Jim Repetti, William J. Kenealy, S.J. Chair and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, has been named a Master Teacher at Boston College:

[W]ith his soothing voice and kindly deportment [Repetti] manages to exert a calm influence over a lecture room packed with five dozen second-year law students. “It’s about creating an environment where they’ll feel comfortable, empowered, self-confident,” Repetti, a 1980 Boston College Law graduate, said immediately after class in his office. “You’re teaching the whole person intellectually, but you’re also building character. I hope that by seeing me treat them respectfully they’ll go on to treat others the same way.” … Repetti, who was a running back (for Harvard) in the early 1970s and is built like one, does not let up as he impels his students through the arcane ways and byways of tax-law analysis. …

He says that he aims for his courses to embody a teaching philosophy borrowed from the late Daniel Degnan, SJ, a law professor with whom he crossed paths at Boston College in the late 1980s. “Love your students to death, work your students to death,” Degnan had advised the young law professor. In the Jesuit tradition of education, … these commandments are mutually inclusive: Love, which must be entwined with communication, is epitomized in action.