Philip Johnston
Title: Chairman, UMass Building Authority Board of Directors
Age: 69
Experience: 45 years
Philip Johnston was recently selected as the UMass Building Authority’s chairman of the board, which the UMass-Amherst graduate said feels like “coming full circle.” Johnston, a former state representative, started his own public affairs advisory firm after a long career in state and federal government. He worked on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and went on to serve as Secretary of Human Services in the commonwealth under former Gov. Michael Dukakis. Later, former President Bill Clinton appointed him as the New England Administrator for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services before being elected twice to chair the Massachusetts Democratic Party. More recently, President Barack Obama selected him for the Commission of White House Fellows.
Q: What are your primary responsibilities as chairman of the board?
A: I was appointed by Gov. Patrick to this particular board about five years ago. For about three years I’ve been secretary treasurer. We have a terrific, overworked but under-personed staff. We have something like 11 million square feet of space total to oversee. We have $3.2 billion in construction money out there that’s either in the ground or about to get into the ground. We’re putting over a billion dollars into the Amherst campus alone. So that money needs to get into the ground in as efficient and effective a way as possible, serving the taxpayers and the students. The board has a fiduciary responsibility, as all boards do, to make sure that those things happen. We have our own bonding authority, but we also work with the commonwealth and Deval Patrick and his administration and the Legislature have been very supportive of expansion and construction on these five campuses. It’s been transformative over the past five years, since the first new [dormitory] on the Lowell campus in 30 years has been built. We just did a $400 million research and teaching facility at the medical school. The medical school is now ranked number seven in primary care in the country. We want to be sure we’re keeping up with the building needs of the students.
Q: Obviously, UMass-Boston has been in the news lately starting construction on a $113 million academic building, as well as plans for new student housing. What are your top priorities for construction in the university system?
A: I think research facilities are important, but classroom space continues to be an issue in some of the campuses, at Dartmouth and Boston. I think we all have a wish list. On the Amherst campus, the iconic building is the old chapel right on the campus pond next to the old student union and the newer campus center. [The chapel] has been boarded up for about 20 years, which is a scandal. Chancellor Subbaswamy, who is the relatively new chancellor there … has as his top priority to reopen that old chapel, which will cost $20 million. I think shame on us if we don’t do it. It’s like Widener Library in Harvard Yard, if that were boarded up for 20 years, it just wouldn’t have happened at a private university. The old pumping station on the UMass-Boston campus is a beautiful old Victorian building that is not operating. Many people including myself would like to see the [John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies] there and maybe have a center for human rights there named for Robert Kennedy maybe; I’m a big fan of Bobby. We already have Teddy and JFK there on the point.
Q: What are the challenges of your new post as the building authority chairman?
A: I only do things like this where the organization’s values match my own values. UMass does that. Politics are at the heart of it because you have all kinds of competition for public dollars, and they’re all legitimate, whether they’re infrastructure needs or health and human services or elementary and secondary school education. But I think there’s a special place for public higher education in the state. We have this history of leading private institutions of higher education. I have two sisters who went to Wellesley, another went to Smith. I have a graduate degree from Harvard, so it’s not like I have any antipathy towards these institutions. But the reality is, the guy that I roomed with at UMass-Amherst who came to this country from Italy when he was 14 and didn’t speak English when we met in high school, he went through the doctorate program at UMass-Amherst. He and I both would not have been able to go to college if it were not for the affordability of UMass-Amherst.
Johnston’s Five Most Influential People:
- Eleanor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- The Kennedy family
- Michael Dukakis
- Deval Patrick
