This issue of The Point was written by Jason Rodriquez, FSU President and Professor of Sociology, and Jessica Holden, FSU Vice President and Associate University Archivist for Research Services.
In February 2025, the Carnegie Foundation classified UMass Boston as an R1, top-tier national research university, and moreover, as the top R1 university in the United States for its high research access to students across socioeconomic categories. This achievement is a great credit to our dedicated faculty and librarians, who put in the effort to make UMB all it can be and to take every opportunity to involve students along the way. It’s actually remarkable that we have done this, considering the substandard learning infrastructure on campus. By way of example, we want to draw your attention to the intellectual heart of UMB: Healey Library. The library should be a beautiful, modern, and comfortable space for intellectual engagement. But right now, it’s a health and safety hazard that is completely unacceptable by any standard, R1 or not. Consider the following:
1) Elevators. All four elevators in the library, which are original to the 50-year-old building, malfunction on a regular basis. Since just this past January, there have been nearly 30 documented incidents of the elevators failing or working incorrectly, with many of those incidents involving entrapments. That’s about once a week. The elevators pose an immediate danger to the health and safety of the FSU librarians and PSU and CSU staff who work in the building, as well as students, faculty, and members of the public who use the space. While many people are now opting to use the stairs, many others do not have that option, whether due to health conditions, disabilities, or the nature of their jobs—e.g., needing to transport book carts between floors. Some who have been trapped in the elevators have had panic attacks; others have waited more than an hour to be released from the entrapments. Anyone who has taught in the lower level of the library knows that due to the elevators, students are regularly late to class through no fault of their own. The highest levels of the Administration promised in 2023 to fix these broken elevators, and yet here we are. They urgently need to be replaced.
2) HVAC. Like the elevators, the HVAC system is ancient and failing. Ventilation is poor in many areas. Librarian and staff office temperatures are frequently in the high 70s/low 80s, sometimes so warm that people feel ill. The humidity is also far too high in most spaces, which poses a serious risk to the library’s circulating books collection and to our unique and irreplaceable archives and special collections. The faulty HVAC system endangers the human beings and physical library materials in the building, and yet the Administration has not yet acted on the need for a new system.
3) Pests. While pests of various types have been sighted throughout the building over recent years, insects are currently the most common. Library employees have routinely reported cockroaches on various floors, as well as the presence of clothes moths and carpet beetles in one archival storage area. These infestations limit the ability of our librarians, archivists, and staff to support our students and faculty. In the storage area with moths and carpet beetles, for example, the carpet will need to be removed and replaced—a project that the Administration has been promising to start for more than a year. Yet our understanding is that different Admin units are fighting over who will have to pay for it. Earth to Admin: all the money is coming from the same place—just get it done.
Our Administration, to its credit, has in recent years taken on big projects. They’ve built new dorms, reorganized the colleges to be more financially stable and intuitive, redone the entire UMB website, and made a nice green quad. While each project was messy, hard to do, and had its critics, each also, in the end, resulted in a better university. Which begs the question: amid all these much-needed improvements to our campus, when will the Administration invest in Healey Library and why have they not done so already? Safe working conditions are a contractual right (see Article 19.1 of the FSU contract) and a moral responsibility. Of course, if the Administration made all these much-needed repairs, we would merely have a safe, functioning workspace, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for anything resembling an R1-quality library.
While Healey Library has not been a priority for the Administration, it is a priority for us. We are coordinating on this with student leaders in Undergraduate Student Government, Faculty Council, as well as our friends in the CSU, PSU, and GEO. We call on the Administration to renovate our library. It is filled with dedicated educators, staff, and learners who make Healey Library the academic engine of the campus. Let’s honor that. Let’s make the library beautiful. But first: let’s make it safe, and let’s do that without delay.
Stay tuned this semester for updates on FSU’s support of Healey Library.
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.