Remarks and Speeches
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Chancellor Holub's Community Breakfast Remarks
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September 3, 2009
Good morning. It’s wonderful to see so many friends, neighbors, and colleagues here today. I’ve now been in Amherst a little more than a year, and it’s my pleasure to speak with you this morning as someone much more familiar with the campus, the town, and the Pioneer Valley, as someone who has learned, for example, that you don’t stand outside on the steps of town hall in the middle of February without an overcoat, as someone who further has come to appreciate the local produce and doesn’t yearn anymore for California-grown vegetables, and as someone who has definitely understood that the “h” is silent in the name of the town and the campus.
I learned this last lesson the hard way. Just after I was appointed chancellor, I had a small press conference in the Campus Center, and there I waxed eloquent about how honored I was to be the next Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, how wonderful I found the town of Amherst, and how I was delighted to be moving into Hillside on the Amherst campus. About a week later, sitting in Knoxville, Tennessee, where they have their own unusual ways to pronounce place names [Maryville = Merville], I received a letter from a linguistically inclined gentleman informing me not only that the “h” in Amherst is unpronounced by the natives of the region, but also giving me a detailed pronunciation guide to various and sundry other towns and cities in central and western Massachusetts. I was advised to pay careful attention to this list if I was going to be accepted by the local townspeople, and he added, if I were to venture inside 495 – which at the time was only a number to me – I should take special care to learn the idiomatic dialect of that part of the Commonwealth.
So let me just say to you today how happy I am to be beginning my second year on the Am[h]erst campus and to be living in the town of Am[h]erst.
Last year this event was scheduled on the first day of school, and as a result I was unable to introduce my wife Sabine to you. I believe in the year that we’ve been in Amherst, however, she and her flaming mini-van have become well known in the area, so introductions are probably now superfluous. Nonetheless, I’d like to ask her to stand and be recognized. Many husbands refer to their wives as their better half; in my case it’s probably more like my better three-quarters.
The past year has been a productive one in many ways. Although the campus and community have felt the effects of the country’s economic crisis since we gathered for last year’s breakfast, we remain well positioned to continue to improve the great University of Massachusetts Amherst. And we are ready to help make our local communities even better places to live, learn, and do business.
Of course, you can’t do much better than being called the best college town in America. The article last spring that named Amherst number one confirmed what you already knew and what my family and I have experienced this past year: We’ve found that Amherst is just as commendable a place for families as it is for students. And in case anyone thought that this high regard for Amherst was merely an anomaly, just last week the National Hotels and Travel Reservations web site touted Amherst as one of the country’s best college communities.
Everyone here can be proud of the positive, mutually beneficial, relationship that exists between the campus and the community. Our connections are strong and making them stronger is one of my priorities as Chancellor.
Good relations are not always the norm between town and gown. In fact, townies and gownies have often come into conflict, and there is a long history of disagreements that stretches back to the very origins of the university in medieval times. Perhaps the most notorious conflict took place on St. Scholastica Day, February 10, 1355, at the University of Oxford. It’s come down to us as the St. Scholastica Riot, and like many historical disputes in university towns it involved alcoholic beverages, in this case a quarrel at the Swindlestock Tavern over wine or beer (the sources are unclear which alcoholic beverage was actually involved).
Here’s what we know: A party of scholars in the tavern – obviously involved in pure and lofty academic pursuits – was evidently dissatisfied with the quality of the inebriant they were imbibing, (and as a scholar myself I can fully sympathize with this sort of complaint). The barman responded to their protestations in what was later described as “stubborn and saucy language,” and the scholars proceeded to hurl at his head some sort of vessel that contains potable intoxicants: either a tankard or a flagon (again the sources are not unequivocal). These actions precipitated a major disturbance between town and gown, and the brawl obviously intensified and spilled over into the streets outside the tavern and into the student quarters of the university. The rioting that ensued eventually led to the deaths of 63 students and 30 townsfolk.
After an investigation, authorities settled the dispute in favor of the university. As an annual sign of contrition, on February 10th, the town mayor and councilors had to march bareheaded through the streets and pay to the university a fine of one penny for every scholar killed. And, as a further result, the University gained considerable influence over the town’s affairs. It received the right to set the prices of various commodities, including, of course, wine and beer.
