BU marks 50 years of changing lives behind bars

Community organizer and poet Elizabeth Barker was an untenured instructor at Boston University in the early 1970s when she brought a group of BU students to the medium-security prison MCI Norfolk to compete against men who had created their own version of the popular College Bowl quiz show on radio and TV while incarcerated there. The students lost, and “Ma” Barker, as she was known, became a vigorous champion of offering college courses behind prison walls. With the support of John Silber (Hon.’95), then BU’s president, the University offered the first courses at Norfolk in 1972.