The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is in a bad place. It has historically been the most populated college on the Orono campus. In recent years, we have seen a fall in CLAS students proportionate to a rise in students in the College of Engineering and Computing. While the push for engineering could be a great thing for our school and its resources, we’ve seen it occur at the fall of arts and sciences.
CLAS buildings on campus lack proper ventilation and get scorching hot. South Stevens doesn’t even have an elevator, which presents issues of accessibility. Meanwhile, engineering students just received a brand new state-of-the-art building in the form of the Ferland Engineering Education and Design Center. On top of this, the new Green Energy and Materials building is being constructed on the Collins Center side of campus. While this building is being funded by the Department of Defense, UMaine will bear the maintenance costs required to maintain and staff the building for years to come. While this is happening, requests for maintenance and new buildings from CLAS are continuously rejected by the Board of Trustees. It’s clear where their priorities stand.
This issue is exacerbated by the budget cuts that disproportionately hurt CLAS. This is coupled with a hiring freeze, meaning new staff aren’t being brought in to teach classes. Minors for CLAS are increasingly being shifted to online-only programs. This leaves very few options for students who want to minor in more niche topics while still taking classes in person. My minor, legal studies, consists of a variety of classes from other popular subjects, like political science and sociology. Despite this, I still wouldn’t have been able to complete it without taking online classes. Some classes that students need to complete their major’s degree program have not been offered at all in recent semesters.
Due to these factors, I posit that the increase in other colleges, especially engineering, and a fall in humanities is not a sign of shifting interests of students but rather the results of a systemic failure to support CLAS. Numerically, engineering students are overtaking CLAS students because CLAS students are increasingly finding that UMaine has not shown its ability to care for them. UMaine has not shown that it can provide for and maintain our quality of education.
