LETTER TO THE EDITOR BY BILLY OBENAUER
There is nothing I feel guiltier about in my life than moving my family to Maine. As a White man, I’m generally treated well in Maine, but my wife is not White and has not had the same experience. She has experienced racism in several contexts, but her experiences of employment discrimination at Northern Light Health (NLH) have been the most upsetting because NLH’s performative activism strongly influenced our decision to move to Maine—performative activism is when organizations put on public displays of valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for business purposes, but don’t integrate those values into their culture. Additionally, the discrimination she experienced at NLH impacted our entire community, as it resulted in the University of Maine not having a psychiatry provider on campus for the first part of this semester.
NLH is not alone when it comes to Maine employers who face challenges incorporating DEI into their culture. Over the past 10 years, the Maine Human Rights Commission (MHRC) has received more than 7,000 discrimination complaints. Approximately two-thirds of these complaints are related to employment discrimination. For context, the MHRC receives more discrimination complaints per capita than any state in New England other than Connecticut. Interpret that statement cautiously, as these data are messy, but the key point is obvious: Maine is not immune to the problem of discrimination.
As the state’s flagship university and a land grant institution, UMaine needs to become a leader in fixing this problem. When it comes to areas like engineering and marine biology, we proactively drive important changes that impact the world, but when it comes to DEI, we are reactionary at best. This is such a low priority for us, that the link to our Equal Opportunity Complaint Procedure on our website is currently dead. This lack of prioritization is also reflected in our curriculum. Several students have recently told me that they had not been exposed to any content on DEI until my 300-level class. The University’s proposed core curriculum includes “Human Cultural Traditions” and “Global Perspectives” requirements, but as long as classes like Elementary French I and Italian Renaissance Art meet these requirements, students can avoid addressing the hard questions related to current DEI issues.
The impact of the University not prioritizing DEI is that we produce business leaders who don’t prioritize DEI. For example, since Paul Bolin—a UMaine alum—took the position of Chief Human Resources (HR) Officer for NLH in February 2016. NLH has had at least 38 complaints filed against it with the MHRC and lost two landmark discrimination lawsuits (see https://youtu.be/2FpNjDF-pcs?si=10GxgMpW_DAp6W3G for details). Noah Lundy, another UMaine alum, is NLH’s VP of HR who oversees the region in which both of these landmark discrimination cases took place. In an attempt to manage public relations for NLH during one of these cases, Suzanne Spruce—another NLH executive and UMaine alum—publicly disparaged the plaintiff, accusing her of “tak[ing] advantage of [a] crisis situation to obtain publicity for her lawsuit.” If we took responsibility for being a leader in DEI, we could have provided Bolin, Lundy and Spruce with an education that would have taught them to value DEI and how to truly integrate it into their organizational culture.
Perhaps the low prioritization of DEI is cyclical in nature as up until this year, Bolin was on the Maine Business School’s (MBS) advisory board and MBS was running “business of healthcare” classes with NLH. This summer, citing both my wife’s discrimination case and NLH’s poor track record in DEI, I recommended that “we immediately remove NLH as [a course] partner and remove Paul Bolin from our advisory board.” To MBS’s credit, the class with NLH was removed from the Fall 2024 schedule and I recently verbally confirmed that Bolin is no longer on our advisory board’s roster. While I appreciate this response, UMaine needs to be more proactive in managing external partnerships. MBS’s partnership with NLH should have been paused in 2022 when they lost the first lawsuit ever decided under Maine’s Equal Pay Act and the largest racial discrimination verdict in state history. Even if we ignore our ethical responsibility, what faculty member is going to take advice from a small-time HR manager whose organization lost two landmark discrimination cases in the same year?
To UMaine’s credit, we don’t actively promote our institution as a leader in DEI, so at least we’re not engaging in performative activism. I actually respect that. As a flagship, however, I expect us to do better. I expect us to be a leader.
