Firm To Be Hired For Chancellor Search

A consulting firm is expected to be hired to help in the search for a new UMass Boston chancellor, according to a UMass spokesperson.

UMass President Jack Wilson has decided to bring in a consulting firm, says spokesperson Robert Connolly, as a search gets underway to replace Jo Ann Gora, who left in August for Ball State University.

The consulting firm will probably be picked after a search committee has been selected, in order to give the committee a voice in the process. Korn/Ferry International served as the consulting firm for the chancellor search three years ago that found Gora, and recently lent its services towards finding a UMass president.

“We’re in the final stage of putting together the search committee,” said Connolly. The committee, staffed by Thomas Chmura, UMass Vice President for Economic Development, is expected to be formed in the next week or two.

Dukakis To Speak on Health Care

Northeastern professor and former Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis is scheduled to speak on health care policy on October 4 in the Healey Library.

Dukakis was at UMass Amherst to speak on the same subject, according to the Daily Collegian, the campus student newspaper. “We now have 45 million people in this country without a dime of health insurance, overwhelmingly working class people and members of working families,” he said. “These folks aren’t loafing around, they’re working. Some of them have two or three jobs.”

Dukakis said he left the governor’s office before they could begin to put in place a universal health care policy.

“Unfortunately, I left the statehouse when we began implementing it … but [former Governor William] Weld never got it, he did everything he could to screw it up, and I regret to say he was successful,” he said. “So, today my friends, we have some 250,000 more uninsured people in Massachusetts than we did when I left office.”

Dukakis, who spends winters at sunny California’s University of California-Los Angeles, unsuccessfully ran for president in 1988, losing out to the current president’s father, George H. W. Bush.

Vice Chancellor Presses For Criminal Charges

UMass Amherst’s top student affairs official is pushing for criminal charges and to force out of office student government officials pictured in photographs posted on the internet, according to the Daily Collegian.

Nine students, one of whom is the student government speaker, were photographed back in March consuming alcohol, with a caricature of a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard on a dry-erase board in the Student Center for Educational Research and Advocacy (SCERA) office. They could be facing any number and variety of criminal charges, Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs and Campus Life Michael Gargano told the Collegian.With university lawyers involved, an investigation is “well underway,” said Gargano.

“We are going to charge the students with everything,” he told the Collegian, “[the charges] will include the misuse of private property, underage drinking – we are going to look at who they bought the alcohol from, and there is an investigation of the symbol that reflects racism and hate.”

Gargano has not decided on how exactly the students will be punished.”I have the authority to remove these people from office,” he told the Collegian. “I could give them 500 hours of community service, have them conduct an open forum discussion; I have a variety of sanctions at my disposal. I’m not ruling out dismissal.”