Students and parents of Mount Ida College railed against the school's abrupt decision to close at a public meeting of the state's Board of Higher Education yesterday. The Newton school announced earlier this month that its campus will be acquired by UMass Amherst and that its 280 faculty and staff members will be laid off.
Paul Reville, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and former state Secretary of Education, weighed in on Boston Public Radio.
"[Mount Ida College] should have presented a plan to the Commonwealth that they were planning to close out and these students are going to be left high and dry. But they didn't," Reville said.
"What the consequences for that are, I don't know," he added.
Reville said that had Mount Ida expressed its intentions to close to the state Board of Education, a plan could have been put in place to mitigate the impact on current students.
"Had that come forward, I think the due diligence on the part of the Commonwealth would have been to say: 'Well, is there some way to solve this?'" Reville said.
