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URBAN MISSION

City College of Boston

 

The solution to UMass Boston’s woes could start with a city-run college

 

May 9, 2018

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

 

There was an interesting conversation recently between two people who I often criticize for being… um… insufficiently public spirited. The Boston Globe’s Shirley Leung asked Boston mayor Marty Walsh a great question: “What if the city took over the University of Massachusetts Boston?” Walsh, to his credit, replied: “Am I looking to take on a potentially new school? No. … Do I think Boston potentially could be positioned well enough to handle it? Absolutely.”

 

UMass Boston has been struggling to make ends meet for many years. According to the Dorchester Reporter, union activists at the school say that student tuition and fees, state appropriations, and grants, are actually sufficient to cover its operating costs. But UMB labors under more than $30 million in structural deficit from the cost of belatedly rebuilding a campus that was thrown together with substandard materials by corrupt contractors on top of a landfill back in the 1970s. And a lot of other debt besides.

 

Successive legislatures and governors have been unwilling to fork over the money to cover the long-needed repairs—sticking a school with an “urban mission” to serve working-class Boston students with a mountain of debt that it can’t clear on its own. Even after controversial longtime chancellor J. Keith Motley was ousted last year and replaced with interim chancellor and state government hatchet man Barry Mills. Who presided over the layoff of dozens of critical faculty and staff in the interest of “balancing the school budget” even though the UMB community is not to blame for its plight.

 

As the state prepares to bring in a new “permanent” chancellor, it is not prepared to do the right thing. So, it’s definitely worth pushing Walsh to at least produce a serious study on whether a city that struggles to properly fund K-12 education could really do a better job running a medium-sized research university that the Commonwealth can.

 

It remains to be seen if UMass Boston is too heavy a fiscal burden for the city of Boston to take on. But there is a way that Mayor Walsh could dip his toe into the murky waters of administering a four-year public college without taking over UMB in its entirety. That would be to consider a plan for a separate city college that I had a hand in developing between 2005 and 2007 while I was a student, and then a graduate teaching assistant, at UMB’s College of Public and Community Service (CPCS). It was originally conceived as a possible response to the university’s destruction of that innovative and popular division.

 

In brief, CPCS was the most diverse college within the most diverse university in the entire Northeast. Not only did it focus on recruiting working-class Boston students from nontraditional backgrounds—like single mothers—it also put a lot of effort into recruiting older working students like me who had never finished college. It was founded in 1972 and 1973 by professors and politicians who believed so strongly in UMB’s urban mission that they developed a college purpose-built to take students from poor city neighborhoods with few opportunities and turn them into stellar university graduates. Which it did with aplomb for over 30 years.

 

The following section of the CPCS Mission Statement shows how seriously the school took its mandate:

 

The college works toward overcoming the attitudes, beliefs, and structures in our society which prevent access to the resources that exist and discourage full participation in economic, civic, cultural and political life. As an alternative educational institution, CPCS endeavors to function as an inclusive, democratic, and participatory learning community which promotes diversity, equality, and social justice.

 

Unfortunately, the administration of a decade ago—led by Motley—decided that the few bucks more it cost per year to educate a CPCS student compared to a “regular” UMB student was too much to spend. And it had deep ideological differences with CPCS pedagogy. Especially the rejection of letter grades as a metric for success. So it killed the college in all but name by 2008. Despite strong protests by its students, staff, and faculty.

 

Given the current crisis at UMass Boston, Mayor Walsh could revive the plan for a new City College of Boston that myself and other campus activists first suggested… as a successor to CPCS. The goal would be to provide a place for a few hundred working-class native Bostonians at a time. Students who can handle a four-year degree program academically, but are being driven out of UMB by its ever-rising sticker price—and its shift to attempting to compete with local private universities for white suburban middle-class students and full-freight paying foreign students by building dorms. Which is being done, in part, to allow its latest cowardly administration to get rid of its debt load without direct state aid.

 

The City College could hold classes in existing municipal facilities and start with a few dozen faculty and staff. It would be run by the city of Boston. And ideally, it would strive to charge students no more than the Hub’s two-year community colleges, Bunker Hill and Roxbury… which it should work with closely.

