UMASS BOSTON is the only public research university in the Boston area. A great benefit of this focus and location is that it embeds scientific research and education in an urban environment. In turn, this provides the specialized knowledge and advanced training needed to launch students from our local and diverse community into lucrative high-tech jobs and STEM careers. Indeed, UMass Boston has long served as a major onramp for upward social mobility through the STEM disciplines, and this feature has drawn many faculty to work here as researchers and educators.
Unfortunately, in the years since the new chancellor and provost were hired, our senior administration seems to have signaled that, in terms of the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), research and genuine education no longer appear on their list of priorities. To be clear: this is not simply a natural consequence of the institution’s chronic underfunding, but rather an explicit choice to turn it away from supporting the sciences.
The history of this transition began shortly after the appointment of Marcelo Suárez-Orozco as chancellor and Joseph Berger as provost over the 2020-2021 academic year. At the time, our country and communities were swept up in the rightful anger, protest, and reflection that followed the murder of George Floyd – while already managing exhaustion from the global Covid-19 pandemic.
In response, our chancellor wasted no time in declaring that UMass Boston would henceforth be a “leading anti-racist and health promoting university.” When announced, it was unclear if such a declaration was more performative than substantive, but we would eventually discover that it was the worst of both: A substantive withdrawal of resources from STEM research and education, combined with an overt focus on performative social justice.
To be clear, social justice has always been a part of UMass Boston’s mission, and it always will be. But under a new mission statement and strategic plan, the university has strongly embraced the issue as central to its advertising campaign. And the result feels… hollow.
Faculty are compelled to adhere to a new collection of buzzwords and directives such as restorative justice, equity, and inclusive excellence. These buzzwords are neither clearly explained nor provide substantive direction. No tune is playing, but we still must dance for resources. And while we scramble to perform properly, our focus is diverted from solving concrete social justice problems that don’t fit in the advertising campaign.
Here is an example. When new students arrive at UMass Boston, they generally need to fulfill a math requirement, and so they take a test to place them into the math course that matches their knowledge level. The exam aims to be accessible, but in so doing, it severely overshoots its mark. Indeed, students can take the test at home, with no proctor, and although the test is supposed to be taken without assistance from notes, books, apps, or friends, there is no attempt to verify this has occurred. The university does not even verify the identity of the student taking the placement test.
Additionally, students are allowed (and sometimes encouraged) to repeatedly take the exam until they get the score they like, and continuing students may use the placement test as an alternate means to “skip over” courses they are currently failing. The result is not surprising and has been rediscovered by universities across the country – these unproctored tests place students into math courses far beyond their present capabilities, which results in them failing math courses at unacceptably high rates. These early failures then significantly increase the chances that students will drop out of higher education altogether. That’s a societal loss by any measure.
It is important to realize that given the working class population we serve, many of our students are first generation college students, and many more are struggling to pay ever-rising tuition rates. As such, many students don’t understand the financial and educational dangers associated with being placed in math classes they can’t handle. And rather than provide some basic protection for a vulnerable population, UMass Boston has purposefully implemented a policy wherein these students are set up to fail, while the university still pockets their tuition dollars.
We believe this is a social injustice. The authors here are not alone in that belief. The entire math department, the College of Science and Mathematics, and a unanimous Faculty Council oppose this policy, as well as the test maker itself, and so does everyone we’ve spoken with at the Department of Higher Education. Beyond our administration, no one seems to support this policy. Still, here we are.
As such, here is a question for consideration. UMass Boston is one of the most diverse universities in the country, and the College of Science and Mathematics is the most diverse college on campus, and the current math placement policy does the most damage to students in the College of Science and Mathematics.
In short, this damaging policy disproportionately impacts students of color (as compared to the rest of the nation) because our college and campus are so exceedingly diverse. The question then is whether this institutional policy contributed to structural racism?
Regardless of how one might answer, there remains a growing sense that in the sciences (at least), we are being compelled to trade away genuine education and research for something performative. Proctoring math tests hardly fits within a performative social justice advertising campaign, even if doing so would be the single greatest improvement to student success the university could make.
