UMF can’t save last dance

Posted on April 23, 2009, at 12:30 a.m.

Margaret Gould Wescott doesn’t say she was laid off. She says she was fired.

“I’m an old union girl. All these euphemism words that come from downsized, laid off, those take the person out of it. I got fired has a different connotation,” Wescott said.

Wescott’s dance troupe – the UMF Dancers, which she founded 29 years ago – has been cut from the University of Maine at Farmington. Wescott is the first tenured professor to be laid off – or fired, as she prefers – since the university cut the home economics program in the 1980s, she says.

Other programs cut from UMF include ski industries, women’s studies, piano and Russian. In addition, archeology is no longer funded through the university.

The closure of UMF dance “devastated” the dance community, according to Ann Ross, a dance instructor at UMaine.

“Margaret has been a mover and shaker for dance in Maine for years, so it is difficult to have a friend and colleague lose a job,” Ross said in an e-mail.

Wescott, a Maine native, built the post modern dance program after returning from school in North Carolina. Since the program’s inception, it has traveled all over Maine and New England to perform for dance festivals and schools.

Most recently, the troupe performed at the French Immersion School in Freeport, which was founded by one of Wescott’s former students.

The program had only 10 to 15 dancers not because of lack of interest or talent but because the vans can only take 15 people and the program couldn’t afford to take two vans.

“I’m very practical, and I grew up in poverty, so I’ve been running this program on a little over $1,000 a year,” Wescott said. “I laugh with my students that I’m a glorified PTA president. You know, we do car washes and bake sales to earn money to go places.”

Wescott went to University of North Carolina and studied at Duke University in the summer before coming back to Maine to help develop a dance curriculum for the state.

She and other dance teachers from Maine universities and colleges helped write the first edition of the Maine K-12 dance cirriculum.

Wescott, now 64 years old, thought she would teach until she was 70. A self-described “overachiever,” she played three sports in college, first attending Plymouth State University for her undergraduate degree and then UNC for her graduate degree.

She has no plans, as of yet, for what she will do when her contract ends on May 31.

She will probably move. From where she lives she can walk to the university. She can see the campus from her dining room window, a reminder of her old job that may prove too harsh.