 

If the new college does decently well for a few years, then maybe the city could take over UMass Boston in its entirety, merge the two, and move on to strengthen its urban mission university-wide. Returning the school to its urban-focused roots… with local sources of funding that are somewhat more receptive to community needs than state funding sources… and a new sense of purpose.

 

Even such a bold move would not absolve the legislature and the governor of their responsibility to properly fund Mass public higher education as completely as the state budget will allow—rather than doing things like dumping $1.5 billion on the biotech industry—and to lobby the federal government ferociously for more funding as well. But it could at least ameliorate an increasingly dire situation for Bostonians seeking to improve their lot by obtaining a bachelor’s degree. And get the city back in the business of expanding public services rather than privatizing them.

 

This column was originally written for the Beyond Boston regional news digest show — co-produced by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and several area public access television stations.

 

 

Note of Appreciation

Big thanks to Bill Marx of Arts Fuse and Greg Cook of Wonderland (and sometimes DigBoston) for inviting me to participate in a great forum “For the Love of Arts Criticism II: Small Magazines and Bloggers” held on Monday at Rob Chalfen’s fabulous music and arts space, Outpost 186, in Inman Square. Props to fellow speakers Chanel Thervil of Big Red & Shiny; Pat Williams of the Word Boston; Heather Kapplow of, like, everywhere, including DigBoston; Franklin Einspruch of Delicious Line (and DigBoston); Marc Levy of Cambridge Day; Oscar Goff and Chloé DuBois of Boston Hassle; Dave Ortega of the Somerville Media Center; Jameson Johnson of Boston Art Review; Lucas Spivey of Culture Hustlers podcast; Rick Fahey of On Boston Stages; Suzanne Schultz of Canvas Fine Arts; Olivia Deng of several publications, including DigBoston; noted events producer Mary Curtin; Aliza Shapiro of Truth Serum Productions; former Boston Phoenix, Improper Bostonian, and Boston Magazine writer Jacqueline Houton; and a number of other folks. Read Greg Cook’s fine article on the proceedings for all the details at gregcookland.com/wonderland.


Apparent Horizon is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Copyright 2018 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.

TOWNIE: UMB DRUBBING, PAWSOX GRUBBING

UMB DRUBBING, PAWSOX GRUBBING

 

University cuts and a (possible) corporate scam just in time for the holidays

 

November 27, 2017

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

 

UMass Boston admin lays off more staff, unions push back

The neoliberal war on public higher education continues unabated in Massachusetts as the UMass Boston administration announced the layoff of 36 personnel last week, and a reduction in hours for seven more. According to the Boston Globe, all of them are “staff who clean the school, help run academic programs, work in the student health office, or in other ways support the daily operations of the university. Some have worked there more than 30 years.” UMB had 2,095 employees in 2016, but has cut 130 jobs so far this year. The university serves over 16,000 students.

 

As of this writing, campus unions are planning protests. Hopefully, such actions will ultimately build a political movement capable of operationalizing the prescriptions of the fine report a coalition of UMB “students, staff unions, and faculty” released in September. Entitled “Crumbling Public Foundations: Privatization and UMass Boston’s Financial Crisis,” it lays the responsibility for the budget crisis currently engulfing the university at the feet of the UMB administration, the UMass Board of Trustees, and the state legislature.

 

As well it should. The legislature has been slashing the state higher ed budget since the 1980s. The board keeps raising the tuition and fees paid by students and families to cover the resulting gap. And the UMB administration continues increasing the number of high-level administrators with questionable job descriptions and fat paychecks who somehow rarely face layoffs—despite costing the school far more per capita than each of the low-level employees who keep getting axed of late. All while expanding the campus in ways that don’t always benefit the urban students that institution was built to serve… running up unsustainable debt loads in the process.

 

The report calls for five major reforms that its authors believe would set the campus to rights:

 

  1. UMass Boston should not be required to show a positive net income in its budget. Instead, it should be allowed to make debt payments using the reserves it’s been forced to build up for the last few years—and the Board of Trustees should “release Central Office reserves” to help with those payments. Rather than compelling students and their families to shoulder such costs through ever-increasing tuition and fees.
  2. The UMB administration should engage in an open and transparent planning process with faculty, staff, and students that will “ensure that the campus can continue to provide an affordable and diverse education along with appropriate support services to its students,” review interest and principal payments, and review the rapid increase in high-level administrator expenses.
  3. The UMass Board of Trustees should endorse the Fair Share Amendment that will levy an additional 4 percent income tax on millionaires and spend the money on public higher education, pre-K-12 education, and transportation if passed by binding statewide referendum next year.
  4. The Mass Legislature should cover the cost of rebuilding crumbling campus infrastructure.
  5. The Mass Legislature should annually increase appropriations for public higher education until we are at least on par with the national average based on our state’s wealth.  The Commonwealth is presently at the bottom of the pack for state appropriations for public higher ed.

