He believes in UMass Boston
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco keeps a small, seemingly innocuous, piece of concrete on his desk in the chancellor’s office at UMass Boston.
It’s a chunk that fell from the roof of the parking garage early in his time there — and a symbol of the school’s longstanding state of disrepair.
Out his window — the view framed by Dorchester Bay in the distance — stands a revived campus. Four years of construction have yielded a new quad, several substantial new buildings, and a renewed sense of confidence.
UMass Boston has long been a stepchild in Boston’s ecosystem of better-known, better-endowed colleges and universities.
But as the celebration of this year’s commencement — and the chancellor’s official installation — arrive on Friday, it feels like anything but an afterthought. The school, with its deeply diverse student body and deep ties to the city, feels poised for an important new chapter.
UMass Boston is a campus of 16,000 students, drawn overwhelmingly from Boston and nearby cities and towns, many of them first-generation college students.
Traditionally, it’s been a commuter school, though it began adding dorms a few years ago. Its annual tuition of $16,000 is a bargain at a time when other colleges and universities have shot to $60,000 or more.
Suarez-Orozco was recruited to the school by UMass President Marty Meehan after the faculty had rejected multiple other candidates in a dramatic public showdown with the administration and effectively pushed out an interim chancellor after that.
Peaceful, the place was not.
For Suarez-Orozco, 67, the appeal of the job was to build a great public university in a major city. As he notes the vast majority of UMass Boston students plan to stay right here, which is not the case at many colleges.
“No names, but there’s a school across the river where 80 percent of their students end up working in lower Manhattan, or in Silicon Valley, or on the west side of L.A.,” he said, referring (I’m guessing) to Harvard.
“It can’t be a happy future for the city of Boston without a happy future for our students,” he said. “You can’t have a great city without a great public university. The math doesn’t work.”
As an immigrant who arrived from Argentina in his late teens and went through the public university system in California, SuarezOrozco identifies deeply with the many students who come to the college he leads with no sense of entitlement or privilege.
An anthropologist by training, he was an education professor for years at Harvard and NYU, before his long tenure as an administrator at UCLA. Among other accomplishments, he led a celebrated partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District — partnering with schools in south central Los Angeles — something he would like to eventually replicate with the Boston Public Schools.
About that delayed official installation: Suarez-Orozco arrived at the school from UCLA in July 2020, during the throes of the pandemic. A big ceremony announcing his arrival was obviously impossible then. And he decided to skip later. Because, he says, he wanted his ceremony to coincide with the completion of the campus’s reconstruction. Putting it off, he said, was a way to keep up the pressure on all involved to get the work — then 18 months behind schedule — finished. The place is nearly unrecognizable, compared to a few years ago.
Now he hopes to position the school as a leader in the push for climate resiliency, training students for jobs in the industry.
“I want us to be the go to place for all matters pertinent to resilience,” Suarez-Orozco said. “Climate in a very hands-on, way that includes green jobs. That includes training teachers so that they have everything they need to teach the kids about climate and the science of climate.”
Motioning at the coastline out his window he said, “This is not some conceptual, abstract, theoretical problem.”
Beyond that, he believes his diverse student body — a majority of whom are people of color and nearly half of whom speak a language other than English at home — can be a major source of talent for employers in a range of fields looking — as most are — for a diverse pool of new workers.
“They understand that the face of the country is changing,” he said. “So they want talent. They want diversity. They got the memo. They understand that this is the future of the country and our city. This is not your grandfather’s Boston.”