UMass Amherst

Maureen Rogers reviews the dismal attendance at Gillette Stadium for UMass football games - and the $5 million the state school is paying in rent:

What's wrong with having a nice little local program? Play the other New England state universities, and schools like Holy Cross? Why not keep it on campus, where students can attend more easily? What's wrong with 13,000 people watching a football game on a nice Indian Summer day? Does it have to be 90,000 diehards screaming for blood?

Personally, I'd rather see that taxpayer money go for scholarships, or labs, or a few more professors.

Forget putting medical marijuana on the ballot. Can't we vote on this?

A student at UMass Amherst is making a federal case out of the way the school promptly expelled him as part of a new crackdown on rioting after sporting events.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, Cullen Roe charges the expulsion violates his 14th Amendment right to due process because officials ordered him out without even the disciplinary hearing he says is required by the school conduct code.

Anna B rips into Tracy Jan's article in the Globe on the suckitude of UMass Amherst:

She is my age and she went to Stanford. Stanford costs about $38,000 per year now. Guess which one of us graduated with no student loan debt? ME! Maybe Umass Amherst has a bad rep because snobs like Tracy Jan love perpetuating that myth. Guess what? Umass Amherst was an amazing experience for me and I learned a lot. Sure, my dorm didn't have maids or ivy growing up its walls facing the quad. But I sure liked graduating debt free.

Dave Copeland, who also graduated from UMass and now teaches a class at Bridgewater State College, also tears into elitists in a tough economy when not everybody can afford a private college:

You want see a driven kid, find one who could have gone to those top-tier, state-system schools Jan gushes over in her article but, for whatever reason they ended up at a Bridgewater State or a UMass. There's a bit of a "fuck you, I can do this and don't tell me I can't" attitude that, frankly keeps me as an instructor on my toes. It's really hard to be dismissive of a student’s shortcomings saying "well, they are just Bridgewater State students" after you've been on campus for much more than a semester.

And it's really fun to be in that kind of classroom.