Boston University
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40 free Boston University trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Boston University is a big private research university in the middle of a big city, and its history is stranger than its tidy stretch of Commonwealth Avenue suggests. The school started far from the city whose name it carries, opened its classrooms to women long before most rivals, and collected dormitories with past lives that students never tire of retelling. This quiz gathers the best Boston University fun facts in one place. Expect famous alumni and professors, a hockey program with Olympic heroes, a mascot with a literary name, an old ballpark, a haunted hallway and a few nicknames that only make sense once you have walked the grounds. It is written for Terriers past and present, prospective students planning a visit, and anyone who enjoys college trivia. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn the backstory even when you guess wrong.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which hotel chain took its name from a Boston building that later became a Boston University dormitory?
Sheraton
Sheraton became the whole chain's name because the lit rooftop lettering on its Boston hotel cost too much to replace. That hotel became BU's Kilachand Hall.
Q 02Which invention was developed in the 1870s by a Boston University professor who taught speech and elocution?
Telephone
Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell taught at BU's School of Oratory, and the university paid him a year in advance so he could chase the idea.
Q 03Which baseball legend liked suite 818 of a Kenmore Square hotel, later a Boston University dorm, enough to request it?
Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth stayed often at the Myles Standish Hotel, a favorite of visiting ball clubs because Fenway Park was so close. BU bought the building in 1949.
Q 04Which civil rights leader studied for a Boston University doctorate while assisting at Boston's Twelfth Baptist Church?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. received his PhD in systematic theology in June 1955, months before the Montgomery bus boycott began. He met his future wife, a music student, while living in Boston.
Q 05Nickerson Field at Boston University stands on the site of which Major League Baseball team's former home ballpark?
Braves
Boston Braves games filled the park until the franchise left for Milwaukee in 1953, and BU bought it that summer. The old ticket office became the campus police station.
Q 06Boston University students of the 1950s renamed their mascot Fumbles after too many losses; what name replaced it?
Touchdown
Touchdown replaced Fumbles once students tired of the jinx. Earlier terriers had answered to Kappa, Gulliver and Danny II.
Q 07Which radio host got his start playing records and reading news at Boston University's campus station WTBU?
Howard Stern
Howard Stern spent his first two years in BU's College of Basic Studies before earning a communications degree. He also met his first wife on campus.
Q 08Boston University's mascot Rhett shares his name with a scarlet-loving character from which novel?
Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind gives the usual account of the name, which arrived with the costumed mascot in 1983: Rhett Butler adores Scarlett, and scarlet is BU's main color.
Q 09In 1877 Boston University became the first American university to award which degree to a woman?
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy degrees had never been awarded to an American woman until classics scholar Helen Magill earned hers at BU with a thesis on Greek drama.
Q 10Boston University's Center for Computing & Data Sciences, opened in 2023, has a shape that earned it which game's name?
Jenga
Jenga is the popular nickname for the stack of shifted, offset floors, the biggest building in BU's history. Others say it looks like a pile of books.
Q 11Which varsity sport did Boston University scrap on homecoming weekend in 1997, more than a century after its first team?
Football
Football ended at BU during a one-win season, 113 years after the first team took the field. Soccer took over the stadium it left behind.
Q 12Which Boston University graduate captained the Miracle on Ice team and scored its winning goal against the Soviet Union?
Mike Eruzione
Mike Eruzione was one of four Terriers on the 1980 Olympic squad, alongside goalie Jim Craig, who made 36 saves in the 4-3 upset.
Q 13Boston University has won more titles than any rival in which annual tournament of Boston's four big hockey schools?
Beanpot
Q 21Which celebrated science fiction author was also a professor of biochemistry at Boston University's medical school?
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov got the job partly through fan mail: a BU biochemist wrote to praise one of his stories, and the two corresponded for years.
Q 22Which Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner taught humanities at Boston University for decades from 1976?
Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel won the prize in 1986, ten years after joining the faculty, and BU named its center for Jewish studies in his honor.
Q 23Which Boston University president took a leave in 1990 to run for governor of Massachusetts as the Democratic nominee?
John Silber
Beanpot bragging rights are fought over each winter by BU, Boston College, Harvard and Northeastern. BU wins so often that it is jokingly called Beanpot University.
Q 14Which Boston University hockey player was paralyzed just eleven seconds into his first college shift in 1995?
Travis Roy
Travis Roy went on to create a foundation that funds spinal cord injury research and grants. BU retired his number 24 and raised it to the arena rafters.
Q 15Which Boston University quarterback, nicknamed the Golden Greek, chose the Red Sox over the Cleveland Browns?
Harry Agganis
Harry Agganis became Boston's starting first baseman but died of a pulmonary embolism at just 26. BU's hockey and basketball arena carries his name.
Q 16Which future Hall of Fame basketball coach led the Boston University Terriers from 1978 to 1983 before joining the NBA?
Rick Pitino
Rick Pitino pressed full-court for nearly every minute and took BU to its first NCAA tournament in 24 years. He then left to be a New York Knicks assistant.
Q 17Which Boston University hockey star won the Little League World Series as a pitcher before his Hobey Baker Award?
Chris Drury
Chris Drury threw a complete game to win the 1989 final for Trumbull, Connecticut. He later lifted the Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche.
Q 18Which American playwright died in 1953 in a Boston hotel suite that became a Boston University dorm room a year later?
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill died in suite 401 of the Hotel Shelton, and campus folklore holds that he haunts the fourth floor to this day.
Q 19In a 1962 Good Friday experiment on the Boston University campus, divinity students were given which psychedelic drug?
Psilocybin
Psilocybin went to half the volunteers and a vitamin placebo to the rest, in a Harvard-designed test of whether the drug could bring on a religious experience.
Q 20Which Seinfeld star studied theater at Boston University but left after his third year for an acting job in New York?
Jason Alexander
Jason Alexander dreamed of classical roles until a BU professor told him he would never play Hamlet and steered him toward comedy.
John Silber lost a close race to Republican William Weld, went back to BU, and was later appointed by Weld to chair the state Board of Education.
Q 24Which Oscar-winning actress studied acting at Boston University but never graduated after failing a movement class?
Geena Davis
Geena Davis fell short of the credits she needed, with an F in movement and an incomplete in another class. Julianne Moore and Faye Dunaway both finished BU theater degrees.
Q 25Which talk show host earned a broadcast journalism degree at Boston University and wrote for its student newspaper?
Andy Cohen
Andy Cohen had bylines in The Daily Free Press, BU's student paper, years before he fronted Watch What Happens Live.
Q 26Which congresswoman, famed for her speech at the Nixon impeachment hearings, was a Boston University law graduate?
Barbara Jordan
Barbara Jordan finished her BU law degree in 1959 and later became the first woman to give a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention.
Q 27Which Boston University law graduate became the first Black US senator elected by popular vote, in Massachusetts?
Edward Brooke
Edward Brooke recalled that he barely studied as an undergraduate but did little else at BU. He was also the first Black attorney general elected in any state.
Q 28Which poet taught a Boston University writing class whose students included both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton?
Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell also taught the poet George Starbuck at BU, and another student, Kathleen Spivack, later wrote a book about studying with him.
Q 29Who became America's first Black woman physician after graduating from a school that merged into Boston University?
Rebecca Lee Crumpler
Rebecca Lee Crumpler qualified in 1864 at the New England Female Medical College, the first school to train women in medicine, which joined BU a decade later.
Q 30Boston University traces its roots to a Methodist seminary that opened in 1839 in which state?
Vermont
Vermont's town of Newbury hosted the school for eight years before it moved to New Hampshire and then, in 1867, to Boston's Beacon Hill.