Introducing the Bridge Program

What is the new Bridge Program?

David Quigley: It’s the product of years of collaboration among faculty, administrators, and staff in all the undergraduate schools. Over the last three academic years, a group of us has come together to think about how to structure a really meaningful set of curricular and cocurricular offerings for students to draw on the University’s powerful strengths in the humanities, the sciences, and management. The Bridge Program will provide opportunities for students to think at an even higher level about what it means to integrate and pull together the different experiences they’ve had in the core curriculum across the University, with all of it really bringing our commitment to formative education to fuller life for this generation of undergraduates.

Andy Boynton: This explicit integration of humanities, management, and science is about increasing students’ aperture about how to think about and understand the world. I think they’ll be more effective citizens, more effective leaders, more effective doctors, teachers, or whatever else they do.

Mary Crane: It comes out of a sense that problems in the world can’t be solved from just one perspective—not management alone, not history alone, not chemistry alone. Our problems are really complicated, and the people who are going to be in a position to go out into the world and make a difference are people who know how to think and integrate knowledge and methods from across the humanities, management, and sciences.

Fr. Gregory Kalscheur: I think the program really exemplifies the heart of the University’s formative mission. When we think about who we want our students to become through a BC education, one thing we hope is that they become people of wisdom. This is symbolized in the mural in Gasson Hall 100. If you’re familiar with that room, there’s a large mural, The Church: The Educator of Mankind, and it shows scholars from all different disciplines being brought together. Around the frame of that mural there are shields that have the names of disciplines in them, and at the top of that, there is a shield that has the word sapiential, which is the Latin word for the virtue of wisdom. And I think that signifies that wisdom is different than simply information or knowledge or expertise. It’s bringing together that knowledge and expertise, seeing it as an integrated whole, seeing it as something that has purpose and meaning, and then being able to use all of that for the common good. The Bridge Program embodies all of that.

How does the Bridge Program fit within the traditions of Boston College?

Boynton: If I could summarize, it’s Ever to Excel. BC students are now sitting in a philosophy class, and next to them is a finance major and an accounting major and a history major, and they’re working in groups together. So there’s a cross-fertilization happening. I like to think of it as the three C’s—combination, collision, and connection. Collision refers to different ideas and perspectives coming together and colliding to create the integration of new ideas. Combination is how ideas get combined in a way that leads to entirely new ideas coming about. And then there’s connection, meaning the connection of people to different knowledge domains and different areas of expertise that create new ideas. So those three constructs provide an intellectual spine as to what academic integration is. It’s great for the students, and it’s also who we are at BC. If we aren’t waking up every day trying to figure out how to build a better curriculum, a better undergraduate experience, how to give more to the students—which is what Ever to Excel means to me—then we aren’t doing our jobs.

Fr. Kalscheur: I characterize it in terms of creative fidelity, which is a term that comes out of recent Jesuit thinking. We want to be very faithful to the mission and history of Jesuit, Catholic education, but we have to be creative about how we’re approaching that at this moment. So this is another manifestation of creative fidelity.

What makes a program like this distinctive in higher education?

Quigley: Across so many great universities, almost by design, the architecture is meant to prevent this kind of cross-school collaboration and pathways for undergraduates. But here at BC, I would say the trust among academic leadership and faculty, who have gotten to know each other during nearly a decade of teaching across departmental and school lines, has opened up possibilities for us. I don’t think any of us is saying that BC’s the only institution that could possibly do this. But there are reasons why we have so many possibilities that other schools don’t. It’s because of our tradition, our mission, the way in which we think about undergraduate education above all else.

Crane: I agree. There are financial incentives at most universities to avoid these kinds of collaborations among their schools. Also, many deans are thinking primarily about their own school and might not be as interested in what’s going on in the other schools at the institution. But we have a kind of flexibility here at BC. The people that we have here think first about our students. What’s best for their education? And given BC’s mission, encouraging students to major and minor across schools is one of the best ways to prepare them for success.

At the Carroll School, the Portico course includes classes that might be thought of as pilots for the Bridge Program. How would you describe those?

Boynton: We’ve had some of our Portico professors teach courses around this integration concept. The students read a number of different case studies. One involved the Manhattan Project. There were real issues around humanities—should we even build this bomb? There were also issues around management, such as how do you manage these physicists, and how do you store the information? And then, of course, there was the science question of how to build the bomb. The students buried themselves in a number of cases like that one that illustrate this integration. They learn to start seeing things differently. Now, case studies are my background, so I gravitated that way, but in the Bridge Program, other faculty will bring other methods and pedagogical techniques that will be just as effective.

