Category:Famous Boston University Alumni
Boston University is a private research university on Commonwealth Avenue with no undergraduate campus quad and a student body larger than most of its Boston neighbors, and its roster here is built on two of its schools rather than on the university as a whole. The School of Theology produced the doctoral candidate who became Martin Luther King Jr. The College of Communication produced a media block that runs from network news through cable programming to the ownership of American film studios. A third strand, elected office, is unusually spread out: the officials here govern Boston, New York, San Antonio, Fort Lauderdale and Virginia rather than clustering in one state.
Background
Boston University traces its origins to a Methodist theological school founded in 1839 and chartered in its present form in 1869. Its School of Theology is the oldest of its faculties, and it is the school that awarded Martin Luther King Jr. his doctorate in the mid-1950s.
The institution is large and professionally organized, with separate schools for communication, law, medicine, management and theology. That structure is visible in the membership: the people here mostly arrived through one of those professional faculties, and their careers track the faculty rather than the university.
Theology, medicine and the two peaks
Martin Luther King Jr. completed his doctorate at Boston University in the mid-1950s, took the pulpit in Montgomery, and led the bus boycott of 1955 and 1956 that made him a national figure. He served as the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from 1957 until his assassination in 1968.
Drew Weissman is the second peak, and a much more recent one. With Katalin Karikó he found that chemical modifications to nucleoside bases in synthetic mRNA suppress the inflammatory response that had blocked therapeutic use of mRNA for decades. Published in the mid-2000s, that finding became the enabling technology behind the BioNTech, Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. Reshma Kewalramani extends the medical membership into industry as chief executive of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the first woman to lead a large publicly traded biotechnology company.
Broadcasting, cable and the studios
The media block is the most concentrated professional cluster in this roster. John Scali reported for the Associated Press and ABC News and acted as an informal back-channel between Washington and Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis. David Zaslav helped launch CNBC and MSNBC at NBCUniversal, ran Discovery from 2006, and now leads Warner Bros. Discovery after the 2022 merger with WarnerMedia. Shari Redstone moved from her father's theatre business to control of National Amusements and, through it, Paramount Global.
The programming side of the same industry sits alongside them, and it is closely intertwined. Andy Cohen was Bravo's executive vice president of development and talent, where he oversaw Top Chef and Project Runway before creating and hosting Watch What Happens Live and executive producing The Real Housewives. Bethenny Frankel appeared in the first three seasons of the New York edition of that franchise after finishing as runner-up on The Apprentice: Martha Stewart. Christopher Cousins played Ted Beneke in Breaking Bad. Jeffrey Lurie took the same media training into sport and has owned the Philadelphia Eagles since 1994.
Elected office, spread thin
Boston University's political membership does not concentrate in Massachusetts the way a state university's would. Edward Brooke was the first African American elected to the United States Senate by popular vote, serving Massachusetts from 1967 to 1979, and Ayanna Pressley has represented most of Boston since 2019. Beyond that the roster scatters. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents the Bronx and Queens. Gina Ortiz Jones is mayor of San Antonio and was Under Secretary of the Air Force. Dean Trantalis is mayor of Fort Lauderdale and was the first openly gay person elected to that office. Bob McDonnell was Governor of Virginia, William Cohen a Republican senator from Maine who became Secretary of Defense, and J. Howard McGrath a Governor of Rhode Island who went on to serve as Attorney General. Jen Kiggans, Lois Frankel and Keiko Fujimori, the Peruvian party leader and three-time presidential candidate, complete a group with no single geographic centre.
Sybil Haydel Morial belongs to the same public strand from outside electoral politics: a New Orleans civil rights activist and educator, wife of the city's first Black mayor and mother of another.
See also
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