UMass Boston's Fall Convocation: This Is Clearly a Pivotal Moment

Highlights from Provost Borg's 2024 fall convocation speech.

UMass Boston’s fall convocation is always a joyful event. The community comes together to celebrate the start of a new academic year, highlight our achievements and bask in the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes from watching our Supreme Leaders in full academic regalia, practicing their snake oil selling skills.

Every convocation brings with it a speech by our illustrious Provost Borg that has so far provided ample material for the Flickering Beacon: The unforgettable “inherent WHITENESS” speech of 2021 that made more than a few jaws drop, and his practically identical 2022 and 2023 speeches. What will he bring us this time?

We know the Provost is an avid reader of the Flickering Beacon. We also know that he doesn’t like us very much (which makes happy beyond belief), but we are happy that he at least listen to us: Instead of replicating his 2022 and 2023 speech one more time, he actually changed it quite a bit. We are satisfied with that, as we know that his software, deemed by our readers to be far inferior to ChatGPT, does not allow him a whole wide range of self-expression. Let us see what he came up with this time:

Video highlights with time stamps:

1. [1:11] The start of a new academic year is always exhilarating. I say it every year, but this year it’s especially true with our glorious strategic plan that I keep mentioning ad nauseam while repeatedly looking at the Chancellor of color for approval. It was crafted through a broad and deep campus-wide governance (and by that I mean that it was single-handedly crafted by me and a small number of my loyal minions and was delivered to the campus community as a given, while ignoring their feedback).

2. [2:07] We finally managed to pull off the stunningly meh quad, and it only fell apart once! If I call it beautiful over and over again, maybe we will start believing it.

3. [2:50] This is clearly a pivotal moment. I have to say it every time because "pivotal moment” is defined by me standing on this stage pretending to care.

4. [3:00] We move into the future with renewed dedication to holistic student success. I say it every year but I still have no idea what “holistic student success” means, even after saying it thousands of times. All I know is that it still does not include a proper math placement mechanism. We need all hands on deck as we increase successful pathways to and through UMass Boston, and by that I mean increase the number of students who fail repeatedly due to my insistence on keeping the math placement test unproctored while blaming the faculty for the high failure rates. Holistic student success also means decolonizing rigor, competence and learning.

5. [3:44] As what was once a a semi-respectable public research university, we must focus our research exclusively on the four grand Scholarly Challenges which are the only areas of research we allow on this public research university from now on: Climate equity, health equity, educational equity and social justice equity. Want to produce scientific or quantitative research or engage in classical liberal arts scholarship? Go suck an egg and see how far you get when we take all your resources away from you.

6. [5:00] Now, let me honor our newly tenured and promoted colleagues. It gives me immense pleasure to congratulate you. You mean so much to the University and to me personally even though I could not pick any of you out of a crowd. I am certainly going to continue to ignore your emails and refuse to meet with you.

7. [6:55] Let me also honor our 32 newly hired faculty colleagues. Nothing exemplified our strategic priorities like this list: Even though the College of Science and Math (CSM) is the second largest college student-wise, soon to become the largest, only four out of the 32 new faculty hires are from CSM. Serves you right for not aligning with our sacred Scholarly Challenges, science geeks! We will continue to siphon resources away from you until you comply. And also after you comply.

8. [7:35] Finally, non-tenure track faculty, please stand and be recognized. This is the only time of the year anyone in the administration pretends to care about you. We will continue to overwork and underpay you because someone has to fund our ever growing army of associate, assistant and vice provosts and chancellors.

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Great speech as always. But wait… did you notice something was missing? Where is the anti-racism!? The 2021 speech was ALL about equity, social justice and anti-racism. The 2022 and 2023 nearly identical speeches mentioned equity and anti-racism several times, but in this year’s speech - not once did our illustrious Provost Borg say anything about our unwavering commitment to social justice and anti-racism! Could it be that the university is no longer committed to anti-racism after spending so much time talking about nothing else? Or maybe our Leaders finally realized that most of us are not radical activists who only think about anti-racism and equity 24/7? Or maybe, just maybe, could it be that once performative DEI and critical social justice fell out of favor, and the race grifters behind the movement were exposed for the charlatans that the are, our Supreme Leaders decided to quietly and slowly walk back, hoping we wouldn’t notice?

Guess we’ll have to wait for next year’s “pivotal moment” to find out.