Fire the UMass Board of Trustees

Word just came in that the University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees, an unelected and wholly unrepresentative body with sweeping powers over the budget of the 5 campus system, backed a $1500 fee hike for the next school year despite strong protests from student leaders.

For anyone familiar with the Board, the move comes as no surprise. For over 2 decades, trustees have voted to regularly increase fees - the main part of student contributions that they have control over - in an attempt to abrogate their responsibility to demand increased state and federal money for public higher education in Massachusetts. Overwhelmingly stacked with conservative business people with no connection to education whatsoever, the Board - appointed by successive Democratic and Republican Governors - has increased the cost of attending the university by an order of magnitude since the 1980s. Far ahead of increases in the cost of living.

20 years ago students could attend UMass for under $2,000 a year. Now with tuition remaining around that sum, the total average cost of a UMass education - including massive fees repeatedly levied on students by the Board, but excluding room and board charges - will go from this year's $9,548 up to $11,048 next fall.

The Board and other UMass leaders point to the collapse of the U.S. economy and the need for cost-cutting measures across state government as being to blame for the hikes. But in point of fact the reason for the hikes lies at the Board's feet. They, and the 5 UMass Chancellors and the UMass system President Jack Wilson bear a great deal of the responsibility for the slow-motion destruction of the dream of public higher education for all in Massachusetts. These officials, and the state legislators who have ultimate power over public higher education, have failed almost across the board to fight for more money for the UMass system, and the state and community college systems - that educate over 50 percent of all college students in the Commonwealth, but receive under 50 percent of the available federal money for higher education.

The rest of the responsibility for the crisis of public higher education in Massachusetts lies with our huge private higher education sector - far larger, with our dozens of private colleges, than any other state in the U.S.

The irony is that the private colleges are really not private at all. They are public. The bulk of their budgets comes from federal higher education and research dollars hijacked from public colleges to their great detriment. A further irony is that 2 of our largest private colleges are not really private at all - as has been discussed in these pages before. Harvard University was founded as a public college in 1636 - when Massachusetts was still a British colony - and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded as a public land grant college at the end of the Civil War. Although a series of legal tricks by rich and powerful patrons have given these institutions the appearance of being independent non-profits, the truth is that these public institutions were stolen from the people of this state. And now, given their prominence in national and global affairs, suck up vast amounts of public monies without even paying an appropriate amount of Payments in Lieu of Taxes ... or, one opines, taxes.

There is a long debate that needs to happen about public higher education in Massachusetts as in the United States on the road to one day having a fully taxpayer-funded public higher education system that does not force students to go into permanent debt to get educations which by-and-large benefit our society. And we will do our best to play a useful role in this debate here at Open Media Boston.

But for now, one thing is clear. If the UMass Board of Trustees does not represent its primary constituents - the tens of thousands of UMass students and their families - in doing everything possible to raise the public monies needed to stave off further tuition and fee increases, and moving toward the goal of free higher education for all - then the Board must be fired by Gov. Deval Patrick and the legislature, and replaced with members that represent the key constituencies of the UMass system. That is, students, staff, faculty and alumni. Business interests, geared as they are to making profit at any cost in ways increasingly damaging to this country and planet, should be barred from participation on the Board.

Once reconstituted, a newly representative Board can face the crises besetting public higher education with the equanimity that comes from direct knowledge of the sector in question. And best of all, student governments and other representative student bodies will become far more lively and relevant once they get to elect significant numbers of voting student representatives to the Board. Certainly a good deal more representatives than the current 2 voting seats shared by 5 campuses. Once the UMass Board is in hand, perhaps reformers can turn to a similar house-cleaning of the Board of Higher Education that governs the state and community colleges.

But perhaps that's a thought for another day.