March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

University of Maine, Faculty’s pluses and minuses > Professors face low pay, opportunity to affect students’ lives

Editor’s Note: This is the last of three stories examining problems and promises facing the University of Maine as it prepares to hire a new president.

ORONO — When Stephen and Tabitha King were looking for someone to accept a $1 million check for their alma mater, they chose one of their college English professors, Burton Hatlen.

The Kings picked Hatlen to receive the first installment of their $4 million gift several months ago because of his influence on their lives as University of Maine students. The money was quickly deposited into a university checking account to be used to fund scholarships and hire arts and humanities professors.

As the university sets out to hire new faculty, one challenge it will face is attracting high-quality teachers like Hatlen to an out-of-the-way school that doesn’t pay very well.

On the plus side, UM offers aspiring professors the opportunity to affect the lives of their students, many of whom will be the first in their families to set foot on a college campus. That’s one reason Hatlen, with degrees from Harvard and Columbia universities, chose UM in 1967.

At schools like Hatlen’s alma maters, students, most of whom come from the top of their high school classes, are motivated to learn. Teaching there is easy because you’re selling a product they want.

At a school like UM, however, not all students arrive on campus well-prepared and ready to learn. Many, as was Hatlen, are first-generation college students with little idea of what higher education is all about.

Hatlen, who grew up on a small farm in California in the 1950s, said he felt out of place at Harvard and Columbia. At the University of Maine, he has found a comfortable home.

“I have felt close to my students over the years because I understand where they come from,” said Hatlen, winner of UM’s 1996 Presidential Research and Creative Achievement Award.

Two students whom Hatlen understood were Stephen King and Tabitha Spruce, both from poor Maine families. Hatlen taught the aspiring writers early in his career at UM. They have remained close over the years. So when the horror writer and his wife decided they wanted to help their alma mater, they handed the first of four $1 million checks to Hatlen.

Scholarships funded by the gift were named after another of the Kings’ English professors, Ted Holmes, who is now retired.

Stars and duds

Although some leave lasting impressions, UM professors have long been beleaguered by the public perception that they are not as good as teachers at other schools. As do the university’s students, professors fall into a broad spectrum of quality. Some, who have been awarded international prizes, are academic stars. Others get less than rave reviews from their students. Most fall somewhere in the middle.

But there is no doubt that the overall quality of professors at the Orono campus has steadily improved.

For example, the number of professors with the highest degree available in their field, usually a doctorate, has increased over the last 30 years. Last fall, 84 percent of full-time faculty members had terminal degrees; only 40 percent did in 1966.

Public opinion of UM faculty members has been improving as well. In a statewide survey of 300 Maine residents by the Bangor Daily News last month, 60 percent of the respondents said the faculty was either good or excellent. Four years ago, only 49 percent gave UM’s faculty such high marks. The poll has an error margin of 6 percentage points.

More people also believe the faculty should be paid more. UM faculty members are among the lowest-paid professors in the country among similar institutions. Forty-six percent of those polled think paying faculty members higher salaries would improve the overall quality of the university. Four years ago, only 35 percent thought the faculty should be paid more.

“We have a much better faculty here than people in Maine realize,” said Susan Brawley, a biology professor who came to UM in 1991 from Vanderbilt University, where she was a tenured professor.

She said professors on the Orono campus do a remarkable job of teaching and conducting research considering how little support they receive from the university.

Her department, for example, is scattered through five buildings. That means that distilled water setups and other apparatus needed for experiments are duplicated numerous times. The situation should improve some when the new Global Sciences Center and School for Marine Sciences are opened in the next few years.

Lack of equipment is also a problem. For example, the botany department’s scanning electron microscope has been broken for many years. Because Brawley needed to use the microscope for her seaweed research, she included the repair cost in a grant application, an unusual request.

The agency awarding the grant said it would not pay for the costly repairs but would split the cost of a new microscope with the university. Thanks to the efforts of the vice president for research and public service, the university agreed and kicked in $12,000 toward the purchase of a new scanning electron microscope. The broken one still sits unusable.

Brawley and other professors say they routinely use money from grants they receive to buy laboratory equipment for their undergraduate students. At Vanderbilt, Brawley was given $5,000 to $10,000 a year to buy and maintain laboratory equipment.

“I love this university, but what bothers me is that it has so much potential that is not being reached,” Brawley said.

These problems have plagued the university for decades. They were outlined in the university’s 1988 self-study report to the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. “The strength of the university is clearly its faculty who have, with minimal resources, maintained a high standard of excellence in undergraduate teaching, public service and research,” the report said. “The weakness of the university has been in public and private funding levels.”

