Built on a former garbage dump jutting into Dorchester Bay, the University of Massachusetts at Boston is a place long accustomed to being trashed.
Now a half-century old, it was never given dormitories and initially was forced to accept anyone who applied. Its central building complex was so poorly constructed that it’s collapsing from underneath and will be partly torn down. All outside doors faced away from the water so that nobody had to smell the polluted harbor surrounding it.
But now, with the Massachusetts capital’s surprise choice as the U.S. nominee to host the 2024 Summer Olympic Games—based largely on a sales job linked to the state’s wealth of college campuses—visions of transformation already under way at UMass-Boston are now burning even brighter.
The institution opened in 1965, moved to its Columbia Point location in 1974 as a single red-brick complex perched over a parking garage, and absorbed Boston State College in 1982. It’s now in the midst of a building boom, helped by its status as the city’s only public university. Enrollment has reached 17,000, with student demand putting its admission standards on a par with the rest of the UMass system. Its blossoming research portfolio now exceeds $60-million annually, within the top 200 nationwide.
Long overshadowed by the public flagship at Amherst, UMass-Boston is “the little brother who’s grown up,” the campus’s ebullient chancellor, J. Keith Motley, said from his office near an abandoned shopping mall and convention center he ordered purchased in 2010. Nine years from now, that lot could be the site of the main Olympic village, with enough dormitories to house 16,000 athletes and coaches.
And with Boston’s Olympic organizers predicting that university campuses could make up three-fourths of the sporting venues, several other institutions are eyeing pieces of the action. Harvard and Tufts Universities are among those hoping to be the site of the Olympic swimming facility, one of the biggest construction projects after the main stadium and athlete village.
Smaller ambitions include field hockey at Harvard; archery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and rugby, field hockey, and handball at Boston University. UMass-Lowell could host boxing and rowing along the Merrimac River. And dormitories throughout the region would be in demand for a list of nonathlete needs, including a proposed media center at Northeastern University.
While strong public majorities often root for their cities to host the Olympics, Boston remains torn. Polls have shown just a bare majority of local residents favoring the bid, accompanied by large reservations about the possible costs.
It’s a different story, however, among local university leaders. Where others see pitfalls, they see opportunities to show civic leadership, to provide students and researchers with unique educational experiences—and, while they’re at it, to advance their public-relations and recruiting campaigns and get help with construction projects.
Lofty Ideals, High Costs
Boston was considered a long shot just to win the U.S. nomination, given strong proposals from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Its bid organizers, a group calling itself Boston 2024, won last month with a presentation to the U.S. Olympic Committee that emphasized low costs and a world-renowned network of universities with readily available housing, athletic venues, and young volunteers.
The four co-chairs of a “College and University Engagement Committee” formed by Boston 2024—representing Harvard, MIT, Bentley University, and the UMass system—helped make that case. Their leading voice is Bentley’s president, Gloria C. Larson, a former state secretary for economic affairs and friend of John F. Fish, the local construction-industry magnate serving as chairman of Boston 2024.
Ms. Larson waxes emotional on why a Boston Olympics would make so much sense. The region is filled with former Olympic athletes and eager students fluent in dozens of foreign languages. Boston could be a model for “a better, peaceful world through broad global youth engagement.” And the Olympics could act as a recruitment ad for foreign students. Bentley now attracts about 15 percent of its undergraduates from overseas. “I’d be happy if that number rose,” Ms. Larson said.
Others deliver similar messages, if in more measured tones. Universities “are champions of the intellectual and physical human endeavor,” said Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern. “The Olympics do the same.” Anthony P. Monaco, president of Tufts, said he sees an Olympics in Boston as an opportunity to encourage civic-minded attitudes among youths.
A key element of the Boston bid is a promise—like much of the initial bid, not yet fleshed out—to try to help educate the world’s former Olympic athletes. Statistics show half of them eventually fall into poverty after dedicating their youth to sport, Ms. Larson said. Among the Boston 2024 selling points, “that gives me more goose bumps than any else,” she said.
To opponents—many of them experts based on Massachusetts campuses—such talk is cheap. Lavish recent games in Russia and China led the International Olympic Committee last year to issue a report emphasizing its determination to be more frugal, a priority that Boston 2024 aimed to reflect in its bid. Much of the Olympic housing expected at Columbia Point would be portable units, available for relocation as needed elsewhere in the city.
