University of Massachusetts Boston - Beacon Yearbook (Boston, MA)

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A looking glass self of UMass gives that we are an untouted University in Boston and we have to prove ourselves to other schools As a University our image fails in that we don't see ourselves in the world as we know we are. Reasons for this seeming self consciousness are recurring, reverberating still from UMassfBoston's beginnings at Columbia Point. To initiate this S130 million project, january 28, 1974, 5700 students arrived and attended classes. Rather spare, even for a public school. But this unheralded first day was a message, an exhibition of the powers in Boston granted to private schools. These imitation Ivy Leaguers - none of the complaining schools were among the city's best - feared the growing University's cut-rate tuition. They attempted to keep UMassfBoston invisible, veiled in negative press. They did not want their students migrating from the more expensive private schools. They tried to hide the University. And this, of course, is absurd: How do you camaflague 12,000 or so low - income and minority students? Put them on a peninsula in Dorchester. And to this day in 1984, there is no sign anywhere near the buildings at all, announcing The University of Massachusetts at Boston. One anonymous Vice Chancellor jokes that out-of-state friends once drove by the University and asked if it wasn't dangerous to have a prison so close to the highway. UMassfBoston has an image problem. And this complex extends well inside the school as well. From the glass-paneled, computer- terminaled Library Archives, visions of history being rewritten surface as one finds virtually no written history, newsclips - nothing on the University heritage. Evidently, UMassfBoston has not initiated preserving much sense of its history, good or bad. Very little, and cautious at best, oral tradition exists as well. Most faculty, students, and administration requested not to be quoted in this article. One faculty member went so far as to say he never wantfedj to be on record as ever having said anything regarding this university. Another, upon hearing of this reporter's intentions to discuss UMassfBoston with Boston University chieftan john Silber, ranted, Don't ask him iSilberj how B.U. sees UMass. He would love that a picture in their newspaper, front page. 'UMass Man Asks B.U. ' Be it former bad press, previous pressure from the privates, or just plain youth, UMassfBoston is easily intimidated outside its own Harbor territory. Inside, UMB knows its own strengths. The biggest news with this school has always been the quality of education made available to the general public - at a price most anyone, with financial aid readily available, could afford. Most faculty members hold Ivy League PHDs, twenty-five per cent from Harvard - higher than any university outside Harvard itself. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis assured me in an interview that your place offers a first-rate education. But even the pro-UMB Governor elaborated on little else pertaining to the University. Several other politicians, including Mayor Flynn and Senator Kennedy refused interviews. Obviously UMassfBoston is treated as low priority by prominent politicians. Either that, or the place is considered an extremely sensitive issue. Ultimately, the University continues to make the mistakes of a young adult still struggling with its financially supportive parents and more worldly peers. As late as 1980, students were holding sit-ins , fifty sat in the Chancellor's stairwell, the only access to the administration in this cautiously constructed 60's minded building. Their demand, a greater participation in the school's governance body, was solved with token appointments. And the following year, 1981, students rallied in true UMassfBoston tradition on the Boston Common. As students before them had protested the invasion of Cambodia, and the death of Martin Luther King, 1981's students chanted before the Statehouse gates, too late. The legislative bulldozer had started once again, this time shoving Boston State College down to the former city dump in one of the sloppiest unions in educational history. Without the consent, knowledge, or regards of students or faculty, UMassfBoston had a sister. The merger with Boston State was about as efficient and well received ,as a fusion of two separate bodies into Siamese Twins. Adoption plans were announced August 21, after talks began all of three weeks earlier. Actually, a merger was due january 1982, but the State Board of Regents of Higher Education, advisory committee to the Statehouse, couldn't hold it anymore. Determined to join the schools with exigency's bazooka rather than a well-planned solder, the Board recommended the merger, then forced it through budgetary process. The State's fiscal budget that year clustered funds for UMass, Boston State, and the community colleges. The budgetary hack-job short changed public higher education 21

