Marty Meehan flunks history with Mount Ida deal

If Marty Meehan ever gets fired from his $614,381.57-a-year job as president of the University of Massachusetts, maybe the lifelong hack can become an historian – NOT!

Mahhty, you may have heard, is in a major controversy for, uh, well, something about buying bust-out Mount Ida College in Newton Center when he should have been spending the money, our taxpayer money, on… something else I guess.

It’s Mahhty vs. the UMass-Boston faculty, and it leaves me with the same feeling I had about the Iran-Iraq war way back when – isn’t there some way they can both lose?

Last week Meehan gave a newspaper interview in which he attempted to put the purchase of the little school on Dedham Street into some kind of historical perspective.

“The Louisiana Purchase was pretty unpopular in the press for the six months afterward,” he said, “but it turned out to be a pretty good deal for the United States of America.”

You don’t say, Mahhty. Hmmmm…. Louisiana Purchase vs. Mount Ida.

Compare and contrast — Mount Ida’s campus is 74 acres, the Louisiana Purchase was 828,000 square miles. Mount Ida cost $75 million, the Louisiana Purchase, including parts of what became 15 states and two Canadian provinces, was $3.75 million (in 1803 dollars).

If Mount Ida is the 21st century Louisiana Purchase, then Meehan must be the modern… Thomas Jefferson. Again, the similarities between the two statesmen are uncanny – Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, Mahhty drafted a four-term limit pledge, which he promptly broke.

Seriously, though, it’s hard to care about this academic squabble, unless maybe you’re on the faculty of UMass Boston, in which case you have a right to be more than somewhat irritated. The hacks use UMass Boston as nothing more than a dumping ground for unemployable payroll patriots, which, come to think of it, is what they also use all the other campuses in the system for.

Check out the comptroller’s payroll for UMass. Mahhty is only the fourth highest paid employee. Altogether, UMass has 48 people making over $322,000 a year. It’s a bigger hackerama than the state judiciary. State Police F Troop is jealous of the money the UMass hacks are grabbing.

And UMass Boston is ground zero for the academic hackerama, because of its convenient location. Look at all the hires there over the past few years – an ex-state senator, an ex-Boston School Committee member, a former mayor of Fall River, various Deval Patrick and Democrat State Committee coatholders, a “policy adviser” to Hold-It Healey etc. etc.

And at the same time as this hack hiring spree, UMass Boston was laying off janitors.

Here’s a typical UMass Boston hire – Tom Sannicandro, ex-state rep from Ashland. He originally dreamed of a golden parachute at Bridgewater State as “vice president for external affairs,” succeeding an ex-aide to the late Cong. Joe Moakley who now makes $232,500 a year as president of the college, I mean university.

Competition for that Bridgewater hack job was stiff – another state rep, a state senator and a Deval Patrick layabout were all finalists. So they arranged for Sannicandro to get some phony-baloney job at UMass Boston for $165,000 a year. He’s one year into his three top years for pension purposes. By 2020, Sannicandro will be 64, and eligible for 80 percent of $165,000.

Ain’t life grand?

These phony jobs are everywhere in the whole system, it’s just more out in the open at UMass Boston. If you have a real job at Columbia Point, with real tasks and duties, it’s in your face. No wonder the UMass Boston faculty is angry about the Louisiana Purchase of 2018.

But it’s not only UMass. It’s all the other public colleges, which are now universities. You would need a Lewis & Clark expedition to ferret out all the hacks they’ve handed six-figure do-nothing jobs to. There’s one guy, Vincent Pedone, an ex-rep from Worcester, not exactly the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, who’s making $188,000 a year as “executive director” of some college council or something.

Then there’s Salem State, formerly run by the first cousin of a both a corrupt ex-Congressman and a corrupt state senate president, all of them named Harrington. The new president is John Keenan, who used to be… a state rep.

Another nationwide search!

Salem State just had its graduation ceremonies weekend before last. The commencement speaker was Brian “McGiggity” McGrory, the editor of the Boston Globe. He spoke a day or so before he was accused of sending sexually inappropriate texts to a female reporter 17 years his junior.

No word on whether McGiggity advised the Class of 2018 to never, ever inquire of an underling what she wears while she’s writing. But an even better tip to the kids would have been to forget about getting a job, and concentrate on wedging their snouts in the public-college trough. It beats working.

One final question: who do you think will end up on the UMass Boston payroll first?

Brian McGiggity, Kevin Cullen or Stanley Rosenberg.