Education: Scorpions in a Bottle

Columbia Point is a bleak spit of land that juts into the harbor three miles from downtown Boston. A huge housing project, largely black, is located there, and near by are the heavily Irish working-class neighborhoods of Dorchester. Thus the point seems an appropriate site for the new University of Massachusetts campus, a $130 million, 121-acre complex that will primarily serve students from these and lower-income neighborhoods in the Boston area.

But even before the new campus opened last month, it had become the enter of a local controversy that has nationwide implications. The crux of the issue in Boston: Why should taxpayers money be poured into a new public-university center with a planned enrollment of 12,500 when there is space for some 20,000 students in nearby private institutions— several of which are on the brink of financial disaster.

To the 6,100 enrolled students, most of whom had been attending classes in temporary quarters in downtownm Boston, the controversy is entirely academic. They are delighted with the well-equipped red brick buildings; the chemistry and biology labs rival those Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the fancy new sqush courts simply outclass their counterparts at Harvard. Futuristic steel and glass catwalks with spectacular views of Dorchester Bay colleges, a science center, library and administration building. Says Carlo Luigi Golin0,61, chancellor of the new Boston campus— and an Italian immigrant who got his own undergraduate education at New York's City College, "Just because this is an institution for poor kids does not mean that its not be as good as those places across the [Charles] river."

Over the years, the state legislature has been fairly generous to the University of Massachusetts, which has itsmajor campus at Amherst, 91 miles west of Boston, a medical school in Worcester and a total enrollment of nearly 30,000 students. Indeed, as long as there were students and money enough to go round, the powerful and influential private universities in Massachusetts did not object to seeing their public step sister flourish with state funding. Now,faced with a dwindling supply of students and costs that have pushed their tuition charges alone to $3,000 and more, the "privates" can no longer watch with equanimity as the "publics" siphon off students at a mere $300 a head—the basic tuition charge at the University of Massachusetts and other state colleges.