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RE: Plan would eliminate 16 majors, 80 faculty
Are you kidding me? We’re keeping sports programs, which add zero academic value to the school, but we’re getting rid of majors? No big deal; the arts can be cut. No one needs them anyway. Let’s all just get drunk and go to some sports event and be unruly and inappropriate. No one needs culture anyway. We’re from America, we can be as elitist as we please.
Cutting these majors from the university is disastrous. I’m a business student, and I can see this. I have taken some of the women’s studies classes here on campus, and they’re not a joke like some would believe. I studied harder for those classes than some of my business ones. For prospective students, these programs can be a deciding factor in their school decision.
What’s more important to our futures, sports or education? Why not follow in the steps of Northeastern and Hofstra universities and eliminate our football program? It bothers me that UMaine has put education on the back burner for sports. I know I’m not the only one that feels this way, and I hope our voices are heard.
— Laura
There needs to be another option aside from eliminating some of the core programs at the University of Maine. The members of the Academic Program Prioritization Working Group may feel the university can do without these programs and they might seem excessive or extra to what someone “should have” in an education, but I feel they are completely wrong in their decisions.
When I went down the list of the one department and the majors being proposed to be eliminated by 2014, I was shocked by the vast number and the ones chosen. It seems that the liberal arts are clearly being targeted, something we, as a student body, should not stand for. These programs enrich a person’s life and education in a unique way and add a sense of richness to often lifeless and predictable classrooms. Culture is being removed from the curriculum, and who’s to say this might not create a domino effect and spill out onto the campus, leaving us without the well-rounded education we came to college seeking?
Martin Luther King Jr. summed up my thoughts on the matter beautifully, “Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.” In enacting this proposal, we would be removing the aspect of our college that breeds character in our students. In most classes, you listen to lectures, memorize figures and ideas and watch slides and videos displayed before you. In the programs proposed for elimination, students are given the opportunity to think for themselves, grow independently and challenge themselves on things they might have never thought of before.
There needs to be a different way to work with the budget cut. I am afraid to see what happens to the university and its students in the aftermath of these proposed changes.
— Eric Lynne
Coming from someone who worked as a professor at the University of Maine, I think the university is extremely top-heavy when it comes to administration. UMaine has deans supervising deans. Unfortunately, that is the way it is in Maine education, even in the K-12 school system. I doubt it’s ever going to change. We’re in the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, and if it hasn’t changed yet, it’s not going to. The idea of trimming the administration won’t work because of the politics of the school systems.
As far as sports are concerned, UMaine has only one sport that is self-sustaining. We all know what that is: men’s ice hockey. Basically, hockey is the reason there’s basketball, football, soccer, volleyball and all the other sports we lose at. Even if UMaine decided to cut some smaller sport programs, it wouldn’t save academics any money. It wouldn’t be small athletic cuts; both men’s and women’s sports would have to go bye-bye.
Finally, it’s just plain and simple economics. If UMaine is paying five professors more than what the enrollment of a particular academic program makes, the program is losing money, and it has to go. I wish that a dean or someone at the top would get eliminated, but it’s not happening. And truthfully, these particular programs have been losing money at UMaine for years.
— Rick John
Bangor Daily News