 

The white paper concludes with a visionary sentiment that’s worth reprinting in full: “In considering these recommendations, we ask that we all—members of the Massachusetts legislature, the UMass Board of Trustees, UMass Boston’s administration, and the larger community of Boston—remember the purpose with which we are tasked. Chancellor John W. Ryan, at UMass Boston’s 1966 Founding Day Convocation, reminded those gathered that ‘we have an obligation to see that the opportunities we offer… are indeed equal to the best that private schools have to offer.’ This is the expectation that the citizens of our Commonwealth have for themselves and their family members when they come to UMass Boston. This is the responsibility that UMB staff, faculty, and administrators take on each day on behalf of our students. This should be what guides the decision of the Board of Trustees and the Mass legislature as we work to address the crisis at UMB.”

 

PawSox Worcester visit: boondoggle in the making?

Meanwhile, in faraway central Mass, my Worcester Magazine colleague Bill Shaner is tracking what could be another big giveaway of local and state money. Seems that the Pawtucket Red Sox—the BoSox Triple A affiliate team—have been courting Worcester for a few months and might be looking to move there in exchange for lashings of public lucre. Shaner reports that multiple sources said that Jay Ash, secretary of Gov. Baker’s Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, attended a meeting last week between Worcester officials and PawSox bigs. Though “City and PawSox officials both declined to comment on the meeting, or whether or not it took place.” While “Ash’s staff confirmed he was in Worcester Monday but couldn’t say what for.” All I can say for now is that, like some capitalist Santa Claus, whenever Ash appears corporate leaders can virtually always expect a yuuuuge present from the Bay State and any municipal government in range in the near future. So this nascent Woo-town deal is definitely worth watching.

 

Townie (a worm’s eye view of the Mass power structure) is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Copyright 2017 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.

UMASS CAMBRIDGE: MAKING HARVARD UNIVERSITY PUBLIC WILL SOLVE ITS WORKERS’ PROBLEMS—AND THE COMMONWEALTH’S HIGHER ED CRISIS

umass-cambridge

October 24, 2016

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

Three weeks into their strike, Harvard University dining hall workers are in a difficult position. Their union’s demands for better wages, benefits, and working conditions are falling on deaf ears in the Harvard administration. They cannot continue picketing indefinitely on $200 weekly strike pay—which itself won’t last for long … and the bosses know it.

That same administration talks about the situation as if the workers are already overpaid since they make wages higher than the industry standard. Even though college food service workers generally get low pay with few benefits by convention. It tries to make the Harvard dining hall workers union, UNITE HERE Local 26, look greedy by asking for more, when all the workers want is a living wage to be able to survive the increasingly insane costs of living in Greater Boston. And a health care package that doesn’t raise their out-of-pocket costs. Which other Harvard unions have already agreed to, sadly.

This despite the fact that Harvard has an unbelievably massive $35 billion endowment. The largest amount held by any institution of higher learning in the world. Larger than the annual budgets of many nations. The school’s endowment page makes it clear that its administration knows that making any pitch for sympathy on labor costs is ludicrous on its face (although that’s precisely what they do when they attack the dining hall workers’ extremely moderate demands as somehow unaffordable). In a section of that page entitled “Why can’t Harvard use more of its endowment in order to cover additional expenses or reduce tuition costs?” the following logic is offered:

Endowment gifts are intended by their donors to benefit both current and future generations of students and scholars. As a result, Harvard is obligated to preserve the purchasing power of these gifts by spending only a small fraction of their value each year. Spending significantly more than that over time, for whatever reason, would privilege the present over the future in a manner inconsistent with an endowment’s fundamental purpose of maintaining intergenerational equity.

