Tag: Mount Ida College

If only Donald Trump were party to the deal to shut down Mount Ida College and turn the 74-acre campus over to the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Healey also announced an investigation into Mount Ida president Barry Brown, the board of trustees, and assorted Mount Ida officials as to whether they breached their fiduciary duties. Brown, a longtime professor at Suffolk Law School, was appointed provost of that university in 2008 and became acting president in 2010. He took the Mount Ida job in 2012. After Brown and Jason Potts, Mount Ida’s chief financial officer, ducked the Senate hearing on Wednesday, Senator Kathleen O’Connor Ives, the chair of the committee, threatened to subpoena them. But to borrow from Macbeth, the shock expressed in the aftermath of this deal so far boils down to “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” According to Carmin Reiss, the chair of Mount Ida’s board of trustees, the school’s administrators knew in 2017 that they were at the financial “point of no return.” That didn’t stop Mount Ida from admitting students or taking their money. “We’re confident we’ll do just fine in that review,” she said after the Senate hearing. While Mount Ida deserves scrutiny, no one should forget the other party to this deal: UMass. What happened at Mount Ida is unconscionable. But UMass and the state’s top political leaders didn’t try to stop it.