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UMS to release report on restructuring

Posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009, 2:01 am

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University of Maine System Chancellor Richard Pattenaude is expected to release his final restructuring plan Sept. 14, a document no one outside of the Chancellor and the board of trustees has read.

Pattenaude stated the restructuring of the system was started in April 2009 in response to the growing financial problems of the system’s campuses. Pattenaude formed three groups to look at three arenas of university operations: academics, finances and the system structure. The first two groups were composed of chief academic and financial officers from the campuses and the system office. The third was an independent task force of representatives taken from every university in the system.

The task force’s report suggests reducing tuition for first-year and second-year students at all system campuses in order to attract and retain more students. Similarly, the report suggests pricing the universities at “appropriate rates that reflect the different student clientele they serve.”

“I think essentially what the task force is saying is take a look at reducing the price of the first two years with the understanding — the expectation — that it could bring in more students,” said Janet Waldron, UMaine’s vice president for administration and finance. “I think what’s not being addressed here is, what about the next two years?”

In terms of pricing the universities at “appropriate rates,” Waldron said the recommendation means looking at pricing policies in broader terms.

“What I’ve understood the task force report to say is look at the pricing structure across all of the institutions,” Waldron said.

The task force’s report, released during the summer, recommends four suggestions to the Chancellor: Create a public agenda that would transform the UMS’s economic impact on Maine; make system campuses act together as a union, instead of a confederation and pursue less redundant services and programs; restructure system-wide services to be more accountable; and “use financial policy to realize system goals.”

“When the [Faculty] Senate responded to the task force, we made our position clear that the big issue on the restructuring was the centralization of services,” said Judy Kuhns-Hastings, president of UMaine’s Faculty Senate. “That’s a very expensive thing to do, and that the centralization of services needs to be reduced and that work needs to go to the campuses that can do it; which is probably UM and USM. … Centralization of services costs a lot of money.”

The task force report does not share the belief that individual campuses are better suited for providing certain services. It states: “We believe, again, Maine is too small to fragment services where natural economies of scale exist, and further, that many of our problems have come about as a result of various campuses refusing to adopt common procedures.”

Kuhns-Hastings said she did not feel better about how the task force addressed centralized services after she read its report.

“I don’t think that the centralization of services has been well thought out at a central level, and I think it’s continuing to cost a lot of money,” she said. “It seems to me that when you have campuses that already have expertise and already are pretty well set — this campus does a very nice job on distance education — to pull that away to a centralized model is not necessarily money-saving.”

The task force recommended saving money through information technology, in addition to other areas of system services and operations. John Gregory, IT director at UMaine, said the report’s proposed model for IT services, called the “hybrid IT model,” is largely what he and his counterparts already do.

“It talks about trying to save money by increasing the number of virtual servers we have,” said Gregory. He added, “we’ve got a committee made up of some members of the IT directors who are working at ways that we can standardize the desktop and laptop computers that we use in administrative offices.”

Gregory said UMaine will likely migrate away from the WebCT program and switch to Project NG, a hybrid of Blackboard and WebCT, because the next version of WebCT has tools for such a migration and will soon be phased out.

“They’ll be the same product at that point,” Gregory said.

Gregory said the plan calls for replacing Microsoft Office at UMaine and its sister campuses with less expensive software such as OpenOffice. UMaine spends about $70,000 per year on licensing fees for Microsoft Office.

The report calls for switching to the hybrid IT reporting system between chief information officers, such as Gregory and the IT director at the system office. The task force report says this new model will likely save $700,000 during the course of the next four years. But another, called the “enterprise” model, which would require Gregory and other IT directors at system campuses to report directly to the system office, would have likely saved $950,000 during the same period, according to the report. Gregory said the enterprise model was rejected because it called for too much centralization and placed too heavy an emphasis on the system office, unlike the hybrid model, which only requires increased communication.

Pattenaude’s final plan, titled “Adding Value Through Educational Opportunity and Economic Development,” will be unveiled during the Sept. 14 meeting of the system BOT.