Opinion: Why We Have No Confidence in Chancellor Javier Reyes

by Chapter Board members of UMass Amhert’s Professional Staff Union

Chancellor Javier Reyes has brought unbroken turbulence to the University of Massachusetts Amherst ever since arriving on campus in July 2023. No sector of UMass Amherst—students, faculty, staff, or the broader Amherst community—has been left untouched by Reyes’s tactics, and we have watched with growing concern as Reyes has steered the Commonwealth’s flagship public institution into ever more dangerous waters. 

We, the undersigned Chapter Board members of Amhert’s Professional Staff Union, have taken the unprecedented step of passing a vote of no confidence in Javier Reyes for three general reasons, to be detailed below:

1. Reyes has eroded the ability of UMass Amherst staff to support and carry out the university’s educational mission; 
2. Reyes has proven unwilling and unable to work with a unionized labor force; 
3. Reyes has engineered an on-campus climate of fear and mistrust that can only impoverish the well-being of the entire community.

Read The Boston Globe’s report of the no confidence vote.

We are not simply drones who punch in and punch out. Chancellors come and go, but we are the ones who make UMass Amherst work every day, on every level, year in and year out—supporting our students’ mental health, guiding them through their academic careers, and keeping the dining halls filled with delicious, healthy, award-winning food. We no longer believe that UMass Amherst can thrive under Reyes’s leadership, and we believe that it is our collective responsibility to protect our students and our educational institution from further harm by detailing Reyes’s failings and calling for a member-wide vote of no confidence in his leadership.

To that end, we believe that:

Chancellor Reyes has eroded the ability of UMass Amherst staff to support and carry out the university’s educational mission.

• Chancellor Reyes is demanding that our final year-three cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) move to a merit-based system—which means that most of our members will lose approximately half their COLA.
  • COLA is set by the governor—not by Chancellor Reyes—and its sole purpose is to help our salaries keep pace with inflation. It is not a raise. But if Reyes takes your COLA away, it is a pay cut. Chancellor Reyes is demanding that we replace our January 2027 COLA with “merit pay,” a system that would cut most members’ COLA effectively in half and allow a select few favorites to receive significantly more. This is a wage inequality proposal.

○ Tying our January 2027 COLA to merit-based supervisor evaluations will encourage favoritism, torpedo morale, and poison many of our working relationships with our friends, colleagues, and workmates. We are already hearing reports of major problems with the administration’s implementation of merit with the faculty on our campus—paycheck mistakes that will take weeks to fix, and plenty of strife and hurt feelings.

○ Chancellor Reyes knows that too many UMass Amherst staff suffer from food insecurity (which is why he’s so proud of the food pantry on campus), have trouble affording rent or a mortgage, are delaying medical care, and need to work second or third jobs on top of our full-time UMass jobs. How can we give students our best under these conditions?

○ Chancellor Reyes is ignoring the university’s own Thematic Report: Research and Creative Activity, part of its larger 2024–34 strategic plan, which highlights “insufficient numbers of staff (and, in some cases, staff that are inadequately mentored or trained) to support all aspects of sponsored research” as the institution’s greatest weakness. The report furthermore notes that “inadequate career ladders for staff mean that experienced staff members leave units to pursue other opportunities, draining units of their knowledge and expertise,” and that “understaffed centers and institutes struggle to collaborate and compete for resources and limited visibility. Many centers remain isolated, and their leadership lacks the diversity present on campus.”

• Chancellor Reyes has demanded clawbacks to our Performance Management Plan system that would effectively result in every PSU member being put on permanent probation. At the same time, he has directed his bargaining team to reject our proposals that would increase protections for our members most likely to face discrimination.
• Chancellor Reyes is not committed to Amherst, and is already out looking for his next job as reported by The Boston Globe—meanwhile, his staff stay here for decades, suffering poor conditions because we are committed to our university. 
• Under Chancellor Reyes’s administration, UMass Amherst has slipped in academic rank, from 26th among top public universities in the U.S. News and World Report to 29th, but was ranked 6th by the New York Times as one of the most likely to arrest its students.
• Chancellor Reyes’s administration shuttered the Accessible Workplace office, removing access to experts who support those employees needing legally protected accommodations in order to succeed in the workplace.

