The Point: Three-Year College Degree? Massachusetts Board of Higher Education Betrays Working Class Students

2/26/2026

This week, The Point committee is pleased to re-print a post from retired UMass Boston political science professor and FSU member Maurice Cunningham. Cunningham is the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization (2021) about which he last wrote for The Point in 2023, and has just launched a companion newsletter, Sinister Interest & Evil in Every Shape: A Dark Money Reader. As always, The Point represents the views of the author and is not the official position of the FSU.

The Massachusetts Board of Higher Education recently voted to allow schools to award a bachelor’s degree in three years, with only 90-96 credits. It is a betrayal of the commonwealth’s once-upon-a-time commitment to make a first-rate college education available to working class students.

Future graduation ceremonies will be held at a Jiffy Lube in Dorchester.

I have some experience in this area as a retired professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. My more relevant experience is that I was one of the least promising, longest-term undergraduates to finally achieve a liberal arts BA from UMass Boston.

Let me tell you about the spirit that once embodied the commonwealth’s commitment to its young people. When I attended UMass Boston the political science faculty featured an outstanding professor named Rusty Simonds. When I came back as a faculty member twenty years later, he became my colleague and friend until his passing in 2003.

Rusty Simonds photo credit: Harry Brett

Rusty took the unmovable position that working class students deserve a great education, as good as anything they could get in elite institutions. Rusty’s PhD was from Harvard, which he often referred to as “that dump at the other end of the redline”. (The redline is the subway line that connects UMass Boston to Harvard in Cambridge).

He believed that “[T]he democratizing of learning is the point of public higher education, it is the promise that brought me to UMass Boston in 1969 and it is the reason I have never, for all the aggravations we’ve made for ourselves, regretted that decision.” He was a tough grader. He would spend untold hours in his office helping students with a deep well of patience. Rusty had total confidence in us.

Rusty had a mischievous sense of humor. At times he would introduce a class with a slide show presenting images of the buildings at the state prison. Then he’d show some slides of our campus. Not much difference.

He was a political theorist. Rusty taught a class called “Karl Marx’s Marxism” to emphasize that we would be reading the works of one of the most influential political theorists in history, and not the caricatures offered by pandering politicians.

We got all this and more for about $150 bucks a semester. Back then the Board of Higher Education did not slash our education by 25% to rescue us from years paying off loans.

Despite one transfer, two dropouts, multiple dead-end jobs and drifting around the country, the school kept letting me back in. And since in those days the commonwealth actually supported working class students, I didn’t have any debt.

It made all the difference.

I briefly majored in just about every department in the College of Liberal Arts. I read Hedda Gabler, fell in love with Henrik Ibsen and read just about everything he wrote. Same with George Bernard Shaw. I devoured Bertolt Brecht plays and learned to sing “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” from Die Dreigroschenoper in German (“The Ballad of Mack the Knife” from The Threepenny Opera).

The Democratic Party-political establishment could not be more pleased with the ¾ degree. The Board chair, a former gubernatorial candidate, praised the board for being “pro-innovation” (a magic word) and making the state more “competitive” (we are surging ahead in the race to the bottom). The governor praised the decision. The Globe quoted several enthusiastic ¾ fans with ties to the dump at the other end of the redline.

The only dissenter included in the story was Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association and a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He warned that with all those courses cut out young people will miss out on electives and never find fields they “might not have known [they] love.”

Page is right. After all that bouncing around, I eventually started to read political science. Thanks to UMass Boston and a 120-credit program, I found what I love and got to do it most of my working life. When I was ready for grad school, I didn’t have to “compete” my 90 credits against other applicants’ 120.

As I look back on my own teaching career, I remember students who were homeless. One of them I know would sleep in the Wheately Building overnight, carefully evading security. She’s an attorney now. A number were out of their own family homes by age 16. A brilliant new emigrant tanked her first paper because she had never written a paper in her country of origin. I had students who had done prison time. Plenty of veterans including one who served in Afghanistan and explained to us that joining the army was the only way he could afford to get his teeth fixed. I’ve managed to keep track of many of them, and they are doing fine in professional careers. Any UMass Boston faculty member will tell you the same kinds of stories. Now we’re going to dumb down our students’ education?

This is shutting off human potential in order to push young people into the corporate work force, without allowing them to form too many questioning thoughts in their heads.

I do not recommend anyone do what I did. I was not a mature responsible young person. Fortunately I had a lot of family support. Because of the public education system that existed, even a screw-up like me could eventually find their way and do pretty well.

So, it is infuriating that discussion about making public education meet the needs of young people never involves providing the kind of help I got. It is not impossible. We did it before.

The Board’s decision betrays Rusty Simonds’ vision, the belief that all willing students deserve the opportunity for a great education.

The committee for this year’s The Point currently includes Jessica Holden, Healey Library; Nick Juravich, History; Jeff Melnick, American Studies; and Steve Striffler, Labor Studies. If you want to write an edition of The Point, or if you just have an idea, please write us at fsu@umb.edu