Hugh Thompson, far right (Photo courtesy of the Department of Special Collections and
Universtiy Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
From this vantage, he was a natural choice to represent organized labor on the UMass
Board of Trustees starting in 1961, where he was a comfortable ally of Judge Fox. Even before
that he had been appointed to the New England Board of Higher Education and was part of the group that negotiated an agreement with the University of Vermont to admit 70 Massachusetts
medical students at the in-state tuition rate. (Massachusetts Governor Foster Furcolo, a Democrat who wanted his state to have its own medical school, clinched the deal by agreeing to a state
contribution of $2,500 per year per student.) Thompson consistently advocated for a medical school in the Boston area both because of the jobs it would provide and because, as someone
who had spent his entire career in urban settings, he held fast to the notion that only cities could provide the varied “clinical material” that future physicians would need to prepare for medical
practice. As he told the Board at a special meeting to choose the school’s location, it “should be where groups of patients are diversified (age-wise, variety of ailments, etc.).”15 For Thompson, therefore, an urban location, preferably in Boston, held the highest priority.
Many other significant labor leaders played an important role even though they were not
on the Board of Trustees. Probably the most tenacious of these, and someone who always had Worcester in mind as the site for the medical school, was a Worcester native named James P. 70