Chancellor Reyes has proven unwilling and unable to work with a unionized labor force.

• Chancellor Reyes has drawn out bargaining the 2024–2027 contract for 17 months, as of this writing—which means we’re only 1.5 years away from our next contract negotiations. We have no confidence that his behavior will change next time we meet his team at the bargaining table. This coming Wednesday, November 12, we will be 500 days without a contract.
• During this round of bargaining, we have had to file three charges of bad-faith bargaining with the Department of Labor Relations against Chancellor Reyes’s team.  
• Chancellor Reyes has weaponized labor law at nearly every campus bargaining table by declaring or threatening to declare impasse in order to circumvent bargaining, impose takebacks without an agreement, and avoid substantively responding to or engaging with union proposals.
• Chancellor Reyes has a strong anti-union track record: as chancellor of the University of Illinois Chicago, Reyes drove the faculty union to strike—and he lost that fight, at a huge cost in time, taxpayer dollars, and trust between the faculty and upper administration.
• Chancellor Reyes has refused to meet with PSU at every turn, ever since his tenure began—despite repeated invitations to engage with us over the course of his term.
• Chancellor Reyes has already lost the support of every constituency (faculty, graduate students, and undergrads) on campus—other than staff.
  • In response to his disastrous and violent handling of the May 7 and 8, 2024 student protest of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, the Faculty Senate, the Student Government Association, and the Graduate Employee Organization all voted no confidence in Chancellor Reyes’s leadership. 

Chancellor Reyes has engineered an on-campus climate of fear and mistrust that can only impoverish the well-being of the entire community.

• Chancellor Reyes spent more than $100,000 taxpayer dollars to arrest student and faculty protestors in May of 2024…and then $446,000 more on an external report to excuse his behavior.
  • The widespread outrage directed at Chancellor Reyes’s flawed judgement resulted not only in votes of no confidence, but condemnation by PSU, the ACLU of Massachusetts, the MTA, and the Western Mass Area Labor Federation. The 2024 commencement speaker, writer Colson Whitehead, canceled his commencement speech, calling Chancellor Reyes’s action “a shameful act,” as reported by The New York Times.

○ The external report that Chancellor Reyes commissioned, while noting that it was legal for Reyes to call out the police, also finds that “some experienced officers within UMPD did not share the Chancellor’s dire safety assessment” of the protest, that “some senior administrators acknowledged having been surprised by the size and scope/intensity of the police operation,” and worried “about lasting damage to the students’ relationship with campus authorities.” The report concludes that “the approach taken by the Chancellor was marked by a certain amount of inflexibility” and that “we believe a more flexible and deliberative approach would probably have led to consideration of other paths, where the mission to protect the welfare of students could still have been upheld, and with fewer (perhaps far fewer) students or faculty members having to endure the harrowing experience of facing a large and intimidating police operation to disperse the crowd and dismantle the May 7 Encampment, followed by arrest, handcuffing, detention, and criminal charges.”

• Chancellor Reyes tried to seek felony charges against student activist leaders, a suppression of free speech that sets a terrible precedent for the future of free speech and protest at UMass Amherst. 

For all of the above reasons, we believe that Chancellor Reyes has ably demonstrated that he is not fit to successfully lead the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship institution of public higher education in our commonwealth state. 

We therefore endorse a vote of No Confidence in his leadership.

We will be holding a member-wide vote of no confidence on December 3–4; details will follow.

Andrew Gorry, co-chair
Nellie Taylor, co-chair
Dan Cannity, recording secretary
Jennifer Shiao, treasurer
Hannah Bernhard, at-large chapter board member
Emmy Cooper, membership chair
Tyler Bradley, education chair
Aliza Micelotta, organizing chair
Daegan Miller, communications chair
Carley Paleologopoulos, delegate council chair
Santiago Vidales, diversity, equity, and inclusion chair