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I was a bit surprised when Gov. Maura Healey’s office emailed me late last week and asked if I’d like to sit down and talk with the governor.
It’s no secret that I’ve sometimes been a pointed critic of Healey – particularly as far as her hands-off approach when UMass Dartmouth abruptly closed its downtown New Bedford fine arts campus in 2023.
Here’s how one of Google’s ubiquitous AI summaries described my columns from two years ago: “Jack Spillane’s analysis in The New Bedford Light frames the Star Store campus closure as a result of UMass leadership — specifically Chancellor Mark Fuller and President Martin Meehan — orchestrating the exit, while the Healey administration prioritized fiscal calculation over cultural value.”
Well, it’s AI so it’s not exactly precise. I thought Healey had calculated that a downtown New Bedford campus was not worth going to war with the politically powerful Meehan, and his appointee, Fuller. I also knew she thought her hands were tied when Sen. Mark Montigny had zeroed out the Star Store campus budget in order to shut off the endless state payday to its owner, Paul Downey.
Here’s what I wrote then: “Gov. Maura Healey, by her ongoing low profile, seems to have made her position known. She’s not in a rush to take up arms for New Bedford’s fine arts campus.”
Fast forward to this week and Healey had a different opinion. Here’s what she said when I asked her whether any kind of UMass Dartmouth campus, fine arts or otherwise, would ever return to downtown New Bedford.
“I think that… there could be,” she said. Notice her pause in the middle of the statement. Then the governor told me she’d be interested in my thoughts on the issue. Which is a change from the very few public comments she made and her refusal to take a position in favor of saving the Star Store campus when it was actually closing.
Healey made some good points about her overall record on public higher education, that she had increased funding for it in her first term by 40%, that she had made two-year community colleges free, and that she had increased financial assistance for students attending the four-year state colleges and universities.
“I’m a big believer in public education,” she said.
I believe she means that and I applaud her for it.
Healey, of course, also emphasized during our interview what has become the mantra of her re-election campaign, stressing the devastating effects of President Donald Trump’s cutbacks to federal government programming, in this case to science and research programs at colleges and universities.
Then she astonishingly said she knows that whenever you have a college campus somewhere it brings “vibrancy.”
“That’s important to local economies,” she said.
Healey was attempting to explain, I guess, why she sold the downtown New Bedford College of Visual and Performing Arts down the river.
Chancellor Fuller had claimed it would be prohibitively expensive to keep the campus open but former New Bedford Light reporter Colin Hogan demonstrated convincingly that the chancellor’s figures were wildly exaggerated, and based on worst-case scenarios that could have been easily addressed through legislation and practicality.
“It’s about math right now, and what works,” Healey said. “We just put some money into UMass Dartmouth, the renovation of their campus.” Their Dartmouth campus, that is.
When I pointed out to Healey that in the same way that many city residents can’t easily reach medical care in Dartmouth or Fairhaven, they also can’t reach the Dartmouth UMass campus easily, she asked if it helps that she has made the regional buses free.
The free buses have enormously helped low-income people get around in Greater New Bedford for the first time in at least a generation. But it’s not the same as having easy access to a university that was already located in the center city.
“I’m serious, I’ll take a look at it,” she said. “And if there are particular programs… state tax dollars, I’ve got to get an ROI (return on investment) for that.”
Healey said she is trying to get public colleges to create programming that local employers need. She gave the example of marine science as a career where students can earn a living. New Bedford has long had a marine science campus on the South End peninsula.
I know the governor was trying to be practical, but her comments set me to thinking about the recent news that both fine arts and liberal arts programming at UMass Dartmouth could be endangered by the Trump administration’s announcement that it will no longer provide financial assistance to college majors where the graduates are not earning a benchmark liveable wage.
I can’t even explain how bad a precedent that would be. To embark on a system where only expensive private colleges offer fine arts and liberal arts majors would permanently lock out untold numbers of talented working-class youth and others from higher education in the arts.
But just like Healey is now pivoting on a downtown UMass campus, the governor then quickly pivoted on higher education in the arts.
“Totally wrong-headed,” she described the Trump administration’s policy even though she had just finished explaining that she needed a return-on-investment on what kind of schools merited a campus in the city.
Healey said she was a liberal arts graduate herself and that she supports it continuing in state higher education, but her actions two years ago with the CVPA and her comments about ROIs in the meeting with our staff contradict that.
She tried to nuance it.
“That’s a big question,” she said, of whether there will continue to be funding for fine arts and liberal arts at state schools. “Just looking at public higher ed, we absolutely need liberal arts. We need arts education. I think it’s really important to who we are as a country, as a world, and it’s important to our economy as well.”
That’s the right answer, governor. But when the press, not to mention the graduate students at the CVPA, made the same case to you two years ago, you were nowhere to be found.
Healey also said she and Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll have increased funding for arts education in the state budget, but she again reverted to blaming Trump for his cutbacks. “There’s so much there where we have to step up and do right now,” she said.
Look, the closure of the downtown New Bedford fine arts campus was an impossible situation for the governor. She was caught between two powerful political forces — UMass President Marty Meehan and his attempt to make UMass Dartmouth and UMass Boston the same types of largely self-funded research universities as UMass Amherst, and Sen. Montigny’s efforts to permanently wean a politically-connected and savvy landlord off of state subsidies.
She chose to remain silent as scores of graduate students at the downtown campus did not receive the quality of education that they had bargained for, and New Bedford lost a vital economic engine to its downtown. Walk up and down Union Street today and you’ll see one empty storefront after another. That’s one legacy of the departure of the Star Store campus.
Downtown New Bedford needed Maura Healey when the state’s higher education system and its politicians failed it. She didn’t get it done.
Will Healey do better next time? I think she might.
The fact that her office reached out to me as a local guy who knows the city a little speaks well of her. She wanted to know what I thought were the region’s priorities.
But Healey is doing it now in the midst of a political campaign. And she is doing it in the wake of a recent MassINC poll that shows she is underwater in her approval rating, because of the demoralizing increases in the cost of living in Massachusetts.
A MassINC poll last week showed that 45% of Massachusetts voters have an unfavorable view of Healey vs. 39% who have a favorable view. She was particularly weak with male voters, who have trended toward Republican views in recent years even as women have trended Democratic.
So Healey is making the local rounds in an election year. Good for her. An old progressive like me largely agrees with her policies, although as with most, maybe all, politicians, I just wish political concerns did not enter her calculations so often.
The conventional wisdom is that Healey in a Democratic state like Massachusetts is going to have an easy walk to re-election. That may not be true however.
If the Republican nominee is biotech businessman Mike Minogue, that’s a candidate who is said to be worth at least $240 million, and who has already demonstrated he will spend millions of his own money on the campaign. The indications are he’ll try to run as a Charlie Baker-type moderate, which could be a problem for Healey. If the GOP nominee is venture capitalist and former MBTA executive Brian Shortsleeve, she can expect a slightly more conservative opponent, who will probably tack back to the middle in a general election, and who will also no doubt be able to raise enough money to be competitive.
Either way Healey is going to have to bring the progressives back in line while at the same time winning the majority of the moderate vote against either Minogue or Shortsleeve.
That’s why she’s making the rounds in places like New Bedford and taking questions from guys like me right now.
Note from Jack: As I’ve said, the interview with Gov. Maura Healey took place at her office’s request. I’m very happy to do an interview with either Mike Minogue or Brian Shortsleeve should their offices reach out to me.
Jack Spillane is a New Bedford Light columnist and reporter. He can be reached at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