Quigley: To expand on that a little bit, it’s been wonderful to see how the intellectual strength of the Portico program has helped the Bridge come to life. It illustrates how faculty members from across the University have brought a great deal of energy and imagination to the curricular-design phase of the Bridge Program. Jenna Tonn in engineering; Michael Smith, Bess Rouse, and Christine Rojcewicz from the Carroll School; and Michael Glass in the history department have all been indispensable in planning and building the Bridge, and they’ll be teaching in it, too.

How does a program like the Bridge fit into a future that promises to be heavily shaped by AI?

Fr. Kalscheur: Interestingly, Pope Leo recently issued an important encyclical about AI—how do we engage AI in a way that safeguards and enhances human dignity? And he calls at numerous points in this document for the development of people with this kind of wisdom, people who can synthesize and integrate and make discerning decisions that respect human dignity and promote the common good. I think what we’re doing with the Bridge Program very much speaks to this moment.

Quigley: Amplifying that, the substance of the Bridge Program is very much about helping students grapple with some of the great vexing challenges of their time, AI perhaps at the top of the list. Nothing is going to eliminate the anxiety about AI. But I think there’s a clear opening for an institution with the values we have and the intellectual firepower we have to lead the way in conversations about other moments of technological rupture, disruption, crisis. How have previous generations managed through those? How have some of the core human values at the heart of our liberal arts education served institutions well through those moments of transition?

Crane: And those very questions are at the heart of the junior-year course that we’re offering in the Bridge Program this spring. It focuses on what’s happening today with AI within the context of two earlier periods of disruption—electrification and the internet. Then there’s a final unit in the course on AI itself, with part of it examining what an appropriate use of AI looks like. The idea is that it’s in these periods of disruption that people most need to be able to integrate, and people most need the kind of wisdom that can come from the integration of these disciplines. Wisdom is most needed at a time when things are rapidly changing. You’re getting true information, false information, contradictory information. You have to sort through all of that and figure out what to do. And so the hope is that this course will give students historical perspectives, ethical perspectives, and knowledge about the science and about how cultural narratives play into all of this. And so students will have a richer context for trying to understand what’s going on with AI.

Quigley: The Bridge is not going to solve the AI problem, but it becomes a very important tool for helping our students, faculty, and administration think through our responsibilities when it comes to the grand opportunities afforded by AI, but also the fairly serious threats.

We’re at the very beginning of the Bridge Program, of course. What do you see for the future of the program as it evolves and matures?

Quigley: My hope is that a select group of BC students will opt into the program. So some hundreds of students in each graduating class will be Bridge Scholars and will be recognized as such at graduation. And if you’re not a Bridge Scholar, I would hope that you would attend some of the Bridge lectures that the Institute for the Liberal Arts will be putting together in partnership with the Winston Center. You don’t have to do all the requirements for the Bridge Scholar program to derive some of the benefits.

Academe is notoriously siloed and slow to change. You’re looking to shake up the marketplace. Do you expect any pushback? 

Quigley: The modern university has been structured with very well-worn pathways, if not ruts, for disciplinary expertise and speaking to one’s own tribe. Trying to get people to move across and respect, understand, and learn from other areas of expertise on campus can be tough for faculty and academics. I think that we have some work to do to continue to convince those on campus and beyond. But I would say that one of the great moments in the last few years was when an accrediting team from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business came to campus three years ago or so to look at the Carroll School. The team was made up of three deans from peer schools, and we talked through what we were doing then, an early phase of what we are now doing. We showed them the ways in which we are genuinely committed to encouraging students to move back and forth between our undergraduate units, and to draw from and to make sense of the different ways of grappling with the complex, vexing problems of our age. Those three deans were extremely impressed by what we had achieved, in some ways voicing desire to see what they might be able to do on their own campuses. And as we talk to visiting teams for academic program reviews, as we bring in visiting scholars from other parts of the country, when we hire new faculty from other great universities, I’ve been pleasantly surprised that there is more admiration and desire to borrow from what we’re doing than pushback or naysaying. Overall, one of the great satisfactions of the last decade or so has been the recognition that Boston College has something to say about curriculum innovation. The Bridge Program is the embodiment of our innovative spirit and our commitment to serve our students. It will allow Bridge Scholars to take full advantage of the richness of BC’s undergraduate schools, and to think about what it means to integrate the different experiences they have had in their majors, minors, and in the core curriculum. The program will allow them to expand their knowledge and understanding and will prepare them for the challenges that lie ahead. It represents innovation and collaboration at its best. ◽