University of Massachusetts President Jack Wilson on Monday announced that Associate Chancellor Keith Motley has been named interim Chancellor at UMass Boston. Dorchester Reporter publisher Ed Forry was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University at the June 4, 2004 commencement. Below are a portion of his remarks made at the UMass ceremony that morning.

"I hope that those of you hearing these words will pardon my sense of pride, but I expect you will might be surprised to learn that, in the larger world - beyond Kosciuszko Circle and Lower Mills - our Dorchester is not always considered all that fashionable. That's in large part because Dot has had to bear more than its share of the urban problems of recent decades.

"In the middle of the last century, our neighborhoods were home to a quarter million people. In 1950, it was said, Dorchester was a small town that had become part of a big city...Up through those post war years, Dorchester was considered a waterfront community- we're nestled on the banks of the Neponset River to our south, and the Atlantic Ocean to our east. We had great beaches, like Malibu and Savin Hill and Tenean. We had yacht clubs, sailboat races, even a small fishing fleet. It was our own little urban Riviera. But in the 1950's, state planners saw the wisdom of building a highway, so that our young families could move on out to the pastoral towns &emdash; leafy places like Weymouth, and Rockland, Norwell and Holbrook.

So what did the planners do? They built a six lane highway - the Southeast Expressway- right along our shoreline, creating a manmade barrier between the people and the waterfront. Imagine that? Imagine if they built a highway through Manchester by the Sea, or across Falmouth Heights down the Cape?

"As a result, Dorchester people felt a little put upon...We get annoyed when, for example, the news media selectively misidentifies our hometown. If a visiting head of state comes calling to the JFK Library, it is reported as a state visit to Boston. But if there's a police incident at Columbia Point, it leads the news as &emdash; a crime in Dorchester.

"I have been working in community journalism here for 32 years now. I covered the early meetings of this university's Board of Trustees at the old UMass Field Station in Waltham back in the early 1970's, and reported on the plans and commitments for this new city campus.

In those early years, administrators did pledge that this would always be a campus for commuter students - people who would live at home or elsewhere off-campus, and come to the peninsula for their education, only to go home at night.

"If you wonder why there was such a commotion made when plans for 2000 dormitory beds were aired last year, you must realize that the broad skepticism arose from some of us Dot people with long memories- and a healthy dose of resentment over the habitual disrespect that so many public institutions have shown us and our neighbors over these many decades.

"(To outgoing Chancellor Gora,) I promise you that when your successor is named, I will welcome the chance to show him or her around our town, and urge him/her to continue your efforts to broaden the outreach of this great resource that is the University into the neighborhoods of Dorchester, Roxbury, South Boston and Mattapan.

I will introduce our new, next Chancellor to the "D word." The first thing I will tell them is, that's not Boston Harbor out there. it's Dorchester Bay. And this isn't UMass-Boston. It is, UMass-Dorchester.

- Ed Forry