UMass Magazine Online

Winter 2003

Departments

Extended Family

Features

All my best friends are here

One giant molecule

I learnt to dream of Sicily

The Landscape Beautiful

Extended Family

Family Day
Difficult conversations and a lot to sing about

Judson Brown




	CHILLY SERENADE: The Vocal Suspects, a student a cappella group, brave the day at the"Minute Fan Park." (photo by Ben Barnhart)

FOR PARENTS WHO WORRY THAT their sons and daughters might get swallowed up in the university like Jonah in the belly of the whale, Chancellor John V. Lombardi has words of reassurance.

With 17,876 undergraduate and 5,456 graduate students, UMass Amherst might seem like Leviathan to you, he told those who showed up at the Rand Theater in the Fine Arts Center early on a clear, blustery November morning for the opening of Family Day 2002, “but believe me, for a major public research university it’s really quite small.”

Speaking to about 150 people distributed in family clumps across a vertiginous bank of seats, Lombardi said that compared to some places he’s worked – including the huge universities of Indiana and Florida – the Amherst campus “is a very intimate, contained and connected environment,” where students have extraordinary access to faculty and opportunities to participate in research.

UMass Amherst epitomizes, he said, “the last of the handicraft industries in America,” meaning that it is not about mass production, but about fitting individuals with the resources to do their “personal best.”

This “handicraft process is not exactly efficient,” he said. “You can’t automate it and scale it to process 300,000 at a time.” Rather, “This is a participatory process.” New information technologies now being implemented at the university are helping personalize the bureaucracy, he said, citing software that will allow students to do “degree shopping” online, “like trying on a coat,” he said.

Lombardi, wearing a well-broken-in tweed jacket, a crimson tie and black-rimmed glasses, has a colloquial, jocular manner. His partial deafness and aversion to microphones explain why he speaks loudly, he says. He hops up into the seats to make sure he’s heard parents’ questions.

“Conversation” is a favorite word, as in: “Parents are a key to the conversation.” The conversation in the auditorium is remarkably candid on both sides. Parents express concerns: about budget cuts bringing reductions in course offerings and many early faculty retirements; about the parlous condition of parts of the campus; about student safety. This last issue represents a particularly “difficult conversation,” Lombardi says, in part because many students think tighter security “is a violation of their freedom of something or other.”
Sounding momentarily like a police chief, he says, “We are not going to be subtle about this. We are not complacent. We are on the case.” The university police force will be at full size by the end of the month.

The alumni office sent out about 21,000 pieces of snail- and e-mail inviting families to campus for the day. Some 1,750 people, including students, registered for the day’s special events, in-cluding a sampling of classes and informational seminars and a barbecue under tents erected for the occasion at “Minute Fan Park” on the east side of the football stadium.

Lombardi, now bundled up against the chilly breeze in a knee-length crimson UMass coat, is working the lunch tables under the shivering canvas, going from family to family, introducing himself, cracking jokes, back-slapping.

“He’s a down-to-earth guy and seems to have good relationships with the students, too, which is important,” said Bill Boyce, a salesman and sign painter who with his wife, Lisa, a nursery school teacher, came up from Long Island to visit their son, senior Bill Jr., a journalism major.

Paul and Linda Johnston of Andover, at the request of their two children, junior Michelle (a recent transfer from Johnson State College in Vermont) and freshman Matt, had brought Millie, their 15-year-old border collie. Millie looked right at home seated at the end of the table.

Johnston said he really likes visiting the Amherst campus. “I love where it’s located,” he said. “It’s not in a metropolitan area. It’s got a culture of its own.”

Harry and Suzann Tinney of Reading brought their son, Matt, a junior at Reading Memorial High School and future candidate for admission, to visit his sister, Andrea, a freshman. Andrea, a prospective astronomy major, said she is happy so far with her UMass experience. She was especially happy to have gotten an unglamorous, but much-appreciated job in an astronomy lab, a job she hopes will lead to a research assistantship.

Jeanne and John Ferris came from Boston bearing, among other gifts for their oldest son, Jack, a freshman, two boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal. “His refrain always was he and the Cap’n would make it happen,” said Jeanne, laughing.

Jack, a graduate of Boston Latin School and a theater major, said it’s his impression that there are more rather than fewer theater classes offered this year. He got turned down at his first choice, NYU’s elite Tisch School of the Arts, but said he is pleased with his second choice.

Jeanne Ferris said she was disappointed that Jack, although qualified, didn’t get into Commonwealth College, a small competitive program, for reasons of space. She thinks “he would have met students there who are as focused as he is.” Nevertheless, she said she has been “pleasantly surprised” by UMass Amherst. She had heard tales from friends about the university’s old reputation as “Zoo Mass,” the party school. She had expected a drab institutional setting.

What she discovered was “a beautiful campus,” she said. “And the program they put on for prospective students was great.” If further budget cuts don’t “ruin it,” she said, she expects her next two children to come here as well.

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