The panel was presided over by Henry Thomas III, Vice-Chairman of the search committee and an UMass trustee from Springfield. He said that the panel’s purpose was to establish common interests and hear opinions on the qualifications the presidential finalists should have, as well as answer questions about the search process. Also present were Jan Greenwood, Betty Asher and Marion Frenche of Greenwood/Asher & Associates, a firm the committee hired to facilitate the search; Professor Mari Castaneda of the communications department and Paul Reville, Massachusetts secretary of education.
“This is a great opportunity to hear from the front lines about your thinking,” Reville said. “The Amherst campus is the crown jewel of the education system. I want to say how much we appreciate the leadership, faculty, staff and students. We are proud to have this campus as our flagship.”
“Amherst is pretty doggone good,” Thomas added.
The committee formed in March after President Jack Wilson announced he would step down at the end of his term on June 30, 2011. It consists of trustees, professors and students.
“We don’t want somebody who’s a wannabe chancellor or wannabe provost,” Professor John McCarthy of the linguistics department said. “We want someone to be the system’s liaison to legislators, the governor’s council and business leaders. The president should look outward.”
The issue of presidents micromanaging campuses came up again and again. “Outreach is the role of the president, not micromanagement” said Ernie May, Faculty Senate secretary and music professor. “We resist micromanagement. We’ve had our collaborations and we’ve also had conflicts with previous presidents.”
“The number one thing the next president has to be is an advocate against the privatization of public higher education,” said Professor Max Page of the architecture department. “The students and their families pay more to operate this institution than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
Page, a former president of the Massachusetts Society of Professors and a member of the Executive Committee of the Massachusetts Teachers Association explained further, “Privatization means that more money for the University is provided by families—private dollars—not from the commonwealth’s budget. This has been a huge trend over the past 25 years. There’s less money for everything.”
“The next president should embrace the mission of higher education,” said Audrey Altstead, professor of history. “I want to see candidates who have recent classroom experience and instead of rhetoric the things they say should have solid, obvious, intellectual content. The next president should also demonstrate respect for the faculty. When we’re called ‘world class,’ that is, in my mind a sign of Big Y and not applicable to faculty.”
She added that she would like to see a diverse pool of candidates, with women and people of color being considered as finalists. She said that that would restore confidence in university leadership.
Debora Ferreira, executive director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity at UMass Amherst, echoed those concerns. “The president should take into account issues of diversity,” she said. “Especially in these hard economic times, diversity gets put on the back burner.”
“We would like to see a president who respects us,” said graduate student Sarah Hughes on behalf of the Graduate Employee Organization. “The president should support grad students.”
“We need somebody who is willing to talk with unions,” said grad student Anna Strowe of the GEO. “Candidates always say they’re willing, but their actions do not always reflect this.”
Page agreed, “In our relationship with the UMass president we’ve had ups and downs. The present chancellor has been very difficult for unions to work with. The point is for the leaders to work with the unions to advocate on behalf of higher education funding.”
The issue of funding was on the minds of many participants in the forum, especially the conflict between state funding and the entrepreneurial approach.
“If we go without state support,” May said, “then we ‘take off the handcuffs’ and can avoid a lot of bureaucratic processes we have to go through because of the state.”
Massachusetts was compared to public higher education in Virginia, which uses a system of incentives and institutional autonomy from the state bureaucracy to encourage performance and affordability. “The president could look at tax policy,” May continued. “The tax exemption on Harvard’s endowment would float the UMass system.”
“I don’t see it as an either state-support or entrepreneurial support position,” Reville said. “There’s going to be state-support for the University for the foreseeable future. There are a lot of different arguments about at what level that support should be offered. The budget exists within a macroeconomic picture that’s very complicated, so as we look to the future it’s going to be challenging—as it is in virtually every state—to see dramatic increases in public support for higher education under the circumstances,” continued Reville.
“So I think we’ll have no choice but to be entrepreneurial in the system and in time I hope state government will continue to support public higher education and do so at an increasing level and in exchange for that, demand a public mission. So I think we’ve got to find ways of balancing being a state supported institution at the same time as being more entrepreneurial and maintaining a public mission,” Reville said.
“I’ve been here since 1990 and in that time there have been three-to-four economic downturns,” said Professor John Kingston of the linguistics department. “Each time there are always deep budget cuts, but those cuts are never restored. The president should have the capacity to extract resources from every possible source. Without state support we won’t have the resources to generate revenue by our own means.”
“Most public universities have three sources of funding: federal, state and tuition and fees,” May said. “In times past they were mostly funded by the states; now they’re mostly funded by the federal government, followed by tuition and then state support. Most people agree that public education should have public funding, but they don’t want to have to pay higher taxes, so it becomes possible to tax the populace when they go to college. Two-thirds of the state budget is non-discretionary, things like Medicare and pensions and bonds that the state must pay for. The remaining third, which includes education and services, is discretionary funding. The discretionary funding always gets squeezed in a downturn, especially education, because the University can always raise tuition and fees, but MassCare and mental health services can’t.”
“Developing alternative revenue streams is another role of the president, as well,” Thomas said. “I think the state support approach and the entrepreneurial approach can be mutually compatible. Some systems may want to make a heavier investment in one versus the other, but I think it’s based on the circumstances and all of the environmental considerations—the economic environment, I’m talking about—that should play into the final consideration on that, but no they’re not mutually incompatible.”
The public forum was the third for the Committee in a circuit of the UMass system this week.
Mathew M. Robare can be reached at [email protected].
