psychology doctoral student, and his wife, Jess, suffered severe injuries. Websites have been set up by friends and family of the injured to offer support. On Thursday, April 18, the Heights featured accounts by six students and alumni from near the finish line, including photographer Alex Trautwig ’12, who had been on assignment (for Getty) at Fenway Park and shot the scene at Mile 25 in Kenmore Square, and Amy Hachigian ’14, a spectator who was on Boylston Street waiting for a fellow student to run past when the second bomb exploded on the opposite sidewalk. “I don’t remember hearing anything except for my roommate’s dad yelling to us to ‘Get low, get low,’” she said. Friday, April 19, brought a new test of University preparedness. With one of two bombing suspects dead in a police shootout and the other having escaped in Watertown (some three miles from Boston College), Governor Deval Patrick requested the residents of eight towns, including Newton and Allston-Brighton, to “shelter in place.” The BC Alert system notified students, faculty, and staff via email and text message at 6:28 a.m.: “Due to public safety concerns, BC is closed and classes are cancelled until further notice. Remain indoors.” The Boston College Police Department (BCPD) asked resident directors and resident assistants to station themselves near dormitory entrances to encourage compliance. Public Safety director John M. King called a second shift of police officers to duty. In all, the University sent eight messages on Friday—five to the entire community, two to students only, and one to parents. The message to parents went out at 8:30 a.m. from executive vice president Patrick Keating. “BCPD believes the campus is safe,” it read. Dining Services “is looking to find ways” to feed resident students, Keating wrote. In fact, Dining Services had the outline of a plan in place—the “storm plan,” followed most recently in February during winter storm Nemo. The blueprint confined operations to the three largest dining halls: Corcoran Commons on Lower Campus, McElroy Commons on Middle Campus, and Stuart on Newton Campus. With only 20 percent of scheduled staff
on hand before the shelter-in-place order took effect, student employees residing on campus phoned in to offer help, and BCPD escorted 17 of them to the dining halls. From 1:00 to 3:30 p.m., Residential Life staff guided lines of undergraduates to the open facilities, dorm by dorm, beginning with the freshman and sophomore residences that lack kitchens. Keating notified students at 5:20 that the procedure would be repeated for dinner. Although the fugitive suspect remained at large, the governor’s shelter-in-place order was lifted at 6:31 p.m. As BCPD maintained a quiet presence, some students enjoyed the warm spring day’s final hour of sunlight; but many remained indoors watching TV until Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken alive in Watertown at 8:45 p.m. A few minutes before 9:00, near the Mod residences, a student taped a poster to a fence that read, in red and blue marker, “Thank you, BCPD.” On Monday, April 22, Fr. Leahy sent a letter to the Boston College community,
thanking students for helping marooned runners and praising “Boston College police officers, dining services personnel, student affairs staff, facilities management workers, emergency management team members and academic administrators [who] willingly expended extra time and energy helping our University function smoothly during challenging times.” And on Friday, May 3, the first study day before final exams, Dani Cole and Michael Padulsky’s plan for the final five miles was realized in what turned out to be a more intimate, Boston College family affair. Beginning at 10:00 a.m., some 700 students, faculty, and friends of the University walked around the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, wearing T-shirts that read “BC Strong” and raising more than $6,000 for Liza Cherney, Brittany Loring, and Patrick and Jess Downes. n For a slideshow of the April 16 Mass for Healing and Hope, go to www.bc.edu/bcm.
Subway series By Dave Denison
Economists take the Green Line
W
e’re in a seminar room on the ninth floor of the Photonics Center at Boston University, shortly before 9:00 on a Friday morning in April. Soon the room will fill with more than 30 students and professors attending the Green Line Macro Meeting, a twiceannual collaboration of the economics departments of BU and Boston College. The room’s wide north-facing windows look out over Commonwealth Avenue. If you look straight down, you can see the Green Line trains running back and forth. Beyond is a spectacular view of the Charles River. The “externalities,” to borrow a popular macro term, are impressive: the golden dome of the Massachusetts
Statehouse at the east end of the panorama, the greenish dome at MIT closer by, and a steeple or two at Harvard visible to the west. Inside the room, at a minute past 9:00, the work begins. Guihai Zhao, a Ph.D. candidate at BU, is presenting the first of six research papers that will be discussed today. He’s talking about an economic model that seeks to explain how investor confidence affects the rising and falling value of stocks. Dressed in blue jeans and a white shirt, Zhao stands next to a lectern that holds a laptop. Discussion points project onto the screen at the front of the room. The idea of the seminar is to give grad-
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