Dr. Lombardi speaks about becoming the
27th leader of UMass Amherst

Originally appeared in the Fall 2002 issue of UMass Magazine

by Marietta Pritchard

John Lombardi is not at a loss for words. He comes prepared to lay out his views, to answer your questions, to outline his positions. He wastes little time and he pulls no punches. He looks straight at you through his resolutely unfashionable black-rimmed glasses, and when you finish hearing him out, you are in no doubt about where he stands.

The new chancellor arrived this summer from the University of Florida – like UMass Amherst a land-grant institution, but about twice our size. During his tenure as president from 1990-99, he helped conduct a private fund-raising effort that brought in $570 million; research awards doubled to $276 million. Before that Lombardi was provost at The Johns Hopkins University, and earlier taught and held several deanships at Indiana University.

It is just after Labor Day and Lombardi has not been here long, but his views on UMass Amherst are already clearly in focus: The core business of this university – of any university, for that matter, he says – is teaching and research. The "key actors" are always the faculty. If they don’t do their teaching and research, the work of the university doesn’t get done, but they need money to do it. UMass will be competing – for money, for students, for faculty – against bigger and richer institutions. That competition happens in the "open marketplace," says Lombardi, not in some protected, rarefied sphere. Many other state universities figured out long ago that they can’t depend on state funding to stay on top. UMass has only learned this relatively recently, and needs to catch up on fund-raising in the private sector. People forget how competitive universities have to be. Running a university is not, the new chancellor reminds us, a "graceful walk in the park."

But he cautions against overdramatizing this situation. There is no crisis here, he says. UMass clearly has money problems, but it will survive and even come out stronger. Every state university in the country is in a similar budget-cutting, belt-tightening mode. Institutions have to focus, especially when they’re not huge and well-funded. And please, don’t get nostalgic about the good old days, an imaginary time when the Legislature paid all the bills, everything was running smoothly and the university was a cohesive community where everybody knew and talked to everybody. That’s "an abstraction that exists nowhere," says Lombardi.

Now that we’ve agreed on the basics, suggests the new chancellor, we can get down to the interesting part – the business of making UMass Amherst a top-rank institution.

John Lombardi is a historian, a Latin Americanist, with a specialty in Venezuela. He plans to teach regularly at UMass, beginning in the spring with a course in the School of Education called "Managing Universities," a subject he has written and thought about long and hard. He plans to keep his hand in as a teacher. "It’s who I am," he says. "If I don’t teach, I go through serious withdrawal."

Next fall, he plans a course in the history department called "Intercollegiate Sports, 1900-Present." He’s taught this course before, and says the trick is to demonstrate that the problems in college sports did not happen yesterday. It has been one of the "peculiarities of America," he says, "to connect quasi-professional sport and the academy." Exploring the history of something that already interests many students helps provide a sense of perspective. He started writing about sports "in self-defense," he says, while he was at Indiana during the Bobby Knight era.

His only other connection with sports is as a spectator. He and his wife, Cathryn, will be present at the fall football games. And the chancellor will be playing his clarinet in the alumni band at Homecoming. No illusions here. Lombardi knows the difference between diligence and talent, he says, and his musical career stopped at diligence.

Of the 20,000-plus books that the Lombardis have brought to Hillside, the chancellor’s house, most are his professional library. Many are Cathryn Lombardi’s collection of science fiction. But at the moment John Lombardi is reading none of them. He is mostly boning up on UMass, and he’s arranged to get his daily news through well-chosen clippings. No superfluous gestures here, no wasted time. "It’s not always helpful to read daily papers," he says. "Universities don’t ebb and flow at the same rate as a newspaper cycle. The two are on different clocks."

John Lombardi still has something about him of the brash kid who grew up in Los Angeles in the ’50s and worked on hotrods. "Think ‘Grease,’" he says, and recalls the T-shirt with one sleeve rolled up to hold a pack of cigarettes. His signature red pickup truck had to be left behind in Florida, where it’s up on blocks. "I was afraid it wouldn’t pass Massachusetts inspection," he says. But he has another sturdy vehicle that he’ll be driving and tinkering with, a hand-me-up Jeep inherited from his son. In his spare time, when he has it, he still likes to fix up cars – and he hasn’t done so badly with universities either.

The new chancellor has a vision of a first-class institution, but he is not a dreamer. What he says seems so clear and obvious that you’re surprised no one has put it just that way before. If you remember anything, he says, remember teaching and research at the highest level. Don’t get lost on the "fringe issues." Teaching and research, that’s what we do. And we need money to do it.