On Thursday, the University of Maine announced that they intend to make cuts to faculty and staff starting next year. These cuts will be in order to help balance a budget that is $19 million in the red.
The main causes of this deficit are operating costs exceeding the enrollment rate and a change in state appropriations, according to a letter the Office of the President sent out.
While there are elements of this that the university can’t control, expanding operation costs without having the funds to do so is entirely on the university. Because of these bad decisions, we are losing the thing that makes a college truly great — the educators.
We have all had classes that were made or ruined by the teacher. There are concepts that we might have never understood and techniques that would have never been mastered if it wasn’t for a professor who cared. Education is defined by educators. When you shrink down the number of professors, you shrink down the number of possibilities for each individual student.
The goal for the university is to try to reduce $10 million in expenses through the department of Academic Affairs. While the exact number of faculty and staff positions that will be eliminated has not been specified, the university also plans to eliminate about 20% of vacant positions. Long-term, this could cause programs with low enrollment to shut down. If this were to happen, it would be an absolute failure on the part of UMaine. It is difficult not to attribute the potential loss of a diversity of program offerings to the mismanagement of money.
According to earlier reporting by the Maine Campus, lack of communication and transparency has been a big issue for the university concerning this issue, as communicated by the Faculty Senate in an April 3 letter to the Office of the President. There are reports from The Maine Monitor that state faculty started to question UMaine’s intentions as early as back in December when the university conducted a self-evaluation of the school’s programs. All of this obfuscation feels like it has become the new normal for how the university goes about handling decisions.
UMaine’s one saving grace in all of this is the hope that state-appropriated funding increases before they have to make these decisions. For example, the state could decide to give the university more money before the budget had to be approved. However, putting yourself in the position where you’re reliant on the state or federal government to give you more money, so you don’t have to cut your staff, is utterly embarrassing.
This announcement epitomizes something we have been feeling for a long time. UMaine has lost touch with its students and faculty. They are operating with very little care for the critiques and feedback given by faculty and care even less about the opinions of students. Like we stated in our last editorial, the lack of care and transparency needs to change and that has never been clearer.
