 "Photo: Brian Tedder/Collegian")
After having served in the wake of John V. Lombardi's controversial departure, Interim Chancellor Thomas Cole greeted the press on the 10th floor of the Campus Center yesterday with a quip.
"No one is more delighted than I to welcome you," he said before the announcement of the new chancellor.
President Jack Wilson then introduced Dr. Robert C. Holub, who had been approved earlier Monday morning by the University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees after having been recommended to the board by Wilson.
Holub, currently the provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, fielded questions pertaining to university funding, undergraduate education and student safety, among others.
Holub spoke first about public higher education, for which he said he has a "particular passion."
"Public higher education has experienced a steady ascendency," said Holub. "There are more students educated at public universities every year, and the percentage of students who are educated at public universities increases every year."
"Public higher education in my view is the most powerful dimension of the American Dream, which allows individuals with talent and ambition to achieve success no matter where they start in life," said Holub,
Holub said that an investment in public higher education provides - better than private institutions - an opportunity to "alleviate health issues, augment the wealth of the state and even to increase things such as volunteerism."
"Truly, public higher education is the key to a citizenry that is healthy, wealthy and wise," he said.
Holub also spoke about funding, a particularly large issue for the University after the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (PHENOM) brought several hundred UMass students to Boston to lobby for affordable public higher education.
"At the end of the day, it's just as important or more important to use the funding that you have in as effective a manner as possible. My experience is that if you use the funding that you have effectively, that you are going to be able to secure more funding, both private and public funding, more easily," he added. "So I think those kinds of decisions are going to be paramount for me."
When asked what he thought was the primary issue facing the University, Holub was undecided.
"It's difficult for me to say precisely because I haven't been on campus and I haven't spoken with enough people to see what I'm going to have to do," he said. "I can say that in the next year, the most important thing for me will be to put together a good team. There are a number of people in interim positions; I'll need to find people for permanent positions."
Holub said he was unfamiliar with security issues that have arisen in the past after sporting events, but spoke of the importance of preserving student safety.
"Safety on campus of course is a rather large issue, and relates to more than winning championships. It relates to a lot of rather tragic events that have happened on other campuses during the last year or so, and it's something I think leaders of all campuses have to take very seriously," he said.
Addressing concerns that improving UMass as a research institution would take focus away from its undergraduate programs, Holub said he was confident that the two could coexist, and in fact compliment each other.
"I don't think there's an antagonism between great teaching and research," he said. "More often than not, I think that the people that are doing pioneering and cutting-edge work in their fields are better teachers," he said, "because they're very excited about the research and very excited about communicating it to students."
President Wilson said later that "one of the things that impressed me about [Holub] is that when he was at Berkeley he actually increased the contact between senior faculty and undergraduates."
"He facilitated all these undergraduate programs to get students in contact with faculty and into undergraduate research," said Wilson.
Holub said that affordability is another important issue for the University to address in order to improve the quality of the education it provides.
"We don't want students not to be able to come to this campus because they're too poor for this campus," said Holub, adding that the most important way to prevent this from happening is to pay attention to the structure of financial aid.
Holub met with students, faculty and community members at a reception after the press conference, though few students were in attendance.
Most recently a provost and vice chancellor at the University of Tennessee, Holub also spent 27 years at the University of California Berkeley, first as a faculty member in the German department and later holding several administrative positions. In 2003, he was named dean of Berkley's Undergraduate Division of the College of Letters and Sciences.
Holub's specialization is in 19th and 20th century German intellectual, cultural and literary history. He has researched and written on the poet Heinrich Heine, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and social theorist Jürgen Habermas. He holds an undergraduate degree in natural science, two M.A.s in comparative literature and German and a Ph.D. in German. He was born in Neptune, N.J.
Holub will replace Interim Chancellor Thomas Cole, who has filled the position vacated by John V. Lombardi last fall.
S.P. Sullivan can be reached at spsulliv@dailycollegian.com.
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