March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Is Umaine a dying university?

As news reports and now the Jan. 22 columns by Jerome Nadelhaft and John Battick have pointed out, around 15 percent of the University of Maine faculty have chosen the early retriement package or have resigned to take other jobs over the past year. Although I am currently serving for one year as a dean, I have taught at the University of Maine for nearly 30 years — indeed, I came here the same year as Professor Nadelhaft; and the sudden departure of so many of the people I have worked with to build the university is shocking and painful to me. Unlike Professors Nadelhaft and Battick, however, I chose not to retire; unlike them, too, I do not think that the university is dying. In crisis, yes — but a patient in crisis can move either toward death or, with proper care, toward recovery.

I believe we will come through this crisis because the faculty who have chosen NOT to leave, 480-plus people in all, still represents the largest single concentration of intellectual power in this state. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of these people reain committed to providing Maine students a quality education equivalent to anything available at Maine’s nationally known private liberal arts colleges, or at public universities in other states.

I agree with many of the points that Professor Nadelhaft makes. In particular, I think he is right when he suggests that the application of the term “university” to the institutions at Presque Isle, Machias, Fort Kent, Augusta, and Farmington has blurred in the public mind the difference between a university and other no less valuable but quite different kinds of educational institutions. As a consequence of this confusion, Maine is at risk of seeing its only full-service university become simply one more regional campus — “the University of Maine of the Penobscot Valley,” as one of my collegues facetiously suggested. For the Legislature and the trustees to allow any further deterioration of the University of Maine would be a grave disservice to the people of this state.

We have many young people who are ready and eager for an intellectually demanding program of study, but who do not have the money to go to a private college or university. Such students deserve the opportunity to study at a full-service university with the range and quality of facilities available at UMaine: classes taught by highly qualified teacher-researchers, the largest library in the state, the finest performing arts facilities in the state, well-equipped research labs, etc. In the past, the University of Maine has been able to respond to the needs and aspirations of such students; and in the current crisis the Legislature, the trustees, and the faculty of the university must work together to ensure that in the future Maine students will have the option of choosing a genuine university education.

Nevertheless, I also think that if the University of Maine is to continue to fulfill its mission, we must acknowledge the ways in which we are and will continue to be difficult from the great state universities — Ohio State, the University of Wisconson, etc. — that we have in the past sought to emulate. Since 1970 our enrollments have honored around 10,000 students, except for a brief bulge during the President Lick years in the last 1980s. Professor Nadelhaft suggests that at 10,000 students we are too small to function as a real university, and he is probably right in thinking that we should grow a little; but our potential size is restricted by the relatively small population base in Maine, we we probably can’t aspire to grow to much more than about 12,000 students, if we continue to maintain reasonably high admissions standards. (Currently, SAT averages at the University of Maine run about 100 points higher than at any other campus in the system and are roughly equal to those at such peer instiatutions as the University of New Hampshire and the University of Vermont.)

President [Dale] Lick increased the size by lowering admissions standards, and the effect was to give UMaine a reputation that we are only now overcoming, as a school that “anybody could get into.” President [Fred] Hutchinson has insisted on restoring our traditional admissions standards, but as a consequence enrollments have dropped, and the result has been an apparently unending fiscal crisis.

I think President Hutchinson was right to restore admissions standards that make UMaine academically competitive with other land grant universities. But at 10,000 students, or even at 12,000, we aren’t large enough to support the full range of research specialties that we see at an Ohio State or even a University of Massachusetts. Major research universities like Ohio State can afford to sustain a considerable number of faculty who devote most of their time to their research work, and who may see their teaching responsibilities as an annoying distraction. But for the most part the faculty of the University of Maine have neither sought to nor been able to define themselves primarily by their research specialties. Because we are relatively small, at least at the undergraduate level; and UMaine has in fact attracted a large number of teachers of this sort.

Yes, faculty at a university have traditionally been expected to do research as well as teach, and in this respect the University of Maine, unlike most other institutions in the system, has demanded research productivity of all tenure-track faculty. But the faculty who have been happiest here are those who have seen their research, not as taking precedence over their teaching, but rather as nourishing their teaching by keeping them on the cutting edge of their disciplines.

In fact, because of its size UMaine is in some respects more like Colby or Bowdoin than it is like Ohio State. I was an undergraduate at the University of California — almost universally regarded as one of the top three or four research universities in the nation — in the 1950s. As an English major, I took only one course per year with fewer than 25 stueents. Most of my advanced English courses had 75 to 100 students, and one, taught by the famous Mark Schorer, had 300 students. In contrast, all the upper-level courses for English majors at UMaine are limited to 25 students, although we sometimes, in response to student requests, allow enrollments in specific classes to creep up to 30 or 35. Thus in English at least class sizes at UMaine aren’t very different from class sizes at many private liberal arts colleges — and, I might add, the progessional qualifications of our English faculty are also as high as those of the faculty at schools like Bowdoin or Colby.

Funding limitations mean that UMaine cannot afford to give students the level of out-of-class attention that they receive at private liberal arts colleges, but we can and do give our students far more individual attention in class than they are likely to receive at Ohio State — or than I received at the University of California.

Indeed, over the years UMaine has offered students an education as good as anything available at a private liberal arts college, and at far lower cost. Don’t the Maine students who cannot afford to go to Colby or Bates deserve as good an education as the ones who can pay $25,000-plus per year for that privilege? That is the real question before the people of Maine at this time. The faculty of the university have maintained the quality of our educational programs by working, in most cases, 60 to 80 hours a week or more; and they have done so because they are committed to giving their students the best. These dedicated teachers need and deserve the support of the people of this state, and with this support we’ll get through this crisis.

At the same time, I am also hopeful that the crisis itself will help us to understand better the kind of educational institution that the faculty have created here in Orono and over the last 30 years: not simply a junior-grade Ohio State, but something unique, something between a liberal arts college and a research-intensive university. The kind of university that we are is also, I think, the kind of university that Maine needs: a university dedicated primarily to offering the highest-quality education to the people of this state.

Burton Hatlen is professor of English at the University of Maine. He is currently serving as interim dean of the College of Arts and Humanities.


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