Happily, relations are much more amicable here in the Pioneer Valley, (in part, no doubt, because of the high quality of the wine and beer sold here). In fact, UMass Amherst has been nationally recognized for its community involvement. Our students perform thousands of hours of community service through classes, internships, service organizations, and as individuals.
We have deep and longstanding connections to the community through many channels. I’ll name just a few: We share outstanding cultural institutions. We work closely with local school systems to improve education for local children. We provide support to sustain family businesses. We are training the workforce of the future.
Earlier this week, we finalized a new five-year partnership agreement with the town of Hadley. We already had completed a five-year agreement in place with Amherst. These pacts cover vital issues such as fire, ambulance, and utilities. In addition, in concert with Amherst, Hadley and several other local municipalities, the campus is participating in a grant-funded feasibility study exploring the potential for establishing a regional emergency dispatch center.
We recognize that the campus and community will grow and succeed together. You can walk around outside today and see our growth for yourself. We have an incredible new Studio Arts Building. Students started classes last spring in our Integrated Sciences Building. We will celebrate its grand opening this month, and it’s just the first phase in the development of new life science facilities on campus. Our new Recreation Center will open later this term. Skinner Hall has been completely renovated for the Nursing School. We opened the new University Transit Center last spring and will break ground on a long-awaited Band Building in October, and a new police station later in November.
We are particularly proud of the new, award-winning Central Heating Plant, a co-generational facility that is the envy of other college campuses. It’s one of the cleanest burning plants in the nation and has reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent. Thanks to an agreement with the town of Amherst, we filter effluent from the town’s wastewater treatment plant and use it in our heating plant and cooling towers, recycling daily up to 200,000 gallons of municipal wastewater.
The Central Heating Plant is a major step in the transformation of our campus into a showcase of environmentally progressive initiatives. Our campus is bursting with green projects from biofuels and cutting-edge hydrogen fuel-science, to solar and wind energy, and green economics. We are at the forefront in efforts to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels.
While the building projects here are truly exciting, it’s the people at UMass Amherst who make us most proud. Our entering class of 2013, which, by the way is our sesquicentennial, was selected from a record-high number of applicants and is very special. The 4100 freshmen who start classes on Tuesday are the best and brightest in our history, both in terms of their SAT scores and high school grade point averages.
We expect they will continue a trend of UMass Amherst students winning prestigious national scholarships and fellowships. Last year, our students won more of these awards than ever before, including a Goldwater Scholarship, a Truman Award, a couple of National Science Foundation awards, and eight Fulbrights. Very impressive, indeed, but we believe the best is yet to come.
We recognize that the most worthwhile educational experience these fine students can have is putting knowledge into practice. And so, we are moving toward implementing programs that will ensure that every undergraduate student has the opportunity to conduct research alongside our stellar faculty.
This commitment to undergraduate research is one of many goals we put forward in the spring in a document we call our Framework for Excellence. We have outlined where we want UMass Amherst to be in 2020, and how we propose to get there. We will build upon our high quality undergraduate education, outstanding graduate programs, and internationally recognized research to attain these goals.
I could go on enumerating the many things we have to brag about on campus and in our community, but I’ll stop here and add only that one of our points of pride is the high quality of the award-winning Dining Services you are enjoying this morning. If you haven’t yet tried the eggs from Diemond Farms in Wendell, don’t miss out – our Dining Services uses them every day. In fact twenty-five percent of the produce Dining Services serves our students comes from local farms.
Before I relinquish the podium, however, I want to extend my sincerest thanks and appreciation to all of you who have supported me during my first year as Chancellor. I would also like to thank you in advance for your ongoing energy and commitment as we continue working together to make the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Pioneer Valley better than ever. We have the excellent faculty, staff, students, and neighborly support we need to reach the upper echelons of national research universities. And we will do it all together, as a community.
Now, for the best way I know to kick off a new academic year, let me introduce to you something else we like to brag about at UMass Amherst: I am honored to present to you George Parks with the “Power and Class”: the Minuteman Marching Band!
