One unfortunate byproduct of a weekly press run is that breaking news is often old news by the time an issue hits the stands. So it’s not until now that we can hold forth on the appointment of Congress-critter Marty Meehan as chancellor of the Lowell campus. We will hold back on eviscerating Mr. Meehan for three reasons. The first is that it is old news by now: what’s done is done. The second is that our own Chancellor Collins is friendly with him, and we respect the job our Chancellor has done thus far. The third is that there is nothing we can do to him that Howie Carr and “The Boston Herald” can’t and won’t do better.

We can sit back and watch, though. Far be it from us to say that this was a don’t-look-back, hackneyed, cut-me-some-slack Jack, flack flying, no denying, I ain’t lying, cough cough HACK appointment. Or that Dr. Nabil Ibrahim, who served as vice chancellor of Purdue and has competently handled leadership positions in colleges all over America, would be a better fit than Meehan, who has never held a professional role at any school. Or that David Chang, who served as chancellor of Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, would have been either. We’re not even going to ask when Meehan is going to move the $5.12 million dollars in his campaign bank account now that (we assume) he won’t need it.

We’re going to look askance, and pray that UMass President Jack Wilson knows what he’s doing. Unless Meehan does indeed perform well in his new capacity, however, Wilson’s move is eminently open to criticism.

We at the Mass Media like to think of ourselves as fair-minded folks. No one is denying that Meehan is a smart man, that he has not been reelected as often as he has by accident. Integral to being a Congressman is management ability, and there is no reason that the skills he honed in MA-05 can’t translate into success in the Lowell campus. We will say, however, that if we are going to seize the momentum offered by the recent Nobel Prize awarded to Worcester’s Dr. Craig Mello and establish ourselves as a premiere state university system on par with that of California and others, Wilson must make many good decisions. We’re not certain that the appointment of Marty Meehan is one of them.

Time, of course, will tell.