The University of Massachusetts is looking to acquire Mount Ida College in Newton, Mass., a source familiar with the proposal has told MassLive.

Details of the proposal were not immediately available and officials with UMass and Mount Ida did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mount Ida, a small private college, recently discussed merging with Lasell College, which is also a small private college in Newton, but those talks fell through.

Mount Ida, which has 1,555 undergraduate and graduate students, was founded in 1899 as a liberal arts college. Most of its students live on the 72-acre campus.

The college is led by Barry Brown, the former acting president and provost of Suffolk University in Boston. The college's website describes the institution as "[n]estled in the picturesque and safe suburb of Newton."

The UMass system has 74,500 students on five campuses across the state: Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, Lowell and the medical school in Worcester.

The impact of the proposal on the Boston campus, located in the city's Dorchester neighborhood, remains unclear.

The UMass Boston campus is searching for a new chancellor. Barry Mills, the former president of Bowdoin College, was brought in by top UMass officials on an interim basis to dive into reported budget issues at the campus.