Outreach Highlights

University Without Walls Celebrates 35th Anniversary with Monster.com's Jeff Taylor

Jeff Taylor

University Without Walls celebrated 35 years as a premier degree completion program for non-traditional adult students with a June 16 gala featuring – among others – Monster.com founder and UWW alumnus Jeff Taylor.

UWW, a unit of UMass Amherst Outreach, was one of the first, and is one of the few remaining, university programs designed to help adult learners turn experience into college credits as part a rigorous, individually-shaped interdisciplinary program calling on resources from throughout the campus community.

Since 1972, more than 3300 baccalaureate degrees have been awarded to UWW students, many of them adult learners who have returned to higher education after a long hiatus. The current enrollment of 450 students is the largest in the program’s history.

Also attending 35th anniversary celebration in the Student Union Ballroom were a score of community leaders, policy makers and University of Massachusetts Amherst officials, including Chancellor John Lombardi. State Senator Stanley Rosenberg of Amherst, a longtime UWW supporter, addressed the gathering, leading a contingent of area legislators including state Reps. Stephen Kulik of Worthington, Benjamin Swan of Springfield and Rosemary Sandlin of Agawam.

Former UWW director Gary Bernhard served as Master of Ceremonies. Also speaking were Vice Provost for Outreach Sharon Fross, UWW director Cindy Suopis, former director Ed Harris – and, of course, Jeff Taylor.

Other guests included Northampton Mayor Mary Clare Higgins, a UWW alumna, and Holyoke Mayor Michael Sullivan, along with former UMass Amherst chancellor (1971-1979), Randolph Bromery.

For Jeff Taylor, widely credited with reinventing the way job hunters seek employment and with helping unleash the commercial power of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990’s, the UWW celebration was something of a homecoming. Taylor attended UMass Amherst from 1978 to 1983, and completed the requirements for an individualized bachelor’s degree through UWW in 2001. His area of concentration was "Human Capital and Marketing in the New Economy." He was also a keynote commencement speaker that year.

“I was never proud of the fact that I’d dropped out,” Taylor told UMass Magazine last year. “UWW allowed me to find my path to a degree in a way I could not have done otherwise with three children, running a half-billion-dollar business, with a multitude of responsibilities.”

Since resigning as Monster.com CEO in 2005, Taylor has founded Eons, a Web-based media company dedicated to “celebrating life on the flipside of 50.”

In the meantime, UWW programming has gone through something of a revolution, notes Cindy Suopis, who became UWW director when Gary Bernhard, who ran the program for nearly 20 years, returned to teaching at UWW.

“We’ve restructured and expanded our entire curriculum in direct response to the needs and experiences of our students, and forged very effective new collaborations,” she said. “In addition, our students will now have many more study options, in that they will be able to take courses in the classroom, online, or in a ‘Blended Learning’ format that combines the two.”

Last year, the program received a major Sloan Foundation grant to establish a Blended Health and Human Services degree for adults.

“What makes this exciting is that we are able to address the changing needs of students in ways the truly reflect and honor what has set UWW apart since the beginning,” she added

Suopis noted that over half of UWW graduates go on to graduate school.