a 15,000-student campus, and the local news media and public opinion generally favored creating the new Boston campus for the UMass System.
=== 1964–1974: Park Square campus ===
In June 1964, with a $200,000 appropriation, the legislation establishing the University of Massachusetts Boston was signed into law. UMass President John W. Lederle began recruiting freshmen students, faculty, and administrative staff for the fall semester of 1965 (with goals of 1,000 students and 80 faculty members), and appointed his assistant at the Amherst campus, John W. Ryan, as UMass Boston's first chancellor. Ryan recruited tenured faculty members from the Amherst campus to relocate and form the UMass Boston faculty, and appointed Amherst's history professor Paul A. Gagnon and Amherst's provost and biology professor Arthur Gentile to hire the humanities and natural science faculty members respectively.
Serving as the new university's first provost, Gagnon became the most important faculty member in defining the curriculum …
