Every day, students from Orchard Hill or Upper Central walk past a white house on a small hill on their way to Worcester Dining Commons. Usually, the house doesn’t cross their minds; they’re thinking instead of the culinary wonders awaiting them at the DC.
This year, though, something’s changed about that house. The lawn is still green and the paint is still white, and it still projects a certain charm. What’s different about the chancellor’s house is who’s living in it.
Dr. John Lombardi, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts system since 2002, stepped down last spring, opting to take a job as President of the Louisiana State University system. Due to disagreements with both UMass President Jack Wilson and the Board of Trustees, Lombardi felt it was his time to step aside.
“The current trustees are now embarked on a plan to rethink and reconfigure the way in which the University of Massachusetts will function,” Lombardi told the Associated Press. “And since I don’t agree … it seemed only appropriate for me to think of other opportunities.”
John V. Lombardi was born in Los Angeles in 1942 to a college librarian and the president of Los Angeles City College. After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Pomona College in 1963, he went on to get his masters and doctorate from Colombia University in 1964 and 1968, respectively. He married Cathryn L. Lee in 1964, with whom he has two children, John Lee (1969) and Mary Ann (1972).
Lombardi went on to hold several administrative and teaching jobs in his career. A specialist in Latin American history, especially Venezuelan, Lombardi held a job as Profesor Contratando at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas in 1967.
After obtaining his doctorate, Lombardi began teaching for the history department at Indiana University at Bloomington. He worked his way up to dean of the College of Arts and Sciences before he left IU in 1987, when he was given the position of provost of John Hopkins University.
He stayed at JHU, teaching history in addition to his duties as provost, until March of 1990, when he was offered the job of president of the University of Florida. The ninth president in the history of the school, Lombardi became very popular with the students and alumni and is credited with improving academic standing, increasing the size of the student body and helping elevate the Gators to their current level of performance. He resigned in 1999 as president, but continuing to work at the University of Florida as the director for the Center for Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University until he took the job as chancellor here at UMass.
During his time on the Amherst campus, Lombardi has been both praised and criticized for his actions. He’s responsible for raising the University’s standing as a research institute, as well as overseeing the building of the North apartment complex, the first residential development in several years. Lombardi has also been praised as a very charismatic leader with a strong talent for fundraising.
Athletic director John McCutcheon commented on the important role Lombardi played in the athletic programs as well, stressing his “energy, support and ability to articulate the role of athletics on the campus.”
“He [Lombardi] was extremely supportive of the efforts we put into athletics, at least over the 3 1/2 years I’ve been here,” he said. “He was instrumental in some of the successes we’ve enjoyed in the last few years.”
However, Lombardi faced heat in recent years for the increase in his [and Vice Chancellor Gargano’s] salaries and for his extremely controversial recommendation to award former White House Chief of Staff and Iraq war mastermind Andrew Card with an honorary degree.
Throughout his career, Lombardi has had a reputation for bluntness in his dealings, as well as being accused of having an “abrasive” management style, which reportedly triggered his resignation in Florida. Lombardi himself has defended his bluntness, saying, “I find that, while clarity has some disadvantages in the political life of a university, its advantages greatly outweigh them.”
This particular management style, however, reportedly caused conflict between the chancellor and the president and Board of Trustees, especially regarding the president’s plans to streamline the UMass system, which currently consists of five campuses – Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, Lowell and the UMass Medical School at Worcester. This conflict was apparently a major factor in Lombardi’s resignation.
While President Jack Wilson said that he and Lombardi came to a “mutual agreement” regarding Lombardi’s departure, some lawmakers and faculty have criticized Wilson for ousting a popular chancellor for political reasons.
In a comment to the Boston Globe over the summer, John Armstrong, a former UMass trustee who resigned in protest of Wilson’s reorganization plan, echoed these sentiments.
“It’s a great loss for the University of Massachusetts and Amherst. What it indicates to me is that people elsewhere in the world understand academic leadership better than the folks here in Massachusetts.”
Max Page, president of the UMass Amherst faculty union, wasn’t surprised by Lombardi’s departure.
“It was clear their [Lombardi and Wilson’s] relationship was not going to work out,” he said.
Page, a critic of the reorganization plans, has stated that the faculty wants the search for the new chancellor to be a national one, and has apparently passed a resolution opposing the permanent appointment of any interim chancellor, saying that they “don’t want a chancellor installed from the president’s office.”
History professor Bruce Laurie agreed that “John Lombardi was no saint,” but his personality had little to do with his departure.
“He could be too blunt and plainspoken for the faculty, staff and students partial to more genteel discourse. He was opinionated and not inclined to suffer fools – or simply those he disagreed with.” Laurie said. “He would have benefited from tact and discretion. But he was not given the sack for personality flaws or want of charm; he was dismissed because he was too independent-minded and too loyal to this campus for the trustees who have traditionally been troubled by local leaders determined to make this campus what it ought to be – an excellent place to pursue research and learning.”
Laurie, who has been a professor at UMass for 36 years, was also critical of those seen as responsible for Lombardi’s leaving the campus.
“It is the trustees, sometimes in alliance with lawmakers and leaders of the larger private schools, and sometimes on their own, who have held down this campus. They have done it again – this time on their own,” he said. “They are why ours has long been a very good school but not quite an excellent one. They simply cannot bear the thought of excellence at Amherst; it threatens them and their vision of a five-campus system of presumed equals. That is why they want our money – endowment and whatever – and why they deserve our unstinting condemnation. We deserved better and we got it with Lombardi. The campus will miss him. He was as good as it gets in university administration and the best chancellor this campus has ever seen.”
Mario De Pillis, professor emeritus of history at UMass, claimed that the use of the word “confrontational” to describe Lombardi could “undoubtedly be traced to the Boston pillagers who have anonymously applied the word ‘confrontational’ as a desperate little calumny to justify their unbelievable coup d’etat.”
De Pillis also pointed out that there has been little media questioning of the motives behind the restructuring plan.
“No newspaper has investigated the agenda of
