Jonathan E. Boe Memorial Scholarship

With academic credentials like his, Dr. Jonathan Boe could have taken a position at any prestigious institution of higher learning, but he chose Cal Lutheran—and that choice made all the difference. Dr. Boe received his undergraduate degree in history from Carleton College his and master’s and doctoral degrees from Stanford University.

Professor Boe began his career at CLU in 1970, just a few months after his marriage to Jeanne Myers. He had met and courted her for three years while attending Stanford. He loved the subject of history and was a popular professor. In 1994 he left the classroom to become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. While serving in that position he was diagnosed with cancer in 1999. He was only 55. Complications from chemotherapy received at UCLA Medical Center claimed his life in November 1999.

Dean Boe’s death produced a flood of reactions from the campus. People described him with various adjectives—all accurate and consistent, yet varying in depth and description. He was described as quiet, modest, principled, unflappable, brilliant, trusted and indefatigable. He was all of these and more.
His faculty colleagues had always relied on his uncompromising honesty and judgment. As one colleague wrote, “Jon was invariably the smartest man in the room. Any room.”

Dr. Boe wrote numerous scholarly publications, but his proudest academic achievement was the completion of a three-volume series of texts entitled The American Journey: United States History through Diaries and Letters. After he died his wife, who for many years had worked as a middle-school counselor, endowed a speakers’ series in his honor that focused on American History.

The Jonathan E. Boe Memorial Scholarship came into existence through the many memorial gifts received from faculty, friends, family and his wife. The recipient of the scholarship is to be a student who emulates Jonathan Boe’s qualities—a love of history as a discipline and high academic achievement.