This week’s edition was written by Joseph G. Ramsey, a faculty member in English, American Studies, and the Honors College. As always, The Point represents the views of the authors and is not the official position of the FSU.
At times like these, when global dangers threaten to overwhelm us and ‘Politics’ often appears as the province of oligarchs beyond our reach, maybe there is something to be said for anchoring in the shared concrete: what’s happening in our own campus backyard, or, more precisely…in our parking garage and lots. Like the much-derided MBTA, parking at UMB bring us together—even as it sometimes drives us to distraction.
What IS happening with parking these days?
Here are 4 short takes (before you run to go teach):
- UMB Admin is pushing to raise our daily parking rates, yet again, to $18 per day.
- Our campus unions are pushing back. In coalition, (FSU, PSU, CSU, DCU, and GEO), we’re resisting this proposal at the bargaining table. (Undergrads are organizing as well.)
- Admin is also still rejecting our Coalition demand for a flexible 30-use parking pass that could make discounted parking practical for more students and workers, most of whom don’t come to campus 5 days per week.
- Admin has finally admitted that giving UMB workers and students some sort of meaningful MBTA subsidy is a good idea. (About time!) However, their proposal for a 25% MBTA discount still falls well short of the 50% our coalition demands. Our unions are pushing for an MBTA subsidy that moves UMB towards genuine sustainability, one that makes it cheaper to take the T than to drive.
Here is the bottom line: We need FSU members—and UMB students—to raise our voices together in April to make sure we prevail at the table. So, if you have not already done so, please SIGN AND SHARE our UMB Union and Community Parking and Transit Petition. We plan a mass delivery of this petition on April 30. (Over 1000 have already signed!)
And if you think you can make it to a Standout and Rally for Parking & Transit Equity and Affordability on Wednesday, April 15 (“Tax Day”), 1:45-2:30pm in the ISC, please sign up here, (and bring your friends!). Let’s tell UMB Admin that the “parking tax” to work here is already too high!
We’re also looking for FSU members and students to share testimony at the bargaining table on 4/15. How does unaffordable parking and transit at UMB affect you? How about your students and community partners?
Finally, if you’re interested in having a small UMB Coalition Transit Organizing team come visit your class(es) sometime in April, to talk with students about the coalition campaign and how to get involved, please email FSU or me directly at joseph.ramsey@umb.edu. (A visit can be as short as 5 minutes!) We have a great cohort of students, staff, and faculty ready to talk with students about why this matters to our UMB community.
Whatever our job at UMB, we all share the need to travel to this campus—a fact we share with the vast majority of our students, too (residence halls notwithstanding). This makes parking and transit an opportunity to organize our community, since this affects so many. If we push together against $18 parking fees (and for better MBTA subsidies), we might just discover some untapped collective power. And as banal as it might seem, transit justice is a ‘small’ issue that concretizes ‘Big” ones. By defending affordability at the toll booth, we defend the public mission of UMB, founded, let’s never forget, to make world-class education available to all—not just those with cash on hand to feed the machine.
That’s the short of it.
And now, since this is The Point, for the not so short piece. Below is an edited version of the testimony I gave to UMB Admin at the bargaining table two weeks ago, alongside our all-union Coalition Bargaining Team. I share it in hopes it may inspire some of YOU to speak at our rally or bargaining session on 4/15, or—even better—to talk with your students about the shared concrete beneath our feet.
Remarks delivered at the UMB Parking & Transit Union Coalition Bargaining Session
3/24/26
Good morning. My name is Joe Ramsey, and for twelve years I’ve taught here full-time at UMass Boston, in the English and American Studies Departments, as well as in the Honors College. Among the many classes I teach is a first-year course about “Experiencing Boston,” where students explore the history, literature, and cultures of our city, as an intellectual hub and a center of social change. When the weather allows, we travel across Boston—often via the MBTA—to help bring the city to life.