To be clear, the central issue here isn’t bad educational policy. Instead, the heart of the matter is how senior leadership seems to have forgotten that society benefits the most by letting faculty drive the university’s research and teaching mission, and that a forceful top-down focus on advertising needs – instead of genuine educational needs – will hollow out our reason to exist.
Senior administrators need to care about macro indicators like enrollment and graduation rates, but this cannot come at the expense of our educational mission. Indeed, such tradeoffs betray the trust the Commonwealth has placed in us, and they help fuel the overall decline in confidence in higher education.
To give another example of our core mission being undermined, consider a portion of the recently announced 10-year strategic plan “For the Times.” The plan states that “UMass Boston will array research, scholarship, and academic programming around four Grand Scholarly Challenges,” which will “embody the values and ideals that underpin the university’s research and scholarly strengths.”
In other words, these are the research areas the university values and will redirect resources toward. They are climate equity and urban coastal areas, bridging divides in health equity, education for the future, and advancing a just society .
It’s important to highlight that these challenges do not reflect collective faculty opinion, nor do they have collective faculty approval. They are largely the product of an administration that sought to coerce faculty research into the narrow confines of a fairly overt advertising campaign. For example, the development team was hand-picked by senior administrators, and these participants were explicitly misled to believe the Grand Scholarly Challenges would not redirect resources.
After receiving initial recommendations, senior administrators made their own modifications, announced the challenges above as established, and then made clear that they would indeed heavily influence allocation of tenure lines and internal funding opportunities. The process was completely antithetical to shared governance, and strikes at the heart of academic freedom.
Importantly, the damage inflicted as a consequence of the Grand Scholarly Challenges is felt most heavily in the physical STEM disciplines. Indeed, these areas are disjoint from the science of “health equity” and “climate equity,” but nevertheless are active areas of research with significant social value.
For example, the UMass system has identified both quantum information and data science as signature strengths of UMass Boston, and both have been identified by the National Science and Technology Council as critical and emergent technologies, but administrators at UMass Boston have opted to disregard our existing strengths and de-prioritize these areas.
In response, the College of Science and Mathematics Senate conducted a college-wide survey on the issue and found that a majority of our faculty (61 percent) believe that College of Science and Mathematics priorities were not adequately represented by the existing Grand Scholarly Challenges, and a larger majority (71 percent) supported adding more challenges to the list.
Senior administrators have not responded to our requests to do so. Disconnecting the college and our scientific disciplines from institutional research priorities will inevitably reduce precisely the sort of research access and high-tech training that helps fuel upward social mobility in our students and the population we serve. Unfortunately, these are the consequences of letting advertising narratives drive research directions instead of the other way around.
To be sure, there are many other instances in which our core research and educational mission in STEM fields has been undermined against faculty protestations. For example, senior administrators have successfully coerced STEM faculty to teach a course which taught pseudoscience under the guise of education research; they have severely misrepresented genuine education research to justify rejecting departmental proposals to enhance student success and retention; and they implemented an “Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute” without any collaboration with the Computer Science department, so students will be taught how to use AI instead of the algorithms that underpin it. The list goes on.
Ultimately, we believe the directional pivot taken by the university in the past few years has deeply undermined the institution’s core research and teaching mission – particularly in the STEM fields. We suspect this has been caused by a certain epistemological chasm between administrators and STEM faculty, with the former deeply misunderstanding the nature of the latter.
As scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, we care deeply about the truths discovered in our fields, and we know the social benefits of sharing this knowledge, even if they don’t fit into a convenient political narrative. Importantly, the public values us for that. Higher education is actively under assault across the country, with the public rapidly losing confidence. Abandoning our core mission will only sow more distrust and accelerate our decline. For the benefit of the Commonwealth, we sincerely hope UMass Boston changes course.
Maxim Olchanyi is a professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a recipient of the UMass Boston Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Scholarship. He is also a chair of the College of Science and Mathematics Faculty Senate; however the views expressed in this letter are his alone, and he is not speaking on behalf of the Senate. Nurit Haspel is a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
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