A statement worthy of a CEO or banker. Or neoliberal ideologue. Basically saying, We can’t spend more money from the endowment because we don’t want to touch our principal and lower our profits. Funny attitude for a supposed nonprofit. One that’s unfortunately being emulated at colleges around the country as the privatization of higher education continues apace.

Since Harvard is unwilling to spend down its endowment by even a tiny percentage to ensure all its employees receive truly fair wages and benefits, it’s all the more imperative that dining hall workers continue to press their demands. And that more people support them.

Because not only is Harvard screwing its own food service staff while amassing wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, it is also doing grievous damage to the Massachusetts public higher education system. Which raises the stakes considerably. And links the problems of one group of working people to the fortunes of the working families of an entire state. For whom shaking the edifice of Harvard’s endowment must become a central political concern.

Image via Boston's Local 26

Image via Boston’s Local 26

Understanding Harvard’s finances is the key to apprehending why the university’s very existence is problematic in a democracy—and a clear and present danger to the state public higher education system. And to answering the central question: Why is an institution of higher learning allowed to run like a multinational corporation? Socking away funds that it possesses mainly because it educates the children of the one percent—scions of powerful families who steal money from the rest of us in myriad ways and then donate part of that money back to the supposedly nonprofit school in exchange for income tax breaks. A school not required to pay taxes on its vast income by dint of that nonprofit status. Which then also takes huge amounts of public funds despite being a private school.

It’s also worth asking why Harvard is not a public college. Why is it not UMass Cambridge? Harvard was, after all, originally part of Massachusetts state (and colonial) government. Yet over the centuries it was able to reorganize itself as a private nonprofit school, and essentially write the rules it plays by.

But for a “private” school it’s certainly awash in public money. A brief review of how Harvard enthusiastically drains government coffers that it refuses to replenish should make it painfully obvious that it is indeed a public university. And therefore in dire need of democratic reform to better align its mission with the needs of the Mass public higher ed system.

First, all the funds in the Harvard endowment, and all the money it makes from financial investments, is not taxed. Neither is all the property Harvard owns—on which it famously expends small “Payments in Lieu of Taxes” (PiLoTs) instead of much higher property taxes. According to Slate, a report by Nexus Research and Policy Center—a right-wing pro-corporate think tank that I would normally avoid citing—does some sloppy math that nevertheless helps us think more clearly about the magnitude of the problem with giving private schools nonprofit status. The report says that, in 2014, Harvard made the equivalent of $48,000 in tax savings from federal, state, and local governments for each of its students. Many of whom can definitely afford to pay full freight on their education. While predominantly working and middle class Massachusetts public college students are educated in woefully underfunded state institutions. The Nexus report indicates that UMass Amherst—the Commonwealth’s flagship university— made only the equivalent of $9,900 in tax savings for each of its students. While undergraduate tuition and fees amounted to $13,258, and average room and board costs were $10,957, for a total cost of $24,485 that year. Even before thousands in book costs and other fees are considered.

Second, although it may not be obvious to outsiders, many Harvard students use public grants and loans to get through school. According to its website, the annual disbursement from the Harvard endowment covered 35 percent of the university’s $4.5 billion operating budget in 2015—including much of the cost of tuition and fees for undergraduate students who need it. And the Harvard administration makes clear that “Even with endowment support, Harvard must fund nearly two-thirds of its operating expenses … from other sources, such as federal and non-federal research grants, student tuition and fees, and gifts from alumni, parents, and friends.” But a good chunk of the aforementioned tuition and fees is covered with public money.

It’s true that Harvard pays all expenses for the 20 percent of current undergrads who come from families that make less than $65,000 a year. One cheer for that given the provenance of Harvard’s money. However, undergrads whose families make between $65,000 and $150,000 a year are expected to contribute up to 10 percent of the total cost of their education annually. And undergrads whose families make more than $150,000 a year pay concomitantly higher percentages of their education costs. Students whose families can’t cover those costs, and don’t receive enough scholarships, grants, or stipends from private sources can apply for federal and state financial aid like any other college student(though foreign undergrads generally don’t qualify for such aid).

