In the early years, Emmanuel was a day college preparing women for professional fields such as education, nursing, and social work. Despite being commuters, students were involved in numerous co-curricular activities including student publications and athletics. The 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s saw growth not only in the student population, academic programs and activities, but also in the physical campus, with additional land purchases on Brookline Avenue and Avenue Louis Pasteur. In 1949, the college completed the construction of Alumnae Hall, a science center, the first building constructed on campus after the original Administration Building. The trustees of the college were incorporated by the state in 1921.
John F. Kennedy served on the college's advisory board from 1946 until his death in 1963. Longtime President
Janet Eisner, who had presided over years of enrollment decline and sought to save the college from closure, oversaw a signed agreement with
Merck Pharmaceuticals. With this, the college agreed to lease a portion of its campus for a new research laboratory to Merck for 75 years and approximately $50 million. The agreement made Emmanuel the only college in the country with a pharmaceutical lab on campus. At the same time, Emmanuel started admitting men, enrolling its first undergraduate male students in 2001. The financially stabilizing alliance with Merck permitted Emmanuel to begin building new dorms and buying back buildings it had sold in leaner times. Going co-ed and improving the campus sparked a sustained revival that made Emmanuel one of the fastest-growing colleges in New England at that time. Emmanuel's building plan also included the
Jean Yawkey Student Center, which opened in 2004 as the first new building on campus in 35 years. The college administration used the windfall to secure millions in federal science grants to fund the construction of a $50 million science center. The Maureen Murphy Wilkens Science Center opened in the fall of 2009, effectively doubling the academic space of the campus. The Wilkens Center is four floors and 47,500 feet and contains faculty/student research space and offices, student study areas, new classrooms for all academic areas, 120 underground parking spaces, as well as teaching laboratories for
biology,
chemistry,
biochemistry, and
physics. In 2016, Julie Hall was torn down to make way for a new apartment-style 18-floor residence hall. Built for a cost of $140 million, the cost of the project was the same as Emmanuel's total endowment. The resulting residence hall opened in 2018, provides 692 beds of apartment-style housing to upper-class Emmanuel students and approximately 250 students from nearby
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, generating additional revenue. In 2022, president
Janet Eisner retired and Mary K. Boyd was named the college's 13th president. She abruptly resigned the following year. In August 2023, Beth Ross was named acting president and the following January she was named the college's 14th president. ==Campus==