University of Massachusetts Boston
The University of Massachusetts Boston is a public university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
The university is a member of the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities and the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research spending and doctorate production". It is the only public research university in Boston and the third-largest campus in the five-campus University of Massachusetts system.
History
Origins (pre-1964)
The University of Massachusetts System dates back to the founding of Massachusetts Agricultural College under the Morrill Land-Grant Acts in 1863. Prior to the founding of UMass Boston, the Amherst campus was the only public, comprehensive university in the state. As late as the 1950s, Massachusetts ranked at or near the bottom in public funding per capita for higher education, and proposals to expand the University of Massachusetts into Boston was opposed both by faculty and administrators at the Amherst campus and by the private colleges and universities in Boston. In 1962, the 162nd Massachusetts General Court expanded the UMass System for the first time to Worcester, Massachusetts with the creation of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In 1963, UMass President John W. Lederle informed the General Court that more than 1,200 graduates of Boston area high schools qualified to attend the University of Massachusetts were denied admission to the Amherst campus due to lack of space, and endorsed expanding the system with a commuter campus in Boston.At the time, there were 12,000 freshman applications to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst with only 2,600 slots, yet the majority of the applicants lived in the Greater Boston area. In 1964, Massachusetts Senate Majority Leader Maurice A. Donahue and State Senator George V. Kenneally Jr. introduced a bill to establish a Boston campus for the UMass System. The bill was opposed by several private colleges and universities in the area, including Northeastern University, Boston University, and Boston College, as well as by Boston State College. However, the Huntington Avenue building of Boston State College could not be expanded to accommodate a 15,000-student campus, and the local news media and public opinion generally favored creating the new Boston campus for the UMass System.
1964–1974: Park Square campus
In June 1964, with a $200,000 appropriation, the legislation establishing the University of Massachusetts Boston was signed into law. UMass President John W. Lederle began recruiting freshmen students, faculty, and administrative staff for the fall semester of 1965, and appointed his assistant at the Amherst campus, John W. Ryan, as UMass Boston's first chancellor. Ryan recruited tenured faculty members from the Amherst campus to relocate and form the UMass Boston faculty, and appointed Amherst's history professor Paul A. Gagnon and Amherst's provost and biology professor Arthur Gentile to hire the humanities and natural science faculty members respectively.Serving as the new university's first provost, Gagnon became the most important faculty member in defining the curriculum and academic focus of the university, saying in June 1965 that "The first aim of the University of Massachusetts at Boston must be to build a university in the ancient tradition of Western civilization." Gagnon would be the principal architect of the university's brief attempt to create a Great Books program called the "Coordinated Freshman Year English-History Program", which was dismantled by the end of the 1960s.
Freshman classes started for 1,240 undergraduate students in September 1965 at a renovated building located at 100 Arlington Street in Downtown Boston, formerly the headquarters of the Boston Gas Company. Virtually the entire entering class were residents of Massachusetts, with the great majority living in the Greater Boston area. By the fall of 1968, the number of applications to UMass Boston for the fall semester had risen from 2,500 for fall 1965 to 5,700, and total enrollment had risen to 3,600. In the late 1960s, UMass Boston students on average were 23 years old, typically white and male, working part- or full-time, and either married or living with others in an apartment. UMass Boston also reportedly had the largest population of Vietnam War veterans of any US university and the largest population of African American students of all universities in Massachusetts.
In February 1966, the 164th Massachusetts General Court appropriated funds for the university to purchase the building at 100 Arlington Street. Over the next three years, the university also leased the Sawyer Building on Stuart Street, the Salada Buildings on Columbus Avenue, a part of the Boston Statler Hotel for faculty and departmental office space, and the Armory of the First Corps of Cadets. The student newspaper, The Mass Media, published its inaugural issue on November 16, 1966, and the Founding Day Convocation for the university was held December 10, 1966. In 1968, a group of students started the folk music radio station WUMB-FM. In the summer of 1968, inaugural Chancellor John W. Ryan resigned and was succeeded by historian Francis L. Broderick. Chancellor Broderick oversaw the reorganization of the university into separate colleges, along with the establishment of the College of Public and Community Service, and presided over the university's first graduation ceremony on June 12, 1969.
By early 1967, some younger professors were holding teach-ins and encouraging their male students to burn their draft cards in protest of "American corporate imperialism." The Young Socialist Alliance and the Students for a Democratic Society both had chapters on campus, and in April 1969, the latter group rallied more than a hundred students protesting the decision to move the university campus to Columbia Point. The following month, a student group called the "Afro-American Society", staged an occupation of summer school registration, demanding the immediate hiring of more Black faculty members and the admission of more Black students. In March 1970, a group of thirty students occupied the chancellor's office after a popular "radical" female professor in the Sociology Department was denied tenure. Following President Richard Nixon's announcement of the Vietnam War's Cambodian campaign on April 30, 1970, and the subsequent shooting of anti-war protestors at Kent State University on May 4, like hundreds of other universities across the United States, UMass Boston administration suspended regular business operations while the campus became consumed by protests. In 1972, Chancellor Francis L. Broderick resigned, and was succeeded by Carlo L. Golino in 1973. During Golino's tenure before the move to Columbia Point, the university began awarding its first master's degrees in English and mathematics.
1974–1988: Columbia Point campus and BSC merger
On January 28, 1974, the university opened its new campus on the Columbia Point peninsula. In 1975, enabled by the move to Columbia Point, Chancellor Carlo L. Golino oversaw the opening of the College of Professional Studies, and in 1976, supervised the merger of College I and College II into a single College of Arts and Sciences. Golino resigned as chancellor in 1978, was succeeded in the interim by Claire Van Ummersen, and succeeded permanently in 1979 by Robert A. Corrigan. In October 1979, a dedication ceremony was held for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on a 10-acre site adjacent to the university campus.In 1980, the 171st Massachusetts General Court voted to establish the Massachusetts Board of Regents of Higher Education with the authority to consolidate resources for public higher education in the state, and in 1981, the board decided to merge UMass Boston and Boston State College by 1984. Such a merger had been proposed in the state legislature in 1963 when UMass Boston was initially founded. Though the 1981 merger had allowed both schools a three-year grace period to ease the transition, a large cut in the state's higher education budget forced the board of regents to require a "shotgun wedding" merger to happen by September 1981. Boston State College's largest programs—its teacher's college, nursing and police administration—transferred over to UMass Boston fully intact, and formed the basis of the College of Education, the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, and the Criminal Justice program in the Sociology Department respectively.
Despite the Boston State College students having a similar demographic profile to UMass Boston students, many students expressed opposition to the merger. Many of Boston State College's undergraduate academic departments and programs that had equivalents at UMass Boston were disbanded, and as fewer of the Boston State faculty had PhDs than the UMass Boston faculty did, the board of regents also decided to terminate the employment of hundreds of faculty and staff at Boston State College. The merger boosted enrollment at UMass Boston by 38 percent in one year, and as Boston State College had more graduate programs than UMass Boston did at the time of the merger, most of Boston State College's graduate programs made the transition and tripled the graduate student enrollment at UMass Boston. By 1995, graduate students accounted for 21 percent of the university's total enrollment, and in 2011, the College of Nursing and Health Sciences was the ninth largest and was ranked as the 50th best undergraduate nursing program in the United States by U.S. News & World Report.
In 1988, Chancellor Robert A. Corrigan resigned. Besides the opening of the Clark Athletic Center and the Boston State College merger, during his tenure, he oversaw the authorization of the university's first PhD program, the opening of the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs and the Urban Scholars program for talented Boston Public Schools students in 1983, as well as the opening of the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture in 1984.