Nobel pride
LET THE champagne flow -- it is surely a time for rejoicing, as researcher Craig C. Mello has given the University of Massachusetts its first Nobel Prize. UMass Medical School has already earned a reputation among the premier teaching and research medical institutions in the nation. It receives some $174 million in research funding annually, more than the Amherst campus. The Nobel, which Mello shared with a colleague from Stanford, is most welcome recognition, on top of a long list of achievements at the medical school.
But people connected with UMass will not fool themselves into thinking it is a sign that all is healthy and strong throughout the system's five campuses. University President Jack M. Wilson said yesterday that the Nobel ``is fully consistent with our mission to be a university of distinction." UMass Medical School, however, is almost completely self-sustaining, while the other four UMass campuses are still a long way from recovering from deep budget cuts early in the Romney administration. Operational funds are meager, forcing the schools to raise tuition and fees, and state appropriations for maintenance and capital improvements are even worse.
UMass can and should aspire to excellence, as it has in the past. Two Princeton physicists won the 1993 Nobel Prize for work partly done at UMass-Amherst. But state support for public higher education has always lagged in Massachusetts, and is at exceptionally low levels now. The medical school's four sibling campuses are not likely to follow its lead unless the next governor and Legislature pop the budgetary cork and let more dollars flow. 