When a study of air quality at the University of Massachusetts Boston was conducted in the winter of 2021, 60 percent of the rooms in heavily used Wheatley Hall were found to be deficient, with fewer hourly air exchanges than recommended.
And this is not the only health and safety concern on campus. Anneta Argyres, president of the Professional Staff Union at UMass Boston, tells The Progressive that mold from persistent leaks, rodent infestations, inoperative air-handling systems, and malfunctioning heat and air conditioning have long plagued the public university.
“Many buildings on campus are about fifty years old, and the conditions we’re facing are maddening,” Argyres says. “The governor appoints trustees to the UMass system. Most are real estate moguls and investment bankers who see UMass as a competitive product. They ignore the purpose of public education.”
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Buckets catch dripping water in the Fine Arts Center at UMass Amherst in March. Professor Eric Berlin tells The Progressive that in addition to leaks, other problems in the building include possible unsealed asbestos in ceilings and excessive heat and cold in offices and classrooms.
Worse, she says trustees insist that each of the five UMass campuses turn an annual profit. “We did that in Boston and have a reserve fund, but when new construction began and we started to accrue debt, we were told that we could not use this money because it would make our bond rating go down.This is not a policy that any public institution should have.”
Like Argyres, Joseph Ramsey, a senior lecturer in English and American studies at UMass Boston, is concerned about the campus’s haphazard facilities and financial management—some buildings, he says, are beautiful and new, while others are old and decrepit. “You can feel the morale shift when you move from a room with state-of-the-art air filtration, windows, and Smart boards into a cramped room with blackboards and windows that don’t open,” he says.
But even new construction is problematic, he continues, and buildings often feel like marketing showrooms. “The original mission of UMass was to make a world-class education available to everyone in Boston,” Ramsey says. State-subsidized tuition used to cost $100 per semester but now it is much more expensive—nearly $37,000 a year for out-of-state students. He attributes this to a “current trend that depends on donors, out-of-state, and international students, who pay much higher tuition than local residents.”
Ramsey considers the spate of public-private partnerships—something the university claims is imperative—to support new construction to be a capitulation to the idea that direct government allocations will not be forthcoming, and that attracting private funding is the only viable model for expansion or maintenance. “You have to ask who these new structures are for,” he says. “When you dig into the budget, you can see patterns. One pattern assumes that student tuition needs to go up and expenditures on faculty and maintenance need to go down.”
The same reality exists at other UMass campuses. UMass Amherst trumpet professor Eric Berlin likens the Fine Arts Center building (FAC) where he works to a concrete penitentiary. Among the building’s problems, he says, are leaks, dust from crumbling ceilings, and excessive heat and cold in offices and classrooms.
“The FAC is dirty and dark, which affects our ability to recruit students,” Berlin says. The facilities are a deterrent, with inadequate concert halls, leaks in the percussion room, and too few practice areas. In addition, Berlin says that he’s had to periodically cancel classes because of excessive heat.
The building’s poor air circulation became increasingly problematic during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. “When we reopened after the shutdown, there was not enough air circulation,” he tells The Progressive. “I brought an air purifier that I purchased myself, but it can still get gamey when lots of people are crammed into one room.”
Adding insult to injury, Berlin says that recent flooding destroyed materials in the jazz library, a loss that will continue to reverberate for music historians and scholars alike.
He blames the problems on something called “deferred maintenance.”
According to APPA (formerly the Association of Physical Plant Administrators), the term “deferred maintenance”—the practice of cutting corners and putting off routine repairs—entered usage in the 1970s when cash-strapped universities, and some private colleges with small or no endowments, began to put off routine upkeep to save money.
“Over time, small inexpensive repairs can turn into budget-busting replacement bills,” the insurance company Brotherhood Mutual states on its website, referring to the high costs of deferred maintenance at the predominantly Christian schools it insures.
