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A crowd of excited faculty and students swarmed around Jason Harkins, buzzing like paparazzi, snapping photographs and giving him celebrity-status cheers.
Onlookers leaned over the balcony on the second floor of Donald P. Corbett Business Building eyeing Harkins, who sat in the lobby covered with a blue towel. Crowd members held their breath in anticipation as Katherine Deegan filled a pie tin with a mountain of whipped cream.
Moments later, the pie was in his face.
As he cleaned up, the crowd dispersed to Wednesday noontime classes while a few stragglers snapped last-minute pictures on camera phones.
“I’m glad I intelligently chose whipped cream,” said Harkins, a professor of management in the business school. As he wiped the whipped cream from his face, he jokingly tried to hug a colleague, who darted away.
Harkins was this year’s winner of “Pie Your Professor,” an annual fundraiser for the American Marketing Association. AMA’s University of Maine chapter is a part of the national association and boasts 30 members on campus.
The group has used “Pie Your Professor” as a fundraiser for the past four years. A handful of business professors offer themselves as candidates and donations are collected under each one’s name. The one with the most donations gets the honor of being “pied.”
Nine professors were nominated this year, but Harkins came out on top.
“I don’t know if it’s really winning,” joked Emily Antonico, a member of AMA.
The event brought in approximately $140 in the past week. AMA members collected donations from students walking through DPC and professors who were titillated by the prospect of a pie being thrown in the face of a colleague.
“They [professors] all want to throw their hat into it,” Antonico said.
Donators also had the chance to participate. For each dollar they gave, they received a raffle ticket for a chance to be the one to throw the pie.
“It’s totally worth the investment,” said Deegan, a member of AMA and last year’s raffle winner.
AMA uses the donations for group events around campus throughout the year. In the past the group has worked with local businesses, like Harvest Moon Deli in Orono, when they conducted a survey to improve foot traffic for the company. They have also worked to promote the Audubon Society and other local organizations.
One of the group’s biggest events is the annual business conference in the fall semester. Local business representatives hold workshops for participants and give lectures on how to survive in the business world.
“It’s an excellent networking opportunity,” Deegan said.
“Pie Your Professor” is the AMA’s last fundraiser of the year and is on the smaller-scale of donation efforts.
“It’s great because everyone has this pent up energy,” Deegan said. “It’s not a huge fundraiser, but it gets our name out there.”
“We did pretty good for a week of tabling,” Antonico said. The group gathered for its last meeting of the year the evening after the pie-throwing extravaganza. Regularly meeting on Wednesdays throughout the year, AMA is open to all students on campus. Members range from new media to accounting students.
“We’re really open to different people to get all different ideas,” Antonico said.
“We’re always looking for new people,” Deegan said.
