Dr. Javier Reyes, the incoming chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said he was not looking for just any administrative job in higher education. He was looking for the “right position.”
UMass Amherst had a number of qualities that made coming to the school a “very, very attractive opportunity,” Reyes said during a campus visit with his wife, Maritza, and UMass system president, Marty Meehan.
“To be part of a campus that is setting the frontier in research, that is finding the new and best technologies, that is inspiring artists, arts and humanities, that is important to me and something that I was looking for,” Reyes said. “This university has all those components.”
The UMass Board of Trustees voted unanimously in February to approve Reyes as successor to UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy, who will step down after this school year after 11 years at the helm of the university.
Reyes, 49, comes to UMass from the University of Illinois Chicago, where he is serving as interim provost. He has also held senior management positions at West Virginia University and the University of Arkansas.
Both he and Meehan put a lot of emphasis on the “track record” of UMass.
The school has steadily climbed the national university rankings over the past decade and is now ranked 26th among American public universities, according to US News & World Report.
“We were in a much better position to attract the talent we could from across the country because Chancellor Subbaswamy did a great job bringing the Amherst campus to a much better place,” Meehan said. “By any metric that a university would assess or measure, UMass Amherst has had incredible growth.”
Looking from a distance, Reyes said he watched UMass climb on a path that “hasn’t been matched by public universities in the last 10 years.”
“Now we are in a circle that very few, maybe 30 other public universities, are in,” Reyes said. “We have incredible institutions of higher education and research in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We are part of that group.”
At UMass, Reyes said, there is an opportunity to be an affordable and accessible school, make an impact, and do it all “at scale,” for tens of thousands of students.
“When you look at what’s been happening at UMass Amherst for the last 10 years, that’s the driving force,” he said. “Making sure you have access at scale, excellence at scale, impact at scale.”
Reyes, born and raised in Mexico, will be the university’s first Hispanic chancellor. A UMass committee identified Reyes as the top choice after a seven-month search for Subbaswamy’s replacement.
If there’s one thing UMass should know about Reyes, it’s that she “loves her job, loves the students, loves the community,” Maritza Reyes said of her husband.
“I am very confident that we have the best person possible in Dr. Javier Reyes,” Meehan said. “He comes from very humble origins. He believes in public higher education. He has been to three leading public research universities. And he’s been successful everywhere he’s been. He’s great when you get the best candidate and they agree to come.”
Translated by Damaris Pérez Pizarro