Consider leaks, for example. According to the company, replacing crumbling window caulking costs approximately $5 per frame. But if the problem is ignored, “drywall, framing, insulation, trim, flooring, and mold remediation caused by the leaky windows” will be unavoidable. The cost, the site explains, can be thirty times higher than it would have been had the problem been handled as soon as it was noticed.
Buildings, of course, can last for centuries, but they require maintenance, upgrades, and regular care. Sadly, few public colleges and universities do this—and the results are dire.
According to architect Joan Byron, the life expectancy of a poorly maintained building is just twenty-five to thirty years. “All new buildings should have a maintenance endowment that totals 2 percent of construction costs” for annual repairs, she says.
“Renovating an HVAC system is invisible. It does not attract donors or students, so it ends up on the back burner.”
The twenty-five-campus City University of New York (CUNY) is a case in point. Like UMass, CUNY is rife with infrastructure problems, including broken sinks and toilets, holes in the walls and floors, flooded hallways, rodent infestations, and inadequate HVAC systems—problems that are well documented, including on social media.
Jean Grassman is a coordinator of Environmental Health and Safety Watchdogs, a committee of the Professional Staff Congress, the union representing CUNY faculty. She explains that the university has more than 300 buildings, some of them nearly 100 years old. “There have been decades of deferred maintenance,” Grassman says, “and there has long been a culture of scarcity. One thing the administration never [admits to] is that it is sexier to create a new building than to do repairs on old ones. When you build something new, you can have an opening, an unveiling. It’s splashy and gets in the news. Renovating an HVAC system is invisible. It does not attract donors or students, so it ends up on the back burner.”
Danielle Aubert, president of American Association of University Professors/American Federation of Teachers Local 6075 (AAUP/AFT) at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, calls the lack of maintenance on her campus “overwhelming” but reports that student activists are taking a leading role in demanding that President M. Roy Wilson allocate funds for badly needed improvements.
Wayne State student Harrison Cole, a political science major and member of the —the group leading the effort—tells The Progressive that students have launched a campaign to improve campus life. In addition to repairs, student activists are demanding that the college hire more custodians, stock the emergency contraceptive Plan B and medication abortion Plan C pills in the student health center, and operate in a more transparent manner.
“It certainly doesn’t feel like the administration cares about us or the staff,” Cole says. “That’s why we’re pushing for an end to layoffs and outsourcing, and a $15 minimum wage for all campus workers.”
Similar demands are being made at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. Andrew Urban, chapter vice president of Rutgers AAUP/AFT and an associate professor of American studies and history, says that in addition to demanding that administrators fix long-standing problems—including removing chipping lead paint from classrooms and repairing leaks that forced numerous eighteenth-century documents to be moved to a safe space off campus—they are zeroing in on (RCM), a model that divides universities into “centers” that rent space on their campuses.
The American studies department, Urban explains, pays a fee to the School of Arts and Sciences. “We’ve been instructed to earn our keep and enroll a specific number of students and raise a specific amount of grant money. This ignores our larger educational purpose and causes departments to compete,” he says.
This, despite the fact that the campus’s AAUP/AFT chapter reports that Rutgers now has unrestricted reserves of $818.6 million. Faculty question where this money is going, how it will be doled out, and why the number of administrative staff continues to bloat.
“We see RCM as an enemy,” Urban says. “The union also wants to see university governance shared with faculty. We should have an opportunity to oversee development and decision-making.”
Faculty governance, Ramsey agrees, is essential. But he would also like to see faculty and staff play a greater role in decision-making regarding architectural design and determining how and when repairs and renovations are scheduled. “Labor unions need to be at the table when decisions regarding space are made,” he says. “How space is allocated, structured, and used is important and impacts morale, how we see each other, how we know each other, how we interact.”
The Progressive reached out to administrators at UMass Amherst and Boston, CUNY, Rutgers, and Wayne State for comment. None responded.
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Editor's note: This story was updated to indicate that dust was falling from crumbling ceilings at UMass Amherst.