Joyce, W. Seavey, 1913-1988

W. Seavey Joyce served as Boston College’s twenty-third president from 1968 to 1972, during a time of heightened social and political unrest, both within the college and throughout the United States.

Joyce was born in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston in 1913 and attended Boston College High School and Boston College, graduating in 1937. He was ordained at Weston College in 1943 and then attended Harvard University for a doctorate in economics, returning to Boston College as a professor of economics in 1949. Prior to his tenure as president, Joyce played a substantial role in the leadership of Boston College as Dean of the College of Business Administration from 1953 to 1966, Dean of the Graduate School of Management from 1963 to 1966, and Vice President of Community Relations from 1966 to 1968. During this period, he was also heavily involved in city-wide municipal and community groups. In 1954 he established the Boston College Citizen Seminars, which provided a forum to explore urban development issues; these seminars provided the initial impetus for the creation of both the Massachusetts Port Authority and Government Center. As head of the Boston Planning Council from 1963 to 1968, he was instrumental in pushing for the large-scale expansion of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

Joyce’s presidency coincided with an era of large-scale social change in the United States. As a result, his presidency saw a number of significant demographic changes take place at Boston College. These included the first year of campus-wide undergraduate co-education and the initiation of the Black Talent Program and the Black Studies Program.

When Joyce took over as president in 1968, he inherited a budget deficit problem; prior to his tenure, the college’s operating deficit had been dealt with by the re-allocation of funds from a fund set aside for building expansion, but as Joyce began his presidency, this fund had run out. As a result of this deficit, tuition increases were inevitable. During Joyce’s first year as president he increased tuition by double the usual incremental step. Then, rather than wait the customary two years between tuition increases, he again increased tuition in the 1970-1971 year, and by an even larger amount. These increases (and those proposed for the following years) prompted the student government to call a strike, which began on April 13th, 1970. Negotiations between the faculty and the student government continued throughout April, as students occupied the president’s office in Botolph House. An agreement to end the strike was reached on May 5th, but at the same time another issue was sweeping the nation’s campuses: on May 4th students protesting the Vietnam War were killed at Kent State University and the National Association of Students called a nationwide strike. As the tuition strike ended at Boston College, an antiwar strike immediately began. Joyce himself supported the antiwar strike, and issued a public condemnation of the war that called on other universities to support the student strike.

While social unrest was a feature of Joyce’s presidency, so was the continued development of the University. As president, Joyce initiated the Social Action Committee, which became “Pulse,” a program that offered students academic accreditation for social action projects and involved them in issues such as public housing development, youth delinquency, and unemployment. Joyce also oversaw the expansion of graduate education at Boston College with the establishment of a number of doctoral programs, including the doctorate program in English.

In 1972, Joyce stepped down as president of Boston College and took a leave of absence to do work with the Chiswick Center, an educational organization, and to consult on community affairs with the Department of Commerce. He then returned to Boston College to teach economics in 1975, retiring in 1979. After his retirement from teaching, he served with two Michigan parishes. He died in 1988 at the Campion Center in Weston, Massachusetts.