In the fat times, it’s easy to be a university president.
You shake down wealthy alumni and pretend their donations aren’t buying admission for their dim offspring. You learn to breathe through your mouth to endure the bad breath of senior faculty and poor student hygiene, and take their perpetual complaints under advisement, a process similar to what Black Earth Compost does with your table scraps after they pickup your little green barrel.
And as long as the bucks keep flowing and you manage to avoid antagonizing the board of trustees, you’re golden.
But these are not the days of wine and roses for academia, public or private. Dozens of public or nonprofit colleges have folded or are on the brink of it since the pandemic hit. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia forecasts another 80 could bite the dust over the next five years* as costs soar and enrollments drop.
And now, Trump, taking a chainsaw to the federal funding that’s been the mother’s milk of higher education around here for decades. What’s a college president to do beyond waving goodbye as Mr. Chips cashes his chips in?
If you’re Marty Meehan, arguably — along with the late Paul Tsongas — the most influential son of Lowell since Jack Kerouac, you do what you’ve always done: take Trump’s broken eggs and make egg salad out of them.
Building on the work of Tsongas and others to build federal funding pipelines to Lowell and the UMass campus there, Meehan took over as UMass-Lowell chancellor in 2007 and went on a fundraising and spending binge that propelled the school to unheard-of regional and national rankings, with a special emphasis on technology and life sciences.
Now in his tenth year as president of the entire UMass system, Meehan has a new gambit he’s touting: climate tech, the fast-growing universe of scientific and technological solutions to environmental and social issues raised by climate change.
Some academic chieftains like to slip on their regalia (hey, who among us doesn’t like to feel pretty…important?) and deliver their institutional visions like the tablets handed down to Moses. But Meehan is a bit more down home; make that townie home, as a card-carrying graduate of both Lowell High and UMass Lowell. His manifesto was delivered tieless in a snappy, heavily-produced video touting the pieces of the climate tech action each UMass campus will grab: coastal resilience at UMass Boston, sustainable fisheries at UMass Dartmouth, water treatment technology in Amherst, and so on.
Where will the dough for all this come from at a moment of federal pullback and economic malaise? “I think the private sector is going to determine this, not some administration in Washington that may play to the public and say ‘oh, we don’t believe in this,’ or ‘drill, baby, drill’ or whatever they’re going to say. The fact of the matter is, it’s the existential threat of our time. And there could be more and more private sector money that will go into climate tech.”
Meehan wants UMass and the state to aggressively cultivate global partners, the better to build economic relationships that can survive DC bungling. Just as Tsongas, Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill touted academic research as a major player in an array of economic sectors back in the day, and state government made successful wagers on life sciences over the past two decades, Meehan and his allies are betting on climate tech to be one of the next big things, with Massachusetts competing for its slice of the pie.
Will it pay off? The alternative is a future of hanging out at a corner table in the local DD with Mr. Chips, moaning about whatever happened to the good old days.
*Correction note: This column has been corrected to reflect that the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s forecast of 80 additional schools closing is not over one year, but over five years.