Boston College (BC) is a private Jesuit Catholic research university located in the village of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA, 6 miles (9.7 km) west of downtown Boston. It has 9,100 full-time undergraduates and almost 5,000 graduate students. The university\\\\\\s name reflects its early history as a liberal arts college and preparatory school (now Boston College High School) in Boston\\\\\\s South End. It is a member of the 568 Group and the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. Its main campus is a historic district and features some of the earliest examples of collegiate gothic architecture in North America.
History
In 1825, Benedict Joseph Fenwick, S.J., a Jesuit from Maryland, became the second Bishop of Boston. He was the first to articulate a vision for a College in the City of Boston that would raise a new generation of leaders to serve both the civic and spiritual needs of his fledgling diocese. In 1827, Bishop Fenwick opened a school in the basement of his cathedral and took to the personal instruction of the citys youth. His efforts to attract other Jesuits to the faculty were hampered both by Bostons distance from the center of Jesuit activity in Maryland and by suspicion on the part of the citys Protestant elite. Relations with Bostons civic leaders worsened such that, when a Jesuit faculty was finally secured in 1843, Fenwick decided to leave the Boston school and instead opened the College of the Holy Cross 45 miles (72 km) west of the city in Worcester, Massachusetts where he felt the Jesuits could operate with greater autonomy.