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On Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, two members of the University of Maine System board of trustees announced their resignations in response to legislative action to take more control over the University of Maine System and limit the power of the board.
Dr. Wickham Skinner, the vice chair of the board, and Donald McDowell would both have finished their terms as trustees in the next seven weeks. Trustees can only serve two five-year terms, and both Skinner and McDowell have served over nine and a half.
“We both resigned for the same reasons,” Dr. Skinner said. “We resigned because the legislature suddenly intruded into the affairs of the university.”
The legislative action, a response to the BOT’s strategic plan of to combine the University of Maine at Augusta’s campuses with the University of Southern Maine, specifies that the Legislature must approve any changes in the names, number and location of the universities within the system.
The plan indicated that the UMA campuses, which consist of Lewiston, Augusta and Bangor, would be divided between USM, the University of Maine and the Maine Community College System. Lewiston, which USM runs most of their programs anyway, was not a controversial issue, said John Diamond, executive director of external affairs for UMS. The alignment of the Augusta and Bangor campuses was controversial among the faculty, staff and students of that facility, however.
Originally, the board members planned the merger to take place in the fall of this year, but UMS Chancellor Joseph Westphal decided several weeks ago that he would postpone the merger because a legislative committee wanted to look at what options might exist. The amendment the Legislature adopted was heard two or three days after the chancellor announced that he would postpone the merger, he said.
“The effect of that amendment terms control of naming and restructuring of the universities over to the Legislature, and historically it has been the responsibility of the board of trustees,” Diamond said.
The BOT, whose members are appointed by the governor, has always controlled the system, which was formed in 1968. In the early 1970s, the Legislature removed any provision in the law which gave the Legislature authority to alter the names by striking those names from the law books, Diamond said.
“[The BOT] felt that it was the first step towards eroding the trustees’ authority as citizen overseers of the university system. They felt that it politicized the decision about higher education,” he said.
Skinner cited the decreasing budget supplied by the state as the reason for the mergers cited in the strategic plan.
“Every year we had to go pleading to the legislature for more money, and the state was getting in increasingly difficult financial straights,” he said.
The goal behind the strategic plan was to become more self-sufficient and improve the financial problems of the state, he said.
“The issue is that the university system is in severe financial difficulty. The strategic plan was the first up by the trustees to solve the problem. The act of the legislature precluded solving the problem,” said McDowell.
“There has been some concern that the voices have not been heard by the people in the system about the convergence of the strategic plan,” said Sen. Elizabeth Schneider – D, Orono, second majority seat on the education committee. The point of the legislative actions was not to be adversary to the BOT, but to make a “collaborative, mutual compromise” that meets the needs of the state, she said.
“The Legislature is not making decisions about the university rather than the trustees who have statutory responsibilities appointed by the governor,” McDowell said. “That sets a terrible, terrible precedent. It happens in state after state, and in Maine we have been very, very fortunate to have been free of that until now … we have run it without politics at all, and it’s been a wonderful group of people and they work extremely hard, and the thought has always been on the educational processes and the univerties’ financial footing – not politics.”
