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- Video: Public comment session
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The University of Maine System board of trustees held a public hearing Wednesday on a plan to restructure the system. The board heard concerns from students, faculty, staff and alumni, which included course elimination and the cost of education.
The hearing, held in the Collins Center for the Arts, was the last in a series of visits to each campus and the system office to solicit comments from the community.
The chancellor’s initiative, titled “The University of Maine System and the Future of Maine,” seeks to balance the system’s budget and ensure long-term viability. Chancellor Richard Pattenaude presented the plan to the board of trustees Sept. 15 and has said he wants the board to vote on it by November.
Michael Grillo, associate professor of art history, said he had heard there would be cuts encompassing a quarter to a third of faculty by 2014. Grillo asked how those cuts would benefit the system and how they could be avoided.
“If you cut a substantial number of faculty, I think you will also lose a substantial number of students,” Grillo said. “What type of organization structure is there to facilitate the discussions of, you know, what the mission of the system is as it returns to that and how we are best serving our citizens, and how we actually can provide for an educated citizenry?”
Grillo’s question received a round of applause from the audience and rebuke from Joe Wishcamper, the board’s chairman.
“Who says 25 percent of the faculty? That is ridiculous,” Wishcamper said, to a smattering of applause. “People are scared of change, and disinformation flies around like wildfire.”
“We have no interest in seeing a quarter of the faculty gone, ever,” Pattenaude said, but did not provide specifics.
Pattenaude did elaborate on the process through which faculty cuts would be made.
“Shared governance, process, union rules and understandings and agreements will all be respected in this,” Pattenaude said.
Wishcamper said the system did not have specific numbers.
“We don’t know what the economy’s going to do. We don’t know what the legislature’s going to do and, frankly, we have things that are within our control and the control of our administrators that can change all of our assumptions,” Wishcamper said. “All we can do today is do scenarios on what might be the uncontrollable things that we have to deal with. And we have to plug in assumptions about the things that we can control, such as tuition, numbers of students, so forth and so on.”
“The numbers that you may be hearing are simply because we’re running scenarios to inform ourselves about how to make decisions in the event that the future unfolds in ways that are not embedded in our base projection,” Wishcamper said.
Steve Butterfield, state representative for House District 16 and a UMaine student, applauded the board’s efforts, saying as a legislator he understood the process and criticism the board went through.
“A lot of what’s in [the report] is not going to be popular,” Butterfield said. “I really applaud you for putting forward some serious thought here, some serious changes, despite the fact they will inevitably be unpopular.”
Butterfield said he appreciated the report’s stand against “unnecessary and repetitive tuition increases.”
“As somebody paying for my own education now, for somebody whose family was involved when I was in school before; the old habit of relying on tuition increases to make up for the gap in revenue simply can’t work anymore,” Butterfield said. “[Students] are broke; we are in debt, and there’s simply nothing left to get from us.”
“We must recognize that the University of Maine System cannot any longer be all things to all people,” Butterfield said. “That will mean downsizing or completely eliminating programs. That’s never an easy process, but it is, sadly, a necessary one.”
Butterfield’s thoughts, though, were in the minority. Multiple attendees asked about the system’s plans to eliminate courses and programs.
“We try to provide targets for the campuses, but we don’t try to tell them how to change their administrative structure,” Wishcamper said.
Pattenaude said the system office would leave such decisions up to the universities.
“Decisions will be made at the campus level,” Pattenaude said. “Campuses make those decisions and present them to the trustees for support.”
“There are programs at every university that are vestigial,” Wishcamper said. “There are programs that exist today because they’ve existed forever. And there are programs that don’t exist today that should exist today because they have to do with the future needs of the population in terms of being educated.”
Several graduate students spoke on the importance of UMaine’s research mission.
Julie-Ann Scott, a doctorate candidate, said she attended a small liberal arts college for her undergraduate degree.
“If I had to do it over, I would have gone to a research university,” Scott said. “And I would have gone to a research university because it is amazing to be close to the creation of new knowledge.”
Kurt Klappenbach, a graduate student in the communications and journalism department, said UMaine “presents a unique climate for research” and asked what steps were being taken to ensure students will be able to continue working in a research climate.
“There is only one land-grant university in Maine, and that is the University of Maine. And with that comes a distinct mission and a distinct set of responsibilities,” Pattenaude said.
“We agree and understand the immense centrality and importance of the research agenda, the doctoral agenda, but also the statewide service mission of this institution,” Pattenaude said.
About 300 people attended the session, according to university spokesperson Joe Carr, and more than 5,000 people are estimated to have watched the live stream online. Toward the end of the session, the board stopped answering questions in order to allow as many people to speak as possible.
CORRECTION:An earlier version of this article stated Steve Butterfield is representative for House District 15. He represents House District 16.
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Related Posts:- Task Force hears UMaine’s concerns (February 26, 2009)
- Board of trustees to vote on restructuring plan (November 16, 2009)
- Board of Trustees slashes budget (November 13, 2006)
- UMS board of trustees approve strategic plan (September 24, 2004)
- Board of Trustees is optimistic about 2009 (February 12, 2009)
It was an insult to Professor Grillo to label his 25% figure as disinformation. This is exactly what APPWG is discussing. The Maine Campus should be covering that committee, since plans are being promoted by university administrators to cut a number of departments in order to put more money into areas of the university where there are almost no undergraduates but which bring in a lot of research dollars. If you can’t get faculty to speak on the record about this, offer to keep their names out of it. Some faculty know a lot but fear that administration will target their departments should they speak out.
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