Students say UMass being too selective

Goals at Amherst spur strong debate
By Jenna Russell, Globe Staff May 5, 2005
AMHERST -- Since he was hired to lead the University of Massachusetts flagship campus three years ago, John V. Lombardi has been busy laying plans to improve the university. He has expanded private fund-raising and plans to rebuild much of the campus. By boosting recruitment, he has increased the applicant pool by nearly 25 percent in hope of attracting more high-achieving students.

But Lombardi has faced aggressive opposition from an unexpected source in recent months: student government leaders, who say that, by setting more ambitious goals, the university is abandoning the less-advantaged students it was meant to serve.
''We have 20 prestigious private schools in Massachusetts. The public university is supposed to serve the people," said Eduardo Bustamante, a junior and president of the undergraduate student government until last month.
Convinced they must act now or watch their public university drift from its mission, Bustamante and a small, tight-knit group of student leaders have launched a formal campaign, Take Back UMass, to ''return UMass to its legacy as an accessible and diverse public university," according to the group's website.
This year, instead of working with administrators as is typical on many campuses, the UMass student government has staged a half-dozen noisy demonstrations to demand more diversity on campus and more support for minority students. Minority enrollment, which peaked in the mid-1990s, dropped off at the end of the decade and has been mostly flat since then. Students have blitzed legislators with angry letters and phone calls, and they organized a boycott of classes last month to protest a restructuring of student services.

Full Story: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/05/05/students_say_umass_being_too_selective/