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Vote of No Confidence: Graduate students vie for institutional transparency

LETTER TO THE EDITOR BY ERIC BROWN

On November 22, 2024 the Graduate Student Government voted with a 71% supermajority to pass a resolution for a Vote of No Confidence in the University’s Vice President for Research (VPR) and Dean of the Graduate School Kody Varahramyan. The vote was held amidst increasing discontent among UMaine workers with the methods by which the University Administration has pursued R1 designation with the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Learning.

My colleague, Parker Bausmann, and I brought the resolution forth with a desire for increased transparency and clear communications from the University’s administration about decisions they make about our lives without our input. As outlined in our resolution, Varahramyan as Vice President of Research has repeatedly overseen and failed to speak out against decisions that prioritized the University’s prestige at the expense of graduate students—in direct conflict with his responsibilities as Dean of the Graduate School.

Since the start of VPR/Varahramyan’s tenure in 2017, attaining and maintaining R1 research institution status has been a top priority for him and President Ferrini-Mundy. This goal has been chased undemocratically—higher administration has pressed the matter while dismissing the concerns and working realities of the faculty, staff and student researchers that do the actual research here. 

High among concerns are budget cuts and insufficient appropriations handed down from the University’s administration which directly interfere with our many research programs. These have included hiring freezes on replacements for faculty retirees in some departments, paltry startup offers for new faculty which are below even what is offered at many R2 institutions and continued poor compensation packages for office staff which perpetuates a high-turnover rate. 

UMaine also cut 23 teaching assistantships last year, utilizing graduate student workers as collateral for its poor financial decisions. Not only does such a cut directly compromise the “R1 mission,” it sacrifices the quality of education of undergraduate students, the ability of graduate student workers to feed and house ourselves and a fair workload for staff and faculty. 

UMaine’s current budget shortfall is not an issue that exists separate from the UMaine System’s finances as a whole. It is a direct consequence of poor decisions at both University and System-wide levels. The balancing of university budgets is merely an arbitrary set of decisions made by the Board of Trustees and its delegates—no cuts to this or that program, no hiring freeze, etc. is inevitable. 

The Board and University budget teams have simply decided that cutting jobs for graduate students, underfunding office staff, not replacing empty faculty positions and forcing our research programs to pinch pennies in our day-to-day operations is preferable to cutting the exorbitant salaries of administrators like VPR/Dean Varahramyan and President Ferrini-Mundy (>$270,000 and >$500,000 annually, respectively). 

Likewise, the Board has deemed it acceptable to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars to the UMaine Augusta presidential hire who never worked a day for the System to save face for Chancellor Malloy and to this day, maintains someone on payroll to lobby the state to kill pro-labor bills that would improve the living conditions of UMaine employees. 

In that fashion, I wrote last year for People’s World on the layoffs at the University of southern Maine and UMaine Farmington, under Malloy’s leadership. The university has failed in union negotiations to account for increased cost of living.

The pivot of higher education institutions toward an industrial model and away from public education missions isn’t new by any means, and has been a collapsing domino chain for the past several decades. For UMaine Administrators’ R1 mission, it has meant a shift in direct resources from non-research-oriented programs such as the humanities and social sciences toward programs directly implicated in larger research endeavors. We’ve come to find it also means shifting resources away from Masters programs toward PhD programs. If UMaine’s undergraduate students, graduate student workers, staff and faculty are casualties of R1, then who does it serve?


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