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The University of Maine System office could be moving to remake student services and academics. On Jan. 11, Chancellor Richard Pattenaude announced a plan to restructure the system to avoid future deficits, a plan some faculty and staff members are concerned is proceeding without input from the University of Maine departments it affects.
The plan looks at administration, academics and structure as the main focuses of restructuring every campus. It predicts a need to save $18 million this academic year, $10 million next year, $8.6 million the following year and $6.2 million the year after, which amounts to an expected saving of $42.8 million in the next four years. Those predictions are based on assumptions including an average 6 percent increase in student tuition and an approximate 5 percent increase in operating costs in the next four years – assumptions likely to change in the future.
“The goal is to minimize the impact on the pocketbooks of students,” said John Diamond, executive director of external affairs at the UMS office.
Hoff expressed concern that steps of the plan that affect the campus seem to already be decided, without consultation with people from UMaine.
“One of our concerns is that although the plan suggests that this is a process and that everything is on the table, the language in the chancellor’s plan lays out certain steps that seem to already have been decided,” Hoff said.
Programs with fewer than five graduates and courses with fewer than 12 students enrolled annually may be eliminated as part of a proposed action to reduce the number of under-enrolled degrees and classes, according to the plan.
Much of the restructuring plan calls for taking services from respective campuses and centralizing them at the system office, thereby reducing their operational cost while still giving students access to them through Internet-based programs or similar information systems technology, such as PeopleSoft.
“The history of centralizing services has been that when the system office centralizes these, what they call, ‘back-room’ functions, they take people from the campuses to the system offices to do this. When they do that, they often raise their salary; and now, the system office is doing a service farther away from the students who need it,” Hoff said.
Diamond said the system office wants to change how students receive their services.
“The intent is not to reduce – in any way – student service, but to take fuller advantage of technologies that make student services available 24/7, to maintain adequate levels of service so that students have a live person to talk to when they need to,” Diamond said.
Centralization may not be an effective cost-saving measure, according to Hoff.
“The past history has shown that [centralization] has not saved money,” Hoff said. “The example I will point to is PeopleSoft. We pulled people away from this campus to try to coordinate that information system; they got paid bigger salaries. We had to backfill their salaries here, and we have a system that still doesn’t really work.”
Another proposed action in the plan is to establish a “centralized Information Technologies function,” a change that places greater emphasis on the MaineStreet program used by the UMaine System and draws university IT personnel into a “coordinated unit which is responsive more to centralized authority,” according to the plan.
“Right now, there’s been no decision, but the chancellor is looking at whether there’s opportunity at decentralizing university functions or by centralizing some,” Diamond said. “What’s going to determine the outcome is whether it’s cost effective to move in one direction or the other and whether it’s going to maintain or enhance the quality of service.”
The plan also proposes making greater use of Internet-based services, an action which assumes more centralization of offices such as help desks, bursars and student billing.
The UMaine System might consider partnerships with the state government or community colleges and Maine Maritime Academy to share student services such as healthcare and IT, Diamond said.
“The system can oversee them [services], but let the campuses do them; to me that’s the way to save money,” Hoff said. “It’s not that I’m closed-minded about what can and can’t happen, but what I am worried about is that the plan seems to suggest, and others are agreeing, that many decisions have already been made.”
The UMS IT advisory council, a committee made up of representatives from every college and the UMS administration, met at UMaine on Friday, Jan. 23 to discuss the plan and how it will affect the university’s IT department.
“I think the concern that we have in general is that it’s fine to say ‘let’s centralize all IT and we’ll save money,’ and if you do centralize all IT you probably will save money; but the fact of the matter is . we’re very different kinds of universities,” said John Gregory, executive director of Information Technologies at UMaine. “To boil this all down into one central function – my greatest concern is it would not permit the campus to still have that kind of autonomy in how we effectively use IT to achieve our mission.”
Gregory said Friday’s meeting was the first time he’d seen any part of the restructuring plan.
“I think the last time I saw; we had 27 mail servers on campus. Probably we can’t afford to do that anymore, and we ought to look at what makes sense and how can we reduce that number because they’re all running on servers, they’re all taking some person’s time to maintain those and back them up and so forth, and they’re all vulnerable to viruses,” Gregory said.
Another aspect of the plan is to create a 12-person task force to look at possible structural and organizational changes. The task force will not look at possible academic or administrative changes and will provide its recommendations to the UMS board of trustees alongside the chancellor’s suggestions. The task force will consist of a student representative, a few faculty members, two members of the board of trustees, one of the university presidents and people from outside UMaine who have expertise in business financial management and economic development, according to Diamond. The chancellor will appoint all of the task force members. UMaine’s President Robert Kennedy will not be the UMaine president on the task force, Hoff said.
“It’s safe to say that President Kennedy and people representing UMaine – administrators, faculty, staff and students – will have an opportunity to participate in this process in a meaningful way,” Director of University Relations Joe Carr said.
Diamond stressed that at this stage little has been decided. Carr said it’s too early to tell what specific areas on campus this plan will affect.
UMaine endured $11.8 million of cuts from its 2008-2009 budget, and may soon have to deal with a state allocation $5,028,700 less than last year’s because of a state budget proposed by Gov. John Baldacci earlier this month. It is unknown how the restructuring plan will affect student financial aid, tuition rates or fees.
Chancellor Pattenaude will submit his final report to the UMS board of trustees July 13.
Bangor Daily News