MOTLEY WALKS AT UMASS
An unapologetic Keith Motley bowed from his post as University of Massachusetts Boston chancellor with “no regrets,” leaving a campus that’s now roiled in a $30 million hole and a “fundamentally broken” budget, according to his successor.
The unofficial change of guard played out yesterday at a UMass Board of Trustees meeting marked by both Motley’s impassioned swan song and a blunt picture of the financial challenges left by his decadelong tenure.
Facing what was pegged as a $30 million deficit, UMass officials say they’ve trimmed that to at least $7 million, but thanks largely to one-off fixes that won’t correct the school’s systemic financial problems.
“I pass the baton like anybody else. I know it doesn’t last forever,” Motley said, referencing his successor, Barry Mills, who was hired as his deputy earlier this year to take over the campus’ day-to-day operations. “What does last forever is the footprint. This size 16 (shoe) walked this campus.
“I have no regrets,” Motley later added. “Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure — that’s what I worried about. I let my colleagues worry about the rest of it.”
Motley said last week he plans to resign at the close of the school year after overseeing a budget that finished with a $5.3 million deficit last year and plunged further into the red this year, despite vows to make $25.7 million in cuts to right-size the school’s financial picture.
But the breaking point came after the UMass board for two straight years allowed it to run a deficit, stoking questions of what responsibility lay with board members — and later President Martin Meehan — in overseeing the sinking financial ship.
It prompted Motley’s supporters to say he was being scapegoated and calls for the board to reject his resignation. But Meehan and board members called it his decision to step away, and Motley — who earned $422,000 last year — all but said he plans to move on to a planned paid sabbatical.
Mills, who’ll serve as interim chancellor, lauded Motley for building “momentum,” but he was blunt in his assessment: The school has struggled under “overly optimistic” enrollment assumptions that couldn’t keep pace with rising costs in hiring and construction
He said every day “there is a new problem that has a lot of zeros.” He described his first weeks as a “fire drill.”
“The budget process at this institution is fundamentally broken,” Mills said, vowing that officials will be “re-engineering” how departments do their spending. “We know how to do that. We will. ... This is not a one-year turnaround.”
But Mills said he’s hopeful that once “we get our house in order,” the Boston campus will look like a good investment.
“That means,” he “more state support.”
Meehan defended his, and the board’s, role in the Boston campus’ crumbling financial picture, saying he brought in a budget “task force” to address the issues when a mid-year financial report showed it was projected to run at least a $15 million deficit.
He said the board’s role has been “unfairly characterized,” and called Boston’s financial woes an “outlier” in the statewide UMass system.
“Look, I think everyone takes ownership,” he told reporters. “This isn’t about blame. It’s about taking, from my said, vantage point, a very important campus to the city and the state and getting it on a strong financial footing.”
Meehan also dodged questions of whether he wanted to see Motley gone.
“He made that decision” to resign, Meehan said. “I want to see Chancellor Motley recognized for all of the positive things he has done ... The decision he wants to do is his.”
Meehan was among those in a packed boardroom to give Motley a standing ovation after he finished remarks to close the meeting.
“I’m No. 8. No. 9 is over there,” Motley, the school’s eighth chancellor, said of Mills. “His day will come. And he’ll be known for reengineering this institution. ... Now it’s his job to mend that. He becomes the mortar. I had to build bricks.”