The Heights received funding from the school and ran stories about student clubs, sporting events, and lectures on campus.
In the 1950s, The Heights reprinted a Martin Luther King Jr. article, and in 1960, accusing the University of not honoring the rights of its black students.
These more liberal attitudes at the time were a shift from Boston College's more conservative, Catholic values, and became the beginnings of a strained relationship between the paper and the University administrators.
The paper's editors, Tom Sheehan and Michael Berkey, were arrested on charges of conspiring to obtain information by illegal means.
In the meantime, the newspaper operated out of the office of the Undergraduate Government of Boston College (UGBC) with borrowed money.
In recent years, the board has editorialized in favor of the creation of an LGBTQ resource center and University divestment from fossil fuels.
In 2003, this lease was called into question following publication of a sexually explicit column called “Sex and the Univer-city.”[10] In 2021, The Heights faced similar pressure from the BC administration after reporting on University President William P. Leahy's inaction over early warning signs of sexual abuse conducted by former BC chaplain Ted Dziak, S.J.