Few students know the president of the University of Massachusetts personally. Nonetheless, Jack M. Wilson, the 25th president of UMass, has influenced every student since September 2nd 2003.
After almost eight years of service, President Wilson has decided to step down. Robert L. Caret will take Wilson’s place officially on June 30th this year as the new president of the University of Massachusetts.
“He intends to remain in Massachusetts and work more closely with students, through teaching or research in an as-yet-undetermined capacity,” Tracy Jan, the higher education reporter of the Boston Globe wrote in an article after an interview with Wilson.
In another thorough interview with Mass High Tech’s E. Douglas Banks, President Wilson said he hopes “to continue being a faculty member,” adding, “I’m looking forward to going back to having some contact with students.”
Wilson is most proud that he has helped usher UMass into an era of greater cross-campus unity. “We have a stronger university today,” he rightfully asserted. “We’re serving more students. The quality of the students has increased and we’ve kept it affordable. We’re delivering a university to the student; we’re meeting their needs.”
Evidence supporting this claim came out last September when Wilson’s pioneering projects gained not just national, but international recognition. The UMass system was ranked 56th globally, 33rd out of the 72 US institutions recognized, 14th among the US public institutions ranked, and 4th in Massachusetts.
“This ranking is a testament to the hard work of our outstanding faculty and to the efforts of students who come to us with impressive credentials and talents and graduate prepared to change the world,” Wilson said in response to the news. He was undoubtedly happy that a sometimes stigmatized public school system was so highly regarded.
Any ranking (especially one so reputable as the Times Higher Education report) that puts a public institution so close to Ivy Leagues like Harvard and MIT credits the leaders of the university and the faculty who work hard every day.
“The national perception has gone up,” Wilson stated in the Mass High Tech interview when asked about how UMass is viewed by the public. “That’s very exciting to me, because parents now see us as a first choice.”
When taken in the context of the recession that persisted throughout his presidency, each achievement Wilson and his colleagues negotiated becomes even more impressive.
“People truly believed that most of the budget came from the state,” he answered when asked a question about finances. A faculty member took a poll among other faculty members at UMass and discovered a disturbing statistic. According to the poll, the average faculty member thought the state’s money made up around 50 percent of the UMass budget, “there were some people who said it was 85, 80,” Wilson recalled. In reality according to Wilson, “the answer was 14 percent.”
President Wilson prides himself on being an entrepreneur and a businessman. While this might seem like a secondary quality needed in the education system, Wilson’s ability allowed him to make millions out of little money.
For example, he and other members of the board had to cut 150 million from the budget. Wilson cut 151 million. Many were bamboozled by his extra million dollar cut.
Wilson (with others, of course) invested the million into UMass projects that had already seen some success. That one million dollars eventually turned into 30 million. In an economy where 86 percent of the budget must be provided by non-government funding, the ability to turn one million into 30 million is, truly, invaluable.