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University of Maine System Chancellor Joseph Westphal recently suggested a plan during the last Board of Trustees meeting that involves merging Maine’s secondary education system.
According to UMS spokesman John Diamond, only informal discussions have been held at this point between Westphal, the governor and other legislators.
“As [the chancellor] views it, he wasn’t putting it out as any kind of formal proposal so much as giving his personal opinion,” Diamond said in a recent article in the Portland Press Herald.
Westphal’s plan entails combining UMS, the Maine Technical College System and Maine Maritime Academy under a single governing Board of Trustees. This would abolish competition between the systems.
According to Westphal, this plan would provide students with more educational opportunities, as well as allow for better use of resources and money. Current programs at some of the universities and technical colleges would be combined, according to Westphal.
“It makes sense for Maine,” Westphal said at the BOT meeting.
The plan would provide students with greater opportunity to find an academic program that suits their expectations, Westphal said.
“The most important interest of the [new single] board would be to benefit the students,” Westphal said.
According to Diamond, Lewiston-Auburn College’s four-year programs would remain running through the University of Southern Maine. Its two-year programs would be associated with Central Maine Technical College in Auburn. Also, the University College of Bangor’s four-year programs would continue to be run as part of the University of Maine at Augusta system. Its two-year programs would be associated with Eastern Maine Technical College in Bangor.
Some opposition to the plan has already been voiced by John Fitzsimmons, president of Maine’s Technical College System. In a Thursday, Sept. 26 Bangor Daily News article, Fitzsimmons said he was “quite suspect whether . a merger would make it better for Maine in the future.”
“This is the very time in Maine that we need to be talking about getting more people into higher education,” Fitzsimmons said. “We’d spend the next four or five years buried in all the issues surrounding the merger rather than spending time increasing access to higher education.”
Fitzsimmons claims the present system has never worked better. He said transferring credits from technical colleges to the universities is working fine.
“To now dissolve a system that is very effective and doing a good job for Maine and [put] all the administrative energy into merging won’t address Maine’s fundamental need, which is to get more people into higher education,” Fitzsimmons said.
Fitzsimmons said he is concerned that with a merge of UMS, the technical colleges would not get the significant presence they need.
“One board trying to meld us together may not understand the importance of a two-year college mission, which can be distinctly different than a four-year mission,” he said.
“Change is very threatening for a lot of people and something that they feel very uncomfortable with,” Westphal said.
He said that a lot of the opposition stems from not wanting to fix something that is not broken.
Yet, according to Westphal, “The issue is not if it’s broken, but whether you can make it better.”
“It’s only an idea at this point in time,” Westphal said. “But it would be important for the state to really consider it.”
