UMASS MOOD NOT COLLEGIAL
UMass Boston faculty, staff and students plan to crowd Tuesday’s Board of Higher Education meeting to denounce the University of Massachusetts’ decision to buy debt-laden Mount Ida College in Newton, while Mount Ida parents are exploring legal action.
Phil Varlese, a parent of an incoming Mount Ida freshman, said a group of parents are considering filing a class-action suit over the deal, under which the school’s 1,450 students would be accepted for fall enrollment at UMass Dartmouth — more than 50 miles away. The deal calls for Mount Ida’s 72acre campus to host graduate, continuing and professional education programs and allow UMass Amherst students to do internships and academic collaborations in Boston.
“Our immediate goal is to get an injunction to hold up the transfer of the property until everyone can review all the background information and the facts,” Varlese said yesterday.
Meanwhile, at a UMass Boston meeting that drew hundreds of people yesterday, Tom Goodkind, president of the Professional Staff Union, said they were tired of having to fight layoffs, programs cuts and fee increases, only to learn from the media of the deal to acquire Mount Ida’s prime real estate in exchange for taking on the school’s estimated $55 million to $70 million debt.
Goodkind called it “an acquisition that ... ultimately threatens to bleed us dry” and said that it was done “behind our backs in our own backyard.”
Marlene Kim, president of the Faculty Staff Union, said UMass Boston “will lose programs, we will lose faculty and staff, and we will lose the underserved.”
Undergraduate Student Body President Katie Mitrano said, “Putting another campus in the vicinity of Boston makes it harder for our working-class, majority-minority students to compete for jobs, internships and money in a city that already has dozens of schools competing for it ... When UMass Boston was and still is suffering, the Board of Trustees, President (Martin) Meehan or UMass Amherst did not assist us. However, when a private institution goes under, UMass Amherst bails them out of all of their debts, and those students become, and I quote, ‘a top priority’ for President Meehan.”
Meehan’s office did not respond to a request for comment yesterday. In a statement, UMass Boston spokesman DeWayne Lehman said: “It is because people care so much about UMass Boston that they rally to its cause and defend its special ethos and mission. We are confident that these efforts will result in UMass Boston gaining the resources and future it needs and deserves.”