UMass shakeup: what the press missed
Judging from local coverage of the flap over President Jack Wilson's plan to remake the University of Massachusetts, you'd think it's all about process--i.e., Wilson's failure to seek approval from the broader UMass community. That's the message in today's Globe column by Adrian Walker. And it was the gist of an editorial in yesterday's Herald. (Walker thinks concerns about process are reasonable; the Herald's ed page doesn't.)
Process is certainly an issue. But the press seems be ignoring another major concern: there's no reason to think that Wilson's "One university" vision (which he may be backing away from) will help UMass compete with the nation's great public universities.
Put simply, that's not how the best public universities tend to work. The University of Michigan is great because of the Ann Arbor campus, not because of Flint. UNC-Chapel Hill is outstanding; UNC-Greensboro isn't. UC-Berkeley has Ivy League-caliber students; UC-Merced doesn't. And so on.
Why hasn't the Boston media picked up on this? I blame the whole "Hub of the Universe" thing.
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