May 5, 2005
WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT SAFETY SCHOOLS?:
Students say UMass being too selective: Goals at Amherst spur strong debate (Jenna Russell, May 5, 2005, Boston Globe)
Since he was hired to lead the University of Massachusetts flagship campus three years ago, John V. Lombardi has been busy laying plans to improve the university. He has expanded private fund-raising and plans to rebuild much of the campus. By boosting recruitment, he has increased the applicant pool by nearly 25 percent in hope of attracting more high-achieving students.But Lombardi has faced aggressive opposition from an unexpected source in recent months: student government leaders, who say that, by setting more ambitious goals, the university is abandoning the less-advantaged students it was meant to serve.
''We have 20 prestigious private schools in Massachusetts. The public university is supposed to serve the people," said Eduardo Bustamante, a junior and president of the undergraduate student government until last month.
Convinced they must act now or watch their public university drift from its mission, Bustamante and a small, tight-knit group of student leaders have launched a formal campaign, Take Back UMass, to ''return UMass to its legacy as an accessible and diverse public university," according to the group's website.
Having decided as a society that everyone should have a college education, no matter how useless, we can't then make all schools elite. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 5, 2005 8:37 AM
UMass-Amherst is the flagship campus of the system. It needs to be an elite campus for those kids who do not have $40-50,000/yr to waste on a liberal arts education.
The other kids can go to community colleges or to Bridgewater State and its ilk.
Posted by: bart at May 5, 2005 8:55 AMIn only a few quotes, Mr Bustamante uses about every leftist code word there is. Quite impressive, actually.
Posted by: b at May 5, 2005 10:54 AMA college buddy of mine who was homesick for Mass. -- God help him -- transferred to UMAss from UofRochester (late 80s).
After a year he switched back. Said it was a joke. Never cracked a book and got straight A's versus styudying his butt off for B's at UofR.
Posted by: Jim in Chicago at May 5, 2005 10:56 AMEveryone wouldn't have to go to college if the education they got in high school was worth a damn.
Posted by: Brandon at May 5, 2005 11:51 AMBustamante claims that he seeks to return UMass to its "legacy," but he's lying, assuming he has any knowledge of the school's history. The school's legacy is excellence for those who are not rich. In fact, there was probably a time when UMass' standards (as with City College of NY) may have been higher than Harvard's, since getting into the latter used to have less to do with grades and was more a matter of money and connections.
Note that Bustamante is assuming that to be poor is to dumb and untalented. (He is also recycling the identical talking points that were used to fight the City University of NY's attempted return to its elitist-egalitarian roots.) He sounds just like Cruz; I wonder if they are related.
*Today, it is assumed in American discourse that "elitism" and "egalitarianism" are antipodes. Historically, schools like the City College of New York, University of California, and UMass were elitist AND egalitarian. Anyone could gain admission to them, regardless of his family's income, religion, or ethnicity, as long as he displayed academic excellence.
Posted by: Nicholas Stix at May 5, 2005 5:07 PMThe poster above is right. The city college system in New York admitted students strictly on merit. No means test. Rich or poor, if you qualified, you got in. I don't know if it's still true, but at one time it was said that City College produced more Nobel prize winners than any other institution in the world.
What options do bright young scholars have in today's world? Scholarship money is reserved for diversity, not for scholarship. Our late cultural revolution destroyed our once proud public schools and installed the leftwing teachers' unions to rule over their ruins.
Jim in Chicago,
I agree with your buddy 100%, having graduated from UofR in the mid-1980's. There was no grade inflation to speak of then and I also worked my butt off to maintain a B average.
Posted by: LC at May 6, 2005 10:02 AM