Graduate students lean more heavily on public support. Harvard financial aid is similar to other universities in its expectation that its grad students—especially the cash cow master’s degree students—will apply for federal and state financial aid for any expenses they can’t pay out of pocket. Its PhD students get a supposedly free ride, as elsewhere, but the stipends the school pays for their labor as teaching and research assistants clearly aren’t much better than anywhere else given that they are now trying to emulate their peers at public universities by organizing a labor union. Certainly not enough to live on for many students. So public grants and loans are used to fill gaps in funding.

Harvard made its estimated federal grant and loan totals available online for the 2011-2012 academic year. Its students received $10,257,035 in federal grants, $8,371,891 in Perkins Loans, and $135,249,758 in federal direct loans. A tidy sum to be sure.

Third, and perhaps most damningly, Harvard gets a ton of direct federal appropriations every year. To cite just one significant example, in 2014, Harvard had about 20,000 students and received $572,918,000 in federal research and development money according to the National Science Foundation. About $28,646 per student, although it’s obviously not distributed that way. Critics may respond “no harm, no foul” since Harvard gets lots of public R&D money because they do lots of R&D. But that gets things backwards. Harvard does lots of R&D because it has long gotten lots of public R&D money—which should be used to fund public universities to do the work instead. With more public oversight in the public interest.

That same year, the UMass system had almost 74,000 students and received $362,157,000 in research and development money from the federal government. However, the Massachusetts public higher education system also includes nine state universities and 15 community colleges. Both additional groups of colleges receiving only negligible federal research and development funds as teaching colleges rather than research colleges. So the government money UMass gets for R&D covers all of the 194,371 students in the combined public higher education system in the Bay State in the period in question. Amounting to a mere $1,863 per student. Or about $4,894 per student looking at just the UMass system.

Harvard also gets other money from various branches of American government at every level—overtly or covertly, directly or indirectly. But for anyone who believes in public higher education as a vital democratic institution, every penny of government funding that goes to an elite institution like Harvard is money that should be going to the cash-starved public university system. And Harvard is only one of over a dozen supposedly “private” universities with major endowments in Massachusetts who take public money. Others include: Amherst College, Boston College, Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, Smith College, Tufts University, Wellesley College, and Williams College. Plus dozens of smaller privates and erstwhile “for-profits” that suck up even more public funds. [Ironically, as part of a decades-long trend of public universities emulating the privates, UMass itself has an endowment of over $700 million. Much of which should be released to reverse faculty and staff cuts at schools like UMass Boston, and the remainder could be kept in a reasonable “rainy day” fund.]

Such hoarding must be stopped. More to the point, the private university system has to be dismantled if the dream of free higher education for all is to be guaranteed. An attainable dream other countries with far less wealth than ours have been able to manage for decades. One which could be achieved by simply taxing the rich and corporations fairly on the state and federal level to pay for such social goods. An even taller order than the policies under discussion here.

For now, if you really want to help the Harvard dining hall workers and much of the population of Massachusetts in the bargain, help start political movements to demand structural reform of the state university system—and ultimately the national higher ed system in its entirety.

As an interim measure, such movements can push our state government to seize the endowments of so-called private colleges like Harvard and absorb all of their campuses into the public higher education system. Which will end the Commonwealth’s higher ed crisis by flooding the system with once-hoarded money. Guaranteeing a decent college education to more Mass residents while eliminating bastions of privilege and power in our midst. And naturally, a well-funded public higher ed system would have the means to pay its workforce properly and a tradition of “wall-to-wall” unionization that would leave no campus workers unprotected. Solving the problems of the Harvard dining hall strikers, and all other previously low-paid workers at every campus in the Commonwealth.

The parting shot? In 2015, the entire Massachusetts budget for public higher education was $1,462,827,301. Well below the $1.6 billion disbursement from the Harvard endowment for operating expenses that same year.

Meanwhile, the 2017 Mass higher ed budget is only $1,157,298,156. With worse cuts on the horizon.

UMass Cambridge anyone?

TUES., OCT. 25, 2016 UPDATE: Early this morning, the Harvard Crimson reported that a tentative agreement has been reached by the striking dining hall workers and the Harvard administration. The full membership of the UNITE HERE Local 26 dining hall workers unit is slated to vote on the agreement tomorrow (Wed., Oct. 26, 2016), and could be back to work as early as Thursday, Oct. 27, 2016.

Apparent Horizon is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director.

Copyright 2016 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.

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