Scott Van Voorhis
Bribes and kickbacks. That’s just how public construction projects were divvied up in Massachusetts until the blockbuster Ward Commission report blew the lid off in 1980.
And exhibit No. 1 was the bidding and construction of UMass Boston’s harbor campus, in which a crooked contractor delivered a cruel parody of plans for a world-class public university campus.
When it opened in 1974, the new campus overlooking Dorchester Bay was a far, far cry from the futuristic university where students arrived by monorail, as some professors had dreamed. Instead, contractors who had bribed their way into the job of overseeing the construction of the harbor side campus delivered a jumble of crumbling red brick buildings that had the look, to the more cynical, of a medium-security penitentiary.
Four decades later, the UMass Boston continues to pay the price for this travesty as it struggles to close a budget gap amid the long-overdue redevelopment/replacement of a harbor campus that began to fall apart almost as soon as it opened.
And, of course, once again, the wrong people are bearing the brunt of this injustice, with the university forced to cut classes and slash adjunct professors who do the teaching.
The criminal way in which the UMass Boston campus was bid out and built represents an historic injustice, one for which generations of students and faculty at the spunky urban university have paid dearly through pathetically inferior classrooms, labs and offices.
Frankly, the Legislature and state government have an the institutional responsibility to ensure an epic wrong is not made right on the backs of struggling students and poorly paid part-time faculty members.
Skeptical? Just consider some of the facts behind the biggest public construction scandal in Massachusetts history and the incredible damage it did to what has long been the diamond in the rough of the UMass system.
More Than Just A Political Scandal
Written by the president of Amherst College, the 2,000 page Ward Commission report led to a series of reforms that changed the way construction projects are put out to bid in Massachusetts. While it hardly eliminated corruption, it helped curb some of the worst abuses.
However, the epic review was triggered by the scandalously shoddy construction of the UMass Boston campus.
An understaffed and obscure New York firm bribed its way through the Legislature into one of the biggest construction management contracts in state history. The resulting scandal landed two state senators in jail and eventually led to the formation of the Ward Commission, which spent two years looking at corruption in public construction across the state.
But the more enduring scandal here is the ramshackle campus that was bequeathed to a couple of generations of UMass Boston students and professors. What was supposed to have been a showcase urban university wound up looking more like brick fortress or, worse, a penitentiary.
Within a few years of the opening of the UMass Boston campus, buildings had already started fall apart thanks to the poor quality concrete that was used to save a buck and pad the pockets of the corrupt construction team.
Faced with a $50 million repair bill, university officials shut down the central parking garage a decade ago, creating a perpetual shortage of spaces at the commuter school. The garage had become a public safety hazard, with concrete raining down from the ceiling.
When I was an undergrad at UMass Boston in the late ’80s, it was a running debate whether it was more hazardous to your health studying in the Healey Library or walking under it. (Yes, this is a subject close to my heart.)
Spend an hour among the stacks at the library and you’d find yourself with a splitting headache from an air circulation system that wasn’t. But stroll under the library, which was raised on pillars, to get a closer look at the nearby harbor, and you’d run the risk of far more than a splitting headache from a tile or brick falling off the outside of the library.
To make matters worse, the only way to get any fresh air was to go outside, a shame given the one redeeming quality of the UMass Boston campus was its perch beside the bright blue waters of the harbor. All windows in the campus were sealed, in part to block out the noise from the jets coming and going over the harbor but in part because the plans called for a super-duper HVAC system never materialized.
Yet what UMass Boston lacked in basic college amenities, it more than made up with motivated students from a diverse array of backgrounds and an ability to attract idealistic faculty not interested in teaching to the privileged and jaded.
Led by Chancellor J. Keith Motley, the university is now in the midst of long-overdue overhaul of its campus that is more in the vein of a wholesale redevelopment than anything resembling a mere renovation.
UMass Boston students and faculty finally have the digs they deserve in a stunning, $75 million campus center, a new science complex with labs, two new academic buildings, and soon the campus’s first dorm.
Not that the Legislature had some sort some sort of come to Jesus moment where it finally recognized the raw deal it gave to Boston’s only urban public university. Far from it – state support for UMass Boston and the state’s other public universities has dropped steadily over the past decade.
But nothing ever gets built in Massachusetts without a cost overrun, no matter how well managed, with utility work having cost more than first budgeted. Now UMass Boston will have to cut 100 adjunct faculty positions and cancel some classes to make ends meet.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Given the size of the $39 billion state budget, we’re talking chump change. And given the history here, it’s not all that terribly hard to figure out what the right thing for the Legislature and Gov. Charlie Baker to do: Pony up.