Of course, this semester, in a first-year class it has been challenging to pursue our academic learning plan at all. Since close to HALF of the first-year students I’ve taught had their lives upended as a result of the East Residence Hall flooding and closure, and the resulting mass displacement—whether to the Mt. Ida campus, to local hotels, or, in many cases, back home to family who reside (more or less) in the area: students compelled to commute. This dorm crisis and the resulting mass transience hit our first-year students HARD. They’ve been struggling with unexpected costs (for food, housing, travel, and replacement necessities), torn from their newly forged routines and social networks, and have often felt abandoned or disrespected by campus administration’s response. Many students have confessed that they’ve had their hopes for what the first year of college would be dashed, and many more are reeling with a feeling of abandonment at the hands of those they trusted to care for them. Many first year students are now wondering about how they ended up feeling… left to the wind…
Whether or not that is a fair verdict on their part I submit to you that it is an established emotional fact that requires the utmost attention. I’ve heard even some of my most outstanding students—campus leaders in their first year—speaking aloud about something they never expected to be considering at this point in their college careers: transferring out of UMB.
How does this relate to the issue of Parking costs and Public Transit? Here’s the point: UMB should be doing EVERYTHING it can right now to send the message to students, especially but not only first-year students, that UMB is in fact trying to become a welcoming and accessible place that cares about them, as human beings, both on and off-campus. Further raising the costs of parking that is ALREADY too expensive in the eyes of most—while doing far too little to reduce the cost of public transit—sends EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE MESSAGE, “adding insult to the injury.”‘ If we want to keep students here and not send record numbers of the first-year cohort packing, we should be working to make campus MORE affordable and transportation options MORE accessible and flexible, not less so.
And what goes for students goes for faculty as well, especially for our lower paid NTT faculty, for whom parking on this campus has become a burdensome and regressive tax just to get to work. Some of our lowest paid Associate Lecturer faculty are now paying 5% or even 10% of their teaching income JUST TO PARK on this campus! Such punitive fees further harm our students and campus culture by discouraging faculty from coming to UMB on days when they don’t absolutely have to. How many faculty members would be meeting with students more often, or attending more campus events, if not for the punitive tax of paying an additional $15 per visit?
Join me for a moment in imagining a counter-factual:
How great would it be if students and employees, upon gaining admittance (or hire), were quickly sent a (free!) MBTA pass before their first day at UMB. Consider the message THAT would send: “UMB is your gateway to exploring not only our campus but the whole city of Boston. Your UMB ID unlocks all of Boston for you! The city is your university!” And also: “Here at UMB we take climate science and reducing carbon emissions seriously!”
As mentioned, I often take students on field trips and site visits for “Experiencing Boston,” and for many students the logistics and expense of travelling across the city via MBTA are already a major hurdle. Sometimes low-income students miss these field trips because they cannot afford the extra money for MBTA tickets on top of the parking they’re already paying for. I have covered student Charlie tickets out of hand many a time and have watched students scrambling among themselves to cover one another.
We faculty also know very well how increasing backdoor travel costs impact our students, at all levels and across majors: how it puts pressure on students to cut back their days on campus, stacking T/TH or M/W courses to the point of exhaustion (or moving classes online simply to save money on the commute). At the same time, I witness students confessing that despite their interests in a topic, they are unable to attend events on campus—even when those campus events might open fantastic opportunities. Since, on the days they are here, their classes are so packed that there is no space for attending an event…and on the alternate non-class days, they can’t afford to come to campus (and often are working for wages to pay the rising costs of attendance). And then we are surprised when so many excellent events on this campus fail to draw a crowd or fill a room?
Whatever class I’m teaching, I never fail to take a moment at some point in the semester to “quiz” my students: How much would they guess it cost to attend UMB full-time when we opened back in 1965? The Answer: $100 PER SEMESTER. Which is to say, only a fraction of what it now costs just to PARK on this campus. Even adjusted for inflation, commuter students these days can easily spend as much to park at UMB as the full cost of tuition back in the day. What does this say about the retreat of the “public” mission of our campus?
What sort of message are we sending our students (and our workers!) when we fail to heed their protest that things are ALREADY TOO EXPENSIVE and instead further ADD to their daily and weekly expenses? Are we serious about increasing graduation rates, and first to second year retention rates, and reducing transfers? Are we serious about faculty retention? Are we serious about making ours a campus open and accessible to the Boston community? If so….raising parking fees further (while inadequately funding T-subsidies) is exactly the WRONG action to take.
To be sure, there are many systemic obstacles to university access that are difficult to address: poverty, austerity, racial inequity, histories of oppression. But transit and parking costs should be an easy one. I urge UMB Administration to provide more transit support and more affordable parking, for students and employees alike, and let UMB reap the reward of increased student, faculty, and community engagement.
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