Boston College is planning to tear down the Quonset Hut on Newton Campus to pave way for a new athletic support building with fitness facilities, Ryan Milligan, MCAS ’26, shared at the UGBC Senate meeting on Tuesday night.
“They’re knocking down the Hut and they’re replacing it with a new athletic support building, so that’s going to be a major update on the Newton campus,” Milligan said.
Milligan, academic affairs committee chair, shared updates from a recent Provost Advisory Committee meeting in which Michael Lochhead, executive vice president, and John Burke, financial vice president and treasurer, shared developments on campus construction and renovation projects that the University hopes to complete within the next four to six years.
Plans are in place to renovate the facades of McElroy Commons and Carney Hall to better match the outward appearance of other buildings on the Main Quad like Stokes Hall, Milligan said.
“They’re planning on renovating both to fit more of the aesthetic that the academic quad has, so it’ll be the cobblestone with the green roof,” Milligan said.
In the more immediate future, a new building on the Brighton Campus will be constructed to house Catholic documents and archival materials from around the country, Milligan said.
“It’s going to be a place where BC hosts a lot of the national Catholic documents that exist throughout the country,” Milligan said.
The building—officially named the Catholic Religious Archives—will tentatively be situated on a plot of land north of the Theology and Ministry Library, according to a proposal submitted to the Boston Planning & Development Agency.
Milligan also provided an update on admission statistics for the class of 2028, which he said includes 112 QuestBridge scholars—up from 98 in the class of 2027.
“We’re number two in the partners for QuestBridge,” Milligan said. “In the first year, we matched 40 students but we’ve now matched 112 students in the class of 2028.”
Various student senators expressed concerns that the increase of QuestBridge scholars might strain existing resources, particularly in the Pine Manor Institute for Student Success (PMI).
“If we’re only equipped to handle 40 students per class—like it was the beginning of the program—and now we are almost triple that, we definitely need to make up for that in the resources being provided by the school, and it wouldn’t be fair to just dump it on PMI and hope that they take care of it,” said Addie Weiss, student senator and MCAS ’27.
Student senators also expressed interest in inviting representatives from the Office of Global Education to a future meeting to discuss BC’s study abroad tuition policy, which requires students to pay full BC tuition while abroad, even if their host institution’s tuition is cheaper.
“I think that’s why they instituted the policy—to make it equitable and accessible for people who would not otherwise be able to afford studying abroad,” said Meghan Heckelman, UGBC vice president and LSEHD ’25. “But I think there’s still lingering questions about is this the best way.”
Correction (Mar. 14, 2024 10:50 p.m.): This article was corrected from a previous version to note that the class of 2028 includes 112 QuestBridge scholars, not 128.
