[26] In the late 1960s, UMass Boston students on average were 23 years old, typically white and male, working part- or full-time, and either married or living with others in an apartment.

[29] The student newspaper, The Mass Media, published its inaugural issue on November 16, 1966, and the Founding Day Convocation for the university was held December 10, 1966.

[33] By early 1967, some younger professors were holding teach-ins and encouraging their male students to burn their draft cards in protest of "American corporate imperialism.

[38] In March 1970, a group of thirty students occupied the chancellor's office after a popular "radical" female professor in the Sociology Department was denied tenure.

[48] In October 1979, a dedication ceremony was held for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on a 10-acre site adjacent to the university campus.

Her tenure was initially marred by an economic downturn in Massachusetts, to which Governor Michael Dukakis responded by ordering all state agencies to cut their budgets in the 1989, 1990, and 1991 fiscal years.

[99] On January 26, 2015, the university opened its first new academic building since the Columbia Point campus was built, a research facility named the Integrated Sciences Complex.

[109] UMass Boston faculty publicly expressed concern that Motley was being scapegoated for the university's budget deficit while Boston City Councilors Tito Jackson and Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts State Senator Linda Dorcena Forry, and Massachusetts State Representative Russell Holmes called upon System President Meehan to reject Motley's resignation.

[108][115] A coalition of UMass Boston administrative staff, faculty, and students formed (called the "Coalition to Save UMB") and issued a report authored by faculty calling on Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker and the Massachusetts General Court to increase state funding to assist the university to service its debt from its campus renewal construction projects and increase capital investments for the university.

[126] On June 20, 2018, UMass System Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Katherine Newman was appointed as the university's interim chancellor.

[127] In September 2018, students moved into UMass Boston's first dormitory,[128] and the university opened the free-standing parking garage adjacent to the Integrated Sciences Complex.

[129] In February 2019, university campus employees protested an administration decision to increase the daily parking fee from $6 to $15 to cover the costs of the garage operation and other expenses.

[131] In May 2019, the Pioneer Institute released a white paper co-authored by former Massachusetts State Representative Gregory W. Sullivan that concluded that Chancellor Keith Motley and other UMass Boston administrators were scapegoated for the 2017 fiscal year $30 million budget deficit and that instead the approval by the System Board of Trustees of an accelerated 5-year capital spending plan in December 2014 and an error to a 5-year campus reserve ratio estimate were the cause of the $26 million in budget reductions implemented by interim Chancellor Barry Mills and that the reductions were made at the direction of the UMass Central Office.

[139] In January 2023, the Manning College of Nursing and Health Sciences received $3 million in federal funding for a home care digital and simulation lab.

[140] In July 2023, UMass Boston and Mass General Brigham announced an agreement to provide $20 million in funding for a workforce pipeline program in the Manning College of Nursing and Health Sciences.

[152] Other proposals to locate the permanent campus near Fenway Park, or South Station and Chinatown, or on golf courses for sale in Newton, were considered but rejected by Chancellor Ryan due to insufficient space or commuting concerns.

The proposal was deeply unpopular among the faculty and students; 1,500 of them subsequently organized a rally in November 1967 on Boston Common demanding a downtown location in Copley Square.

"[37] Chancellor Ryan also opposed the Columbia Point proposal, who before he resigned in February 1968, made a counterproposal for a 15-acre campus south of where John Hancock Tower was being built that the BRA rejected.

[158] In August 1968, after Francis L. Broderick was appointed the university's chancellor, now Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives Robert H. Quinn, Massachusetts Senate Majority Leader Kevin B. Harrington, and State Senator George Kenneally all urged the UMass Board of Trustees to accept the Columbia Point proposal, while Chancellor Broderick asked the board to delay its decision at an October 1968 meeting by one month so that he might be able to deliver a final counterproposal (while another rally at the Massachusetts State House of 2,500 faculty and students still demanded a Copley Square or Park Square location).

In the end, after reviewing the task force's white paper at a meeting in December 1968, the UMass Board of Trustees voted 12 to 4 to accept the Columbia Point proposal.

[173][43] Construction for the Clark Athletic Center (that included an ice hockey arena, swimming pool, and basketball courts) broke ground in 1978 and was completed in 1979.

[177][178][179] Newspaper columnist Charles Pierce summarized the careless and negligent quality of MBM's construction projects unearthed by the Ward Commission's investigation as follows: Besides the Worcester jail with the cells that did not lock, there was the auditorium at Boston State College in which the stage was not visible from a third of the seats and the library at Salem State College in which the walls were not sturdy enough to bear the weight of the books.

At the UMass-Boston campus, ground zero of the scandal, school officials were forced to erect barricades to keep passerby from being brained by the bricks that kept falling off the side of the library.

[182][183] Chunks of concrete had been falling from the garage ceiling since the 1990s, and when Chancellor Collins ordered the closure, 600 spaces had already been lost due to ongoing repairs and rerouting of passenger and vehicular traffic.

Because of the salt water atmosphere and the road salt from vehicles, the steel reinforcing bars embedded in the campus substructure concrete walls and ceiling became severely degraded, and because all of the campus mechanical systems had run conduits through the substructure, many of those systems could not be repaired and the damage was causing outages of the computer, electrical, heat, and air-conditioning equipment.

[188][189] In December 2009, a report prepared for the state government on the 25-year master plan was released outlining future campus development and construction projects.

[212] In October 2020, the Walsh administration released a 174-page climate change adaptation report for the Boston Harbor coastline in Dorchester with a section on Columbia Point and Morrissey Boulevard.

[260][261][262] It includes poet Lloyd Schwartz (who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1994 and co-edited the Library of America's Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters in 2008),[186] and Jill McDonough,[263] translator and Slavic philologist Diana Lewis Burgin,[264] linguist Donaldo Macedo,[265] author Padraig O'Malley,[266] feminist scholar Carol Cohn,[267] economists Julie A. Nelson and Randy Albelda,[268][269] philosophers Lynne Tirrell and Lawrence Blum,[270][271] political scientists Leila Farsakh and Thomas Ferguson,[272][273] psychologist Sharon Lamb,[274] Monet expert Paul Hayes Tucker,[275] biologist Kamaljit S. Bawa,[276] and physicist Benjamin Mollow, discoverer of the Mollow triplet.

[277] Former faculty members include biblical scholar Richard A. Horsley,[278] chemist John Warner,[279] evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden,[280] feminist writers Beverly Smith and Christina Hoff Sommers,[281][282] politician Mary B. Newman (namesake of the Mary B. Newman Award for Academic Excellence),[283] historians Edward Berkowitz,[284][285] James Green,[286] Peter Linebaugh,[287] William Andrew Moffett, Mark Peattie,[288][289] and James Turner,[290][291] literary scholar Carlo L. Golino (who served as the university's chancellor from 1973 to 1978),[18][292] mathematicians Amir Aczel,[293] Victor S. Miller, and Robert Thomas Seeley,[294][295] computer scientist Patrick O'Neil,[296] neurologist M. V. Padma Srivastava,[297] novelists Jaime Clarke,[298] Elizabeth Searle,[299] and Melanie Rae Thon,[300] philosopher Jane Roland Martin,[301] poets Martha Collins and Sabra Loomis,[302][303] political scientists Jalal Alamgir and Kent John Chabotar,[304][305] clinical psychologist David Lisak,[306][307] social psychologist Melanie Joy,[308] and sociologists Benjamin Bolger and Robert Dentler.

[310] The following university-wide institutes and centers are operationally managed by collective leadership teams appointed by the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.