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To date, people comment not on the University's educational concerns, or its minority, elderly, and low income students, but still talk of the skimming of the Harbor Campus' buliding contracts. The shortcuts are now, ten years later, most apparent. Inside the University appears twice its age, the sorriest of all UMassfBoston stories. Bricks are loose and falling, tiles on every walkway are cracked and shattered, circulation is poor, keeping air unseasonably hot or cold, ceiling panels sag, chunks of carpet are missing But I hereby flush the remains of this scandal, leaving such University Heritage up in the air - as what is passed. orchester, Massachusetts. A poor old section of Greater Boston. In the early seventies, the time of UMassfBoston's siege of Columbia Point, sixteen per cent of Dorchester's families were receiving some form of public assistance, the area had less than one-third as many college students as the rest of the city. Not exactly a bastion of change and academic concerns, Dorchester was outraged at the prospect of UMassfBoston. Horror shows of urban renewal and ousted elderly were projected to citizens. Local opposition coalitions and petitions circulated the area, bad-mouthing the University. Dorchesterians did not want an influx of those snotty Cambridge types, the ones they'd been subjected to every time they left their parish. At first, UMassfBoston reportedly bought off town leaders. Later, concessions were sold: use of swimming pool, the opportunity to audit classes free of charge, the use of vacant rooms for community functions. In these, at least, UMassfBoston 20 would become an asset to the community. But what Dorchester's leaders did not vocalize, if realized, was that they were about to have a University not merely in their midst, but in their income bracket as well. UMassfBoston was designed for the education of people like Dorchester. Dorchesterians feared that UMassfBostonians would run them out of town and erect high priced high-rises in place of the long standing triple Mass! Boston was the generic label for the problems at hand. decker homes where they lived - and rented. Such renovation would have probably turned Dorchester into an AllstonfBrighton type student ghetto. But this never happened. I asked a landlord of several triples in the Columbia road area closest to Columbia Point to comment. He acknowledged, remaining anonymous, that landlords on the whole wouldn't mind a little renovations. I rent to anyone, he said. . .. some around here will only rent if there's government comp. lSection 8 subsidyj They get more for their place that way The property still brings in money. When asked if UMassfBoston students were a problem, he remarked, Look around. Do you see many students? Any renovation? Across Dorchester Avenue, a Hispanic with a waxed mustache and shaven head appeared to be making arrangements with two lads in shorts, turf shoes, athletic socks stretched over their calves. All three could have been UMassfBoston students, but most likely were not. The University population remains outside of Dorchester outside of University hours. However, the original reports of UMassfBoston's siege of Dorchester coupled with the legislatively scandalous building contracts triggered media coverage as if the poor had been slaughtered by the rich's cadillac. In all such print, the name UMassfBoston was the culprit, the generic label for the problems at hand. In 1984 the former Dorchester rage seems a questionable whiplash case - though definitely an indication, if misdirected, of the stench surrounding the entire development of Columbia Point. The long ranging effects of all such issues, however, centered on the University, establishing in its very foundation a severe psychological complex it has yet to outgrow. oston. A city with its own complex. San Francisco trolley cars, London double-decker buses, and an unreliable subway system make it all but impossible for a scheduled arrival to the Harbor Campus. A city where people from everywhere attend dozens of schools of higher education and leave for the summer. MIT, BC, BU. UMB. The sole public university of higher education struggles to gain recognition in this town of letters. Dr. Sheldon Kalick, UMass!Boston Psychology Department, commented on the school's self. It's like Cooley's 'Looking Glass Self ' Kalick said.

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by 56 million, accelerating the combination of the city's only two schools of higher learning. Late August, 1981, students were notified by mail that classes would start later that fall, due to the merger. Yet, in spite of this supposed instant merger, classes were held at Boston State throughout the '81-'82 school year. One Boston State student, again nameless, recounts the typical merger story. Most teachers lost faith In my Sociology class the professor left for another school mid-semester, and there was no one to fill-in. This same student also worked for the Management Department. There, the Department Head had left for a job at an Alabama university. Evidently, the UMassfBoston people did not check on Boston State or respond to its problems. The work-study student remembers that he fthe Department Headj was only in town one day a week. I graded papers, signed incompletes He didn't care, he was already gone I think I filled out most the graduation forms for Management degrees that year. No one else seemed to it was so sloppy. So much equipment and books were stolen. People felt cheated And unfair it would continue. That Fall semester, 1981, three hundred UMassfBoston part-time faculty were laid off, and close to one hundred full-time from Boston State. UMassfBoston only accepted professors from its sister-school with PHDs, regardless of work experience, teaching record, or terminal degree. In true exhibition of legislative concern for public higher education, every classified or unionized State worker was retained. Teachers of some note were allowed to wash away, while every single 22 cafeteria worker was imported to the Harbor to sling another helping from the Board of Regents. In 1984, the merger remains a messy digestion. It was not so much the action itself as the way they brought it about, commented one former Boston Stater. Others maintain that the fusion was harmful, forcing two different types of students together, limiting the programs of one group - the Staters. Regardless, merger troubles have not yet subsided. Three years later, new requirements for transferred Boston Staters slow down their graduation, others find their records have been misplaced, misread, or lost in the shuffle to UMassfBoston. And there are still deeper conflicts for some former Boston State people, conflicts of spirit. Professor William Squires remembers, The kids from 'Bo State' were renegades from their parents. They were losers and they had the brains and the ability and they didn't want to follow their father's foot steps going to Boston College I'd say eighty per cent of the faculty knew that was the type of kid, and they said, 'you know, we're going to see how far this kid can really go.' And they were amazed. When asked how that spirit had transferred to UMassfBoston and the Harbor Campus, Squires responded, Not at all. MassfBoston. That's the shorthand of it all, right there in its title. I mean, doesn't that X in the middle of the school name bother anyone? That X indicates UMassfBoston's isolation from Boston. That's geographically as well as psychologically. That's ironic, considering the University's student body consists of a fair cross section of the city's population. But Boston caters to the imports, those students paying 510,000 a year to attend the other schools. This is, after all, America, and by nature the more expensive product is granted preferential allowances. Take B.U., and recently Simmons College. Both are publicly fearful of UMass!Boston's cut-rate tuition. B.U. has reportedly been behind an Anti-UMassfBoston campaign from the start, becoming involved in the no publicity first day of classes as discussed here earlier. But further than little media skirmishes, these schools have regularly opposed Fine Arts, Library Science, and Engineering courses at UMassfBoston, actually stopping these classes from being offered at a public school in Boston. Deals have been struck between the State Board of Regents of Higher Education and the private foes of UMassfBoston. As this Board consists of mainly private school representatives, including B.U., and UMass-Amherst's nonsupportive Chancellor these deals are like shaking one's own hand - in favor of the privates. It is not difficult, for instance, to have the Board prohibit UMassfBoston from offering an Engineering Degree Program. UMassfBoston Engineering majors receive two years' courses at the Harbor Campus, but must then transfer to a private university to finish their degree. The State, because UMassfBoston cannot offer this degree, picks up the tab, paying for the ten times higher private school rate. And this does more than cost UMassfBoston needed funding. This engineering restriction appears to the world as an inadequacy of UMassfBoston, rendering it not as good as