Editorial

A Smart Choice for UMass

A university looks for many things from its president — everything from an ability to raise money (yes, we put that first for a reason) to a capacity for not only setting lofty goals, but reaching them, to a talent for inspiring others to reach higher.
Marty Meehan put all those talents on display at UMass Lowell, which he led for several years as chancellor after serving as a U.S. congressman. And we have the highest confidence that he will continue to exhibit those traits as the next president of the University of Massachusetts.
Long the favorite to succeed Robert Caret as leader of the five-campus UMass system, Meehan, a graduate of UMass Lowell, was officially given the job earlier this month. Suffice to say, selection committees at the university have had more difficult choices to make in recent decades — Meehan was the obvious choice here — but we’re not sure there’s been a more important one.
Indeed, Caret accomplished a good deal in his tenure at the university — initiating or completing projects ranging from the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke to the UMass Springfield facility in Tower Square, to the building of several new buildings, not only on the Amherst campus, but other facilities as well. And beyond those physical, landscape-altering accomplishments, he helped the university set and exceed lofty goals for fund-raising, research dollars, and that intangible known as prestige.
The next president has the difficult but appealing task of building upon this solid foundation, setting the bar higher, and then clearing that height.
Meehan has shown that he is capable of doing just that. At UMass Lowell, he led efforts to build new dorms and laboratories, strike partnerships with private companies for research, create a far more diverse student population, improve graduation rates, and, perhaps most importantly, increase private fund-raising by 67%.
He didn’t do all that by himself, obviously, but he set the tone and created an environment in which nothing short of excellence was expected — and demanded.
Doing the same at UMass Amherstwill be much more difficult, because the stage is much bigger, the politics are much thicker, the expectations are greater, the stakes are much higher, and, let’s face it, the spotlight under which he’ll be operating will be much brighter. And let’s not forget that he’ll be leading the public university in a state that has not supported public higher education in the manner that it should.
But we believe Meehan is capable of shining in that spotlight, succeeding on that bigger stage, and overcoming the overriding challenges because of his ability to build consensus and generate support for a cause — in this case, what is arguably the state’s most powerful economic engine.
Meehan has already vowed to stay in his position for 10 years. We view that as a commitment to the school, the state, and the Commonwealth’s public higher-education system as a whole.
Given Meehan’s past track record for success, this should be a decade of progress and growth for the UMass system, and development of new and different ways for it to become a difference maker, not only locally, but nationally and globally as well.