as parents and friends.

Four times a year, the Carroll Connection will bring you stories about life at the Carroll School and the ideas flowing among faculty, alumni, students, and others. Later this year, we will also launch a graduate edition serving those who earned their M.B.A.s and other graduate degrees from the Carroll School. 

Undoubtedly much has changed in your lives since you left the Heights, no matter when you stepped off the commencement stage.

If you graduated around the time I did (class of ’78) or earlier, you were still pecking away at typewriters. If you came along a quarter-century later, you were traveling in cyberspace but probably thought the cloud was just something white and puffy in the sky. Even recent graduates perhaps had the experience of handling paper tickets at the airline counter or loading a roll of film. Those and many other fixtures of past life are almost extinct.

Much has changed at the Carroll School too.

Just in the past decade, we’ve revised our core curriculum, and our curricular experiments have contributed to a revision of the University’s Undergraduate Core Curriculum. We’ve created our Portico experience for all first-semester students, who are introduced to business from an interdisciplinary and ethical perspective. We’ve enlivened our academic research culture. We’ve launched new centers. We’ve added multiple courses in data analytics along with a new co-concentration in that burgeoning area (and another one in entrepreneurship). We’ve created a summer management program for non-management, liberal arts majors. We’ve spearheaded these and many other innovations.

And we’ve done all this the Boston College way. We’ve rooted our changes in the liberal arts tradition, which is creative, dynamic, and continually in pursuit of new ideas and perspectives. We’ve also never strayed from the common values and the keen sense of purpose and vision that form the heart of higher education in the Jesuit tradition.

I know that these ways and perspectives have informed your lives as well. We look forward to sharing this evolving story with you, and hearing more about yours. Feedback is gratefully and enthusiastically received by way of email to me.

There’s much to tell.

Andy Boynton ’78, P’13
John and Linda Powers Family Dean
Carroll School of Management