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"You have earned this," Gov. Deval Patrick declared Wednesday as he signed a bill granting Salem State and five other state colleges university status.
Indeed, the bill is a tribute to the hard work of many on and off campus who labored over many years to elevate the status of the state institutions of higher education in Salem, Bridgewater, Framingham, Fitchburg, Westfield and Worcester. While there will be no immediate change in the mission of these campuses, university status will allow them to gradually expand their programs and better serve the regions in which they are located.
Senate Majority Leader Fred Berry, D-Peabody, was an early convert, and as more than one speaker noted during Wednesday's ceremony on the Grand Staircase at the Statehouse, proved instrumental in pushing the legislation through in the face of other pressing issues awaiting action as the session draws to a close.
Berry, like other members of leadership, rightly fear the criticism likely to come the Legislature's way should it fail to act on several critical issues like casino gambling when the current session ends at midnight Saturday. But the fact is that there was no bill as critical to the future of the North Shore as this one.
"The whole community is lifted," Charles Desmond, a Danvers resident who chairs the state's Board of Higher Education, noted in an interview just prior to the signing ceremony. Business groups ranging from the Salem Partnership to the North Shore Chamber of Commerce had gone on record in support of university status out of a belief that it will improve the quality of the region's workforce and boost the fortunes of institutions like the Bertolon School of Business and Enterprise Center located on the school's Central Campus.
While Salem State's current president, Patricia Meservey, played a key role in pushing the bill past the finish line, she would be the first to acknowledge the debt owed her immediate predecessor, Nancy Harrington. It was Harrington — appropriately seated front and center in the audience Wednesday — who mended the rift that had developed between the college and its South Salem neighborhood and got the entire community behind the effort to make Salem State a university. (It was also Harrington who resisted the suggestion that Salem be made part of the UMass system, insisting that her school be allowed to stand on its own. We like the idea of having a Salem State University, with its own president and board of trustees, rather than a UMass Salem whose budget, operations and mission would be dictated by officials in Amherst.)
There was a large delegation from the North Shore at the Statehouse Wednesday anxious to see Patrick put his pen to the document declaring their school a university.
And Desmond, during his brief remarks, said there was plenty of reason to celebrate.
"You are eyewitnesses to history today," he declared.
It will be official in 90 days: The institution founded as the Salem Normal School on Sept. 14, 1854 for "young ladies who wish to prepare themselves for teaching," becomes Salem State University.
