It's actually coming from the chancellor of the school, Michael Collins...and he's pushing a consultant (umass hired at 6 figures to do a campus analysis on diversity) to push the plantation-slavery narrative to get the street change. This is not something altruistic from Collins because he's concerned about the word "Plantation" at all... It's a PR red herring to do 2 things: distract from the racial inequalities in things such as promotions within UMMS and to help UMMS's brand.

I was asking around at work today what the inside take was regarding UMass's insistence all of a sudden to push Worcester to rename Plantation street. The reality is no one cares about the street name b/c there are far more pertinent things going on within Umass like anti-labor and discriminatory practices within departments.

What I heard was that UMMS is looking to rename the other streets around campus, such a North road and South road that are w/in campus to be more "branded", i.e. like how other research campuses name roads to be "science-y" like "Einstein circuit" or "Curie Way". They want to rename Plantation street to be more branded because the new big building being built will have a Plantation street address. UMMS leadership has been wanting the addresses to their main research buildings to be made more research-centric, like "Discovery Street" or something like that.

It's just corporate BS, like it usually is. The real push is coming from the chancellor that a new street name would help the UMMS brand and get more big donors. They are weaponizing virtue signaling as the excuse to make it about racial connotations, or else the city of worcester would just laugh at their request to change the name of a 4 mile long street. They aren't putting in a request to change the names of north and south roads until the Plantation street situation is figured out, because if they did it now...it would be obvious that UMass’s real MO was selfishly to get a better branding opportunity.