The University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass Boston) is a public university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
The university is a member of the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities[4] and the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities.[5] It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research spending and doctorate production".[6] It is the only public research university in Boston and the third-largest campus in the five-campus University of Massachusetts system.[7]
The University of Massachusetts System dates back to the founding of Massachusetts Agricultural College under the Morrill Land-Grant Acts in 1863. Prior to the founding of UMass Boston, the Amherst campus was the only public, comprehensive university in the state.[8] As late as the 1950s, Massachusetts ranked at or near the bottom in public funding per capita for higher education, and proposals to expand the University of Massachusetts into Boston was opposed both by faculty and administrators at the Amherst campus and by the private colleges and universities in Boston.[9] In 1962, the 162nd Massachusetts General Court expanded the UMass System for the first time to Worcester, Massachusetts with the creation of the University of Massachusetts Medical School.[10] In 1963, UMass President John W. Lederle informed the General Court that more than 1,200 graduates of Boston area high schools qualified to attend the University of Massachusetts were denied admission to the Amherst campus due to lack of space, and endorsed expanding the system with a commuter campus in Boston.[11]
At the time, there were 12,000 freshman applications to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst with only 2,600 slots, yet the majority of the applicants lived in the Greater Boston area.[12] In 1964, Massachusetts Senate Majority Leader Maurice A. Donahue and State Senator George V. Kenneally Jr. introduced a bill to establish a Boston campus for the UMass System.[11] The bill was opposed by several private colleges and universities in the area, including Northeastern University, Boston University, and Boston College (who argued that the state would be better off subsidizing the existing private institutions in the city), as well as by Boston State College (who argued for expanding its campus on Huntington Avenue instead). However, the Huntington Avenue building of Boston State College could not be expanded to accommodate a 15,000-student campus, and the local news media and public opi
Sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Massachusetts_Boston
- https://www.umb.edu/
