Campus cheer
J. Keith Motley was far too wise to want any part of being a cause célèbre.
He might have become one, just the same, when he was passed over for the post of chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Boston two years ago. Motley, who had been serving as acting chancellor, lost out to Dr. Michael F. Collins, prompting the ire of students, much of the faculty, and Motley's admirers around town, especially in the black community. They wanted to stage protests; he quashed them.
Instead, he went to work as a vice president for the University of Massachusetts system and bided his time. Whatever disappointment he felt he kept to himself.
His patience -- and, especially, his talent -- was rewarded this week, when he was named chancellor of UMass- Boston.
I asked Motley if he viewed his appoint ment as vindication. He laughed, something he does easily.
"I moved past that kind of thinking when I was a teenager," Motley, 51, told me. "How disappointed could I be to go from being a vice chancellor to a vice president, with valuable work to do on five campuses? It would be hypocritical of me."
Two years ago, Motley's candidacy rested largely on his popularity on campus. That strength was ultimately used against him. Being well liked, as one member of the University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees was kind enough to explain to me, had nothing to do with being a president. The students and their professors would just have to get over it.
Implicit in that view, which carried the day, was that the testimony of the people who actually saw Motley run the campus meant nothing compared with the insights of a search committee that inter viewed him a couple of times.
Or so the committee falsely believed.
Motley's road to university administration began at an unusually early age. By the time he graduated from Northeastern University, where he had been a serious basketball player, he knew that running a college was what he wanted to do.
He attracted mentors along the way, among them John D. O'Bryant, the late Northeastern administrator and Boston School Committee member. Some of Motley's role models were on hand yesterday, when he was welcomed back to the UMass-Boston campus. "I stand on the shoulders of those who came before me and told me that I could do it and that I had leadership qualities," Motley said. "My mentors never had this opportunity, yet they groomed me to have it."
He returns to a campus that is still struggling with many of the capital issues that have bedeviled it for its entire existence. Its leaders have spoken incessantly about the school's "urban mission" without ever quite defining it. Perhaps most important, a plan to build dormitories on campus was so badly mishandled a few years ago that it may defy resurrection.
Despite that, Motley is eager to return to a job he views as a perfect fit.
"It connects my life's work in one place," he explained. "I've always been about access and I've always been about affordable education. It's the same way I felt about basketball; they gave me a scholarship to do what I would have been doing anyway."
When people say UMass-Boston serves a nontraditional student body, what they mean is that its students are older than average and have followed a different path than people who go away to school at 18. Left unspoken is the con descension many feel toward such students.
Motley was beloved on campus partly because he viewed its clientele so differently. "It's just nice to walk around a place where people are grateful to be there, grateful for the opportunity to get an education," he said. "It's a wonderful feeling to be around that kind of energy and easy to be passionate about."
Where many see a campus that has never quite come together, its new chancellor sees a dream coming to fruition, at last. "I knew opportunity comes," he said. "I didn't know where it would come from, but I knew it would come. I've been patient, and just kept working hard."
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 