UMass Amherst Staff Votes No Confidence in Chancellor Javier Reyes

Source: UMass Amherst Professional Staff Union

Members of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Professional Staff Union (PSU) overwhelmingly voted no confidence in UMass Amherst’s Chancellor Javier Reyes on December 4, 2025. The vote passed 966 to 59, representing a 94% vote of no confidence.

Members of PSU, whose contract expired 521 days ago, no longer believe that Chancellor Reyes can steer the state’s flagship institution of public higher education to success. One day earlier, the board of UMass Amherst’s University Staff Association (USA) also voted no confidence in Chancellor Reyes—unanimously. Taken together, these are the fourth and fifth no-confidence votes that Reyes has lost since 2024, and join previous such votes passed by UMass Amherst’s Faculty Senate, undergraduate Student Government Association, and Graduate Employee Organization. They further endanger Reyes’s already tenuous standing as chancellor of UMass Amherst.

At issue is the 18-month-long contract negotiation between the UMass administration and the campus’s largest staff union. While the UMass administration’s bargaining team has shown some tentative willingness to negotiate, progress has been fraught with bad-faith bargaining (PSU has had to file three charges with the Department of Labor Relations [DLR] against Chancellor Reyes’s bargaining team) and misinformation on the part of the university’s spokespeople—which is the subject of one of the bad-faith charges. 

“We are 521 days past the expiration of our last contract,” says Nellie Taylor, Amherst co-chair of PSU, which represents professional staff at UMass Amherst and UMass Boston. “Unfortunately, Chancellor Reyes, the principal decision-maker for the Amherst campus, persists in his demand to punish the staff whose job it is to ensure that UMass students get the education they deserve.”

“It is infuriating to watch our colleagues in PSU suffer the same ill treatment that we suffered during our contract negotiations,” says Sheila Gilmour, president of USA, which represents over 800 clerical and technical staff at UMass Amherst. “Our board unanimously passed a no-confidence vote not only because we heard the same lies at that bargaining table, but also because of Chancellor Reyes’s egregious treatment of staff and students outside of bargaining—including attacks on our First Amendment rights, an utter disregard for folks with disabilities, and numerous claims that staff should rely on food pantries and public assistance despite working full time for the university. This is not leadership.”

PSU’s Amherst chapter board, which is the union’s governing institution, already passed a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Reyes’s leadership on Friday, November 7. “We, the undersigned Chapter Board members of Amherst’s Professional Staff Union,” the Chapter Board writes in its list of grievances, “have taken the unprecedented step of passing a vote of no confidence in Javier Reyes for three general reasons.” These reasons are as follows:

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.

With this vote of no confidence, PSU and USA join student and faculty organizations who cast their no-confidence votes in response to Chancellor Reyes’s May 2024 violent crackdown on peaceful Palestine protestors. In the year-and-a-half since, the multi-organization Palestine movement on campus has seen continuing repression from the administration, recently escalating to multiple year-long suspensions of student activists, as well as the cutting of courses on the Middle East and on Arabic language.

But the most recent and pressing concern for PSU staff at UMass Amherst is that Chancellor Reyes, who lives rent-free in a taxpayer-subsidized mansion on campus and will take home $750,000 this year according to the state’s open payroll database, CTHRU, is demanding that PSU staff lose 1.5 percent of their 2027 state-provided cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) to a “merit pay” system that would allow the chancellor to redistribute everyone’s raises to a select few favorites. 

The sole purpose of cost-of-living adjustments is to keep state employees’ salaries in line with inflation. They are not a raise. But if a portion of the COLA was turned into “merit pay,” several employees would have their state-provided raises cut by $750–$1,500 or more for every employee who received a raise above the COLA rate. 

“UMass’s so-called merit proposal represents a shocking misuse of public funds,” says Andrew Gorry, co-chair of the Professional Staff Union. “We already have too many employees facing food insecurity, having trouble affording rent or a mortgage, delaying medical care, and needing to work second or third jobs. Chancellor Reyes needs to stop playing around with our salaries and settle a fair contract with us now.”

On top of this, Chancellor Reyes recently instructed his lead bargainer, Brian Harrington, to trigger his team’s nuclear option by filing for impasse with the DLR, a tool that management can use to circumvent bargaining and unilaterally impose the demands that they couldn’t otherwise win. Until recently, the threat of impasse has rarely been used at UMass in the past, though it is becoming a favorite tool of the Reyes administration. If the DLR agrees with management that negotiations are at an impasse, management could potentially impose their terms unilaterally, depriving employees of their right to bargain, negotiate, or even vote on and approve management’s package of demands. 

“For the sake of the common good, it’s time for UMass Amherst to settle PSU’s contract, giving staff an agreement that shows respect for our time, expertise, and the basic resources we need to support ourselves, our families, and our students,” says Taylor. “Javier Reyes has united the entire campus against him in a little over two years. He has instituted anti-worker and anti-democratic policies and decisions, which are a bad match with the history and values of public higher education in Massachusetts. We all—students, faculty, staff, and the citizens of the commonwealth—deserve better.”

Resources

• The Professional Staff Union at a glance.
• FAQ on common bargaining misconceptions.
• The PSU Chapter Board’s November 7 vote of no confidence in Chancellor Reyes.