But even a spartan bid is a costly one. The operating budget published by Boston 2024 totals $4.7-billion, accompanied by $5.2-billion in state-financed transportation costs. Yet overall revenue for the London Olympics in 2012 was only $3.3-billion, said one analyst, Andrew S. Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College and author of Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup. He and other critics count another $4-billion in operating costs for Boston, then anticipate cost overruns routinely experienced by past Olympic hosts.
“We have a history of these things getting away from people,” said another critic, Victor A. Matheson, a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross.
As to whether the Games can be economic kick-starters, there are precedents either way. Past Olympics in Los Angeles and Barcelona proved financially profitable for their regions. Many others simply overspent.
‘A Pretty Clear Calculus’
Regardless, it’s easy for Boston-area universities to be boosters, knowing they will not be held responsible for covering the bills, said Christopher S. Dempsey, a management consultant and former assistant state secretary of transportation now serving as co-chair of No Boston Olympics, the main organized opposition group.
“They’re not over-promising in any way,” Mr. Dempsey said of the area’s universities. “They see the possibility of facility upgrades, so that’s a pretty clear calculus for them.”
In Atlanta, the most recent American city to host a Summer Olympic Games, it wasn’t that simple. In that case, back in 1996, the Georgia Institute of Technology hosted both the athlete village and the swimming facility. For the housing, the Olympic organizers paid about $20-million while Georgia Tech contributed about $150-million, said G. Wayne Clough, the university’s president at the time. Georgia Tech spent an additional $80-million on the pool, he said.
Both were costly and led to increased student fees. But both made sense for Georgia Tech in the long run, Mr. Clough said. The dorms were “first-rate and really set the standard for residential halls, where every student has their own room,” he said. And the swimming pool became the focal point of one of the best student recreation centers in the country, he said.
The university did try to get publicity out of the host role, but Olympic rules about advertising largely thwarted that, Mr. Clough said. Even a university logo on the bottom of the pool had to be covered up.
“Over all it was good for Georgia Tech,” he said of the experience. But he cautioned Boston-area universities, “Don’t go into it with unrealistic expectations.”
UMass-Boston’s Mr. Motley is well aware. He was one of five Boston-area officials who made presentations at the U.S. Olympic Committee meeting last month in California where Boston was chosen as the U.S. nominee to compete against such likely aspirants as France, Germany, Italy, Qatar, and South Africa in the final vote, scheduled for 2017.
His endorsement was a strategic move to get UMass-Boston on the inside track, Mr. Motley said, rather than leave his campus “on the outside, trying to figure out how to get into the middle of that conversation.”
Among UMass-Boston students, there’s clearly enthusiasm for serving as Olympic host, said Ignacio J. Chaparro, a senior political-science major serving as president of the Undergraduate Student Government. The students nevertheless plan to watch out for any signs that the event might harm them through its cost, hassle, or impact on UMass-Boston’s mission as an urban institution, Mr. Chaparro said.
“It’s an honor, it’s exciting, but let’s also consider the factors that are in play,” he said.
Beyond the UMass campus, Boston does need the additional housing. Prodded by complaints about student behavior in residential neighborhoods and pricing pressure on low-income families, Mayor Marty Walsh issued a report last year setting a goal of building 16,000 new undergraduate-student dormitory beds citywide by 2030. Housing experts are uncertain, however, whether modular structures from a venue like an Olympic village would fit the necessary locations.
At Columbia Point, where the surrounding harbor is now cleaned and helps to invite rather than repel, Mr. Motley is leading UMass-Boston in the construction of several major new facilities, including a centerpiece $180-million science-research complex that recently opened. The nearby John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum will soon be joined on the peninsula by the just-completed Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate.
At most, however, UMass-Boston anticipates needing only 5,000 student beds to complete its move to becoming a residential institution, Mr. Motley said. And the university is already taking bids on the first 1,000 without worrying about whether they meet the specifications required by the Olympics. His negotiating position is helped by the fact that, among Boston 2024’s likely venues, there’s no obvious second choice for siting the athlete village.
“If this comes true in the way that we’re talking about,” Mr. Motley said of the 2024 bid, “then it helps build on our agenda.”
But “it’s not our dream,” he added, “because we had a dream long before the Olympics came.”
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.
