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

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the private schools. And this of course, as the private schools have made it impossible for UMassfBoston to offer a public engineering degree, is how the private schools most definitely fix their competition. The State of Massachusetts, by complying with such restrictions, is in effect paying to keep its public University of higher education on a lower overall academic level. And this limitation in spite of national statistics which reflect concern for the smaller number of U.S. Engineering graduates as compared with the Soviets and japanese. Doesn't that X between UMass and Boston bother anyone? The 52.1 billion significant export industry of private schools pump steady funds into both City!State. Still, the Legislature is reluctant to provide adequate flow to its own Harbor Campus. An anonymous founding faculty member in Chemistry commented. When this school was built we had a budget to equip ourselves with the best. But as the years go by they fthe Statehousej just don't seem to understand that this equipment must be maintained, replaced, and updated The State just can't seem to grant enough to its public higher education, opting instead for cut-backs, mergers, and payments to private schools while restricting UMassfBoston's overall academic offerings and growth. This is, of course, all tax and budget and land and money related, a system between the power sources in Boston and the government. And UMassfBoston, as a tax-funded school, flounders helplessly in a Commonwealth of seemingly greater concerns. One must wonder why UMassfBoston ever came about in the first place - if it is going to be held back so in its nineteenth year. In this respect, the school itself can be seen as very much like its student body: held in check by the societal limitations imposed on their freedom of education. With UMassfBoston, these former ropes appear to have been cut. Yet close inspection of the school's progress reveals that these educational restrictions for minority and poor have merely been loosened. UMassfBoston does teach the previously very single cafeteria worker was imported to the Harbor Campus. underprivileged, yet it is not allowed to teach them everything another university could. For fear of stealing the fire from the older private schools, the young common university remains chained in its aspirations. But perhaps this is part of the real reason such a seemingly good project like UMassfBoston was started in the first place. Maybe the true workings of this school remain in its original bowels, built into its very design - and exemplified by its early scandals. In a way, it seems that UMassfBoston was constructed to loose the State money, to suck taxes like a sewer-hole, thereby maintaining some strange sort of balance in the Commonwealth. This has been a popular view of cynical insiders. But this is only heresay. As stated here before, no one of any true knowledge will address the real issues of UMassfBoston, preferring instead to keep the public in darkness, and cut off from State aid as well as knowledge. But enough of this depressing speculation, enough methane gas, prison jokes, and Boston snobbery. Enough dirt on UMassfBoston. The school is experiencing growing pains. It is approaching the average age of its undergraduate constituency, coming of college age. It now seems appropriate, as it prepares for its future, that UMassfBoston cleans up its act, and keep its original purpose in mind. To effect this change the University of Massachusetts at Boston must do some cutting of its own. UMassfBoston should remain a generic school, offering namebrand learning affordable to the poor, crippled, veteran, minority, and any other that may fit into the class of those who don't fit into the private school system. UMassfBoston should only allow these folks admission. After all, there will most likely be enough poor to fill a meager six buildings on an otherwise barren Point for years to come. Private school transfers should not be allowed. UMB requirements should demand that the degree candidate be low income, from a previously uneducated family, and able to learn - Basic Studies schools should be established to help potential UMassfBoston students achieve the standard necessary to enter the University. UMassfBoston must do some cutting of its own and sever itself from its agressors, from Boston and Dorchester, from the other Universities. 23

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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

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Take a chainsaw to Columbia Point, releasing The University to float freely in the clearer water of previously undetermined intellectual seas. Take the underpriviledged and teach them previously denied yachting skills. Subtract Boston from the school name. Subtract private school favoritism and bad press and the quality of public higher education could only rise. Toss that strangely meaningful X into the Harbor with all its symbolic cutbacks and mergers. Remove the University of Massachusetts from the name as well. Ask anyone where UMass is and they tell you Amherst And Amherst, the so-called flagship of the State universities, pretends to be a private school, snubbing its Harbor Campus. And if UMass belongs to Amherst, the X to the City!State, and the Boston to Boston private universities, that leaves just The University to the poor and working class student. And this is as it should be. .Q- f, -5' -,M V ... . sg, Q. --ff - ' , . x. i fi- M-- ' 1