The McCormack Graduate School was founded in 2003 to create a dynamic academic and research center in policy studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The school has built upon the foundation of its predecessor, the McCormack Institute, established in 1983 and named in honor of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John W. McCormack. McCormack was a prominent South Boston politician whose political career was marked by the fight for the rights of immigrant groups — in his day, the Irish, Italians and Jews — and major social and economic programs like Social Security and Medicaid that underpin the American safety net.

Our mission goes hand-in-hand with the mission of UMass Boston: To serve the people, and address the issues of a great urban society through outstanding teaching, research and service. While we address policy issues of all kinds, we tend to focus on issues of an urban society. While we address policy issues internationally and nationally, we pay particular attention to disciplines which can address issues at the state and local level.

While we prepare our students for academia, business and the nonprofit world, we have special expertise for practitioners of public policy. And while we approach the discipline of public policy with academic rigor and objectivity, we tend to see the issues through the prism of understanding that social and economic inequities are inherent in our system; part of our mission is to develop the tools to evaluate and address those inequities.

The McCormack Graduate School resides in a great urban university whose ethnic and racial makeup reflects the city around us, and our home city of Boston aspires to continue its international leadership in social, economic and technological innovation and growth. Thus, we see diversity — in age, race, gender, ethnicity and nationality — as central to our makeup, to great learning and to our region's economic future.