He joined the University of Massachusetts-Amherst faculty, and he worked with dancers, filmmakers and early hip-hop artists.

NPR: Max Roach Memorial Show

Before becoming FDIC chairman, Bair was the dean's professor of financial regulatory policy for the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst from 2002 to 2006.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Mitt Romney, the slash-and-burn governor of Massachusetts, has raised hackles in academia by proposing to privatise, in large part, three campuses at the University of Massachusetts, to revamp its Amherst flagship campus with money from more out-of-state students and most heretically to do away with the office of the university president (currently occupied by one of his political foes).

ECONOMIST: State universities

Maura Murray, a 21-year-old nursing student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, disappeared on a cold and snowy night in February 2004.

CNN: Student wrecks car on snowy road, disappears

His professors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst had set his graduate class an assignment - pick an economics paper and see if you can replicate the results.

BBC: News