By Jim O'Sullivan
News Editor

So far, he has diagnosed the student body president's eye infection, confounded a group of science professors with his grasp of cell division, and hauled discarded couches from a basement warehouse to furnish his office.

And school hasn't started yet for Michael Collins.

UMass-Boston's new chancellor, who took the job in June, knows he'll also face a state just starting to nurse its higher education funding back to health, shaky infrastructure, and the expectations of a newcomer whose immediate predecessor proved a campus favorite.

And dorms.

"They tell me dorms is a four-letter word," Collins said Tuesday, popping a diet Coke moments after 9 a.m. He said it's "way too early" to speculate about student residences on Columbia Point, a hot-button topic with the community whose past champion, Jo-Ann Gora, rode so hard it bucked her out of town, while some wondered how much she had been pressured by the school's board of trustees.

"I've spent a lot of time, but I haven't really had a chance to engage. I want to engage. I want to find out what went on, what are the issues, what's it all about. I really want to open an effective dialogue. There are 90 sides to this story, and I've heard two of them," Collins said, promising an enthusiastic effort to engage the community - a sore point for Gora's detractors.

Collins is equally vague about the fate of the Calf Pasture Pump Station, now operating as a waste-handling facility, but eyed by the university once the Boston Water and Sewer Commission decamps, as it has said it hopes to by early next year. Past administrators have hoped the building, on the National Register of Historic Places, could be converted into a science facility, but Collins, who has toured it, said he's uncertain.

"I know that was a stated hope," he told the Reporter. "I wouldn't say it's mine."

Internally, Collins has elevated some people from outside the institution to key fundraising posts - an area he said has suffered under past regimes - and raised longtime athletic director Charlie Titus to a vice chancellorship.

Collins's hiring came during a blizzard of public opinion wary of a selection process that outed some candidates who had relied on secrecy, and was infested with charges and countercharges about racial favoritism. And Collins was hired over popular campus sentiment that the interim chancellor, J. Keith Motley, should stay put.

Some quick shuffling in late May paved Motley's path to a vice presidency over the five-campus UMass system, and landed Collins in the top seat on Columbia Point.

In the interim, which he called his own semester of "summer school," Collins said Motley has been supportive.

"I think the greatest gift I've gotten since I've been here is the relationship with Keith," he said. "It's been very encouraging to me the support I've gotten from him."

Meanwhile, on campus at least, the wounds inflicted by the protracted chancellor controversy appear to have begun healing.

"The students had a great relationship with Dr. Motley, and we were sad to see him go," said Erica Mena, the student body president and a senior from Somerville, adding that Motley had told her he was "excited" about his successor's progress. "I think anyone who was feeling upset about the decision would have to at least trust Dr. Motley's assessment of Dr. Collins."

And it was Mena who sat down with Collins last week - administration leader to student leader - in his third-floor Quinn Building office, appointed with furniture Collins salvaged from the warehouse to which it had been exiled when University President Jack Wilson switched offices.

"I went up to meet with him last week, and I thought I just had allergies, severe allergies, but he took one look at me and told me I had conjunctivitis, and he sent me down to Health Services," Mena said, laughing.

Relating the story during the Reporter interview, Collins turned to university spokesman Ed Hayward, and said, "You know, the really sad part about all this is that you don't get to see what I do best: help sick people."

Collins is an M.D., recently a clinical professor of internal medicine, and the former CEO of the Caritas Christi Health Care System, New England's second-largest health care system, which he led from 1994 to 2004.

While accounts of Collins's departure from Caritas vary, most hold that he was forced out by Archbishop Sean O'Malley. Collins said, "The only thing I'm willing to say about that is that I resigned."

A Walpole native, Collins also served as president of St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Brighton from 1994 until 2001. The Holy Cross graduate is the second cousin of Reporter Publisher Edward W. Forry.

He called on his biology training this summer when he sat down with a group of professors and started talking about one's research into miosis, a form of cell division. As Collins recalled, he stymied the roundtable with his pointed questions into whether the professor who was researching the process believed it occurred in the nuclear membrane of a cell, or in its cytoplasm.

That hands-on approach, Collins said, will shoot through his tenure, and an effort to further the school's ballyhooed "urban mission," which he sees extending to the crowds drawn by academic speakers and sports teams. Athletics, Collins said, could help the school bolster its "campus community" feel and, while he doesn't plan to call for pitching changes or push for a zone defense, "I will probably have a comment if we lost 10 games in a row. You know, what the hell's going on?"