Affirmative inaction
It is no small irony that a black man and a legal champion of affirmative action in public higher education lost their bids to run the University of Massachusetts at Boston to a beneficiary of this city's own peculiar brand of preferential treatment.
Surprise: After a nationwide search and the usual lip service to diversity, the job went to a local, well-connected, white Irish guy.
Marvin Krislov, vice president and general counsel at the University of Michigan, and J. Keith Motley, the career administrator serving as interim chancellor at UMass-Boston, were passed over for Michael F. Collins, an out-of-work (but hardly down-at-the-heels) healthcare executive in search of a soft landing after being ousted from Caritas Christi, the local Catholic hospital network that paid him more than $1 million a year.
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Motley, the popular choice among many of the 11,700 students on the Dorchester campus, has spent his career in higher education in Boston, first at Northeastern University for 25 years and then as vice chancellor of student affairs at UMass-Boston. He would have been the first African-American chancellor of a school that serves a largely working-class student body, many of them students of color.
Krislov, who coordinated the University of Michigan's historic defense before the US Supreme Court of the use of affirmative action in admissions decisions, has fought aggressively and eloquently for the need to equalize opportunity across class and racial lines at Michigan and in the US Departments of Labor and Justice. He didn't have a chance.
All three candidates were arguably well qualified for the job, but only Collins benefited from the social and political connections that have so much to do with hiring decisions in this parochial town. Consider the ascension of the man who for years single-handedly blocked legislative approval of stem cell research to the presidency of an organization committed to advancing that cause. The Massachusetts Biotechnology Council is not paying former House speaker Thomas M. Finneran hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for his thoughts. It is buying his clout, which remains formidable among his coat holders on Beacon Hill, even on the eve of his anticipated indictment on a federal perjury charge.
No one questions Collins's administrative skills. In a decade at the helm of Caritas Christi, he helped the struggling six-hospital network begin to turn a profit. His departure may have been precipitated by his fiscally prudent, if politically foolish, effort to shield the network's endowment from the financial fallout of the clergy sex-abuse scandal.
But leading a public university, especially an urban one that serves so many first-generation collegians, involves more than administrative expertise and fund-raising prowess. There is also an affirmative responsibility on the part of the Commonwealth to ensure that the leadership of its public institutions reflects the changing demographics of Massachusetts. Even as they cling tenaciously to power in Boston, whites are now a minority of residents of the city. It is past time to break up this self-perpetuating circle of influence.
There is a lot at stake. Last month, the Civil Rights Project at Harvard released poll results that should alarm everyone who cares about the future of Greater Boston. Eighty percent of blacks and Hispanics surveyed in the metropolitan area identified racial discrimination as a serious problem that has cost them job opportunities or social discomfort. One in four said he or she had been denied a job in the last year because of racial bias; one in five said he or she felt discriminated against in the workplace.
Creating some make-work vice presidency for J. Keith Motley at UMass is not going to slow the steady march of black and brown faces to the departure gates at Logan. The board of trustees should rescind Collins's selection as chancellor of UMass-Boston and award the job to the man already doing it.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