Beaten by Puerto Rico

Maine ranks 50th in the nation for its support of scientific research. The state recently was surpassed by Puerto Rico, which decided to invest millions of dollars it raised from a new corporate tax in research to help boost the territory’s economy.

Only recently have university and state officials turned their attention to this problem. They were prodded by a small group of UM professors who took to the road last year touting the virtues of the Orono campus and explaining why it needed to be better-funded.

The professors, dubbed the Faculty Five, helped gain $1 million for research from the Legislature and the promise that a $17 million bond issue to support scientific and technological research would be put on the ballot.

Although it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what other states such as research giant North Carolina are investing, the money would go a long way to improve UM’s efforts.

To help Maine boost the state’s research efforts, the federal government put it in a group of similar poor states such as West Virginia, Alabama and Kentucky. Under the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, the 19 states receive federal research money that is earmarked just for them. On average, the EPSCoR states are investing 13 percent of their budgets in higher education, while Maine invests only 5 percent.

These numbers say it all to Senate President Mark Lawrence, D-Kittery.

If Maine and its people “don’t invest the money and create the jobs, someone else will,” said Lawrence, the prime sponsor of a program called Jumpstart 2000, an initiative to invest more state money in research. The program aims to create 2,000 new private sector jobs by the year 2002 by investing $20 million a year in scientific research. Lawrence said the money will allow Maine’s universities and research firms better access to federal grants which will bring in additional funds. He said the state’s investment will be more than tripled in just a few years.

In addition, he points out that 50 percent of new jobs will be created within 90 miles of a university campus.

Such initiatives, and the Legislature’s recent increased financial support for UM — the first increase in state funding in six years — have buoyed faculty spirits.

Things getting better

“I think things universitywide are getting much better,” said education Professor Jeff Wilhelm, who came to UM in 1995 after 15 years as a middle school teacher. “The mood has definitely lightened.”

Money has not been so much of a problem for Wilhelm, who said he chose UM over other universities that offered him a job because he is encouraged to work closely with the state’s K-12 schools, something that was shunned at some more prestigious universities.

Although he admits that he has sometimes paid for travel out of his own pocket, Wilhelm credits UM with funding new training programs for the state’s teachers. For example, shortly after arriving in Orono, Wilhelm asked the dean of the College of Education, Robert Cobb, if he could start a summer institute that would train teachers to make the best use of computers and other technology in their classrooms. Within a week, Wilhelm said, the institute was up and running with a $60,000 budget.

“If you’ve got time and energy, the college will support you,” he said.

One concern for Wilhelm, however, is a lack of personnel. He is the only person in the College of Education who covers literacy issues for secondary and middle school teachers. The college has no one to teach social studies education and is short-handed in the area of special education.

“We’re doing very much with very little,” he said. “We’ve got a great university that’s doing great work but we can’t cover all the bases.”

The biggest concern, he said, is that when faculty members leave, they are not automatically replaced. That problem was exacerbated this year when 68 professors, about 15 percent of the Orono faculty, accepted an early retirement offer. The offer, which was accepted by one-third of those who qualified, was made to save the university money in the long run by getting rid of older, more costly faculty members.

In the short term, not all the departing faculty can be replaced. With money from the Kings and a loan from the University of Maine System office, the university plans to replace only 30 professors next year.

Bigger classes

The loss of professors will increase UM’s student-to-faculty ratio to about 16 students per faculty member, roughly the average at the other New England land-grant universities. Before the buyout, UM’s student-to-faculty ratio was 14-to-1.

According to the NEWS survey, the public is concerned that the early retirements will hurt the university. Of those polled, 58 percent said they thought the academic quality of UM would be harmed by the retirements, while 3 percent said the quality would be improved.

Faculty, too, are concerned. “The most tragic thing that happened here is not the retirements but not being able to fill those positions,” said Hatlen who has been serving as interim dean of the College of Arts and Humanities.

But, warned President Frederick Hutchinson, who will retire June 30, UM must keep in mind why it made the early-retirement offer. One of the biggest challenges facing his successor, he said, is to keep the overall plan in mind.

“This campus has got to keep its eye on the target the next few years,” he said. “We need to make sure we don’t use the money freed up from the retirements to replace all those faculty. We need operating budgets. God, do we need operating budgets.” Among other things, operating budgets are used to fund laboratory equipment, such as that needed by Brawley and her colleagues.

What should UM aspire to be?

The university needs to keep in mind, according to English Professor Hatlen, that it is not the University of Wisconsin, a 40,000-student campus that is heavily funded by the state, and it never will be.

“What we need more than anything else is to stop measuring ourselves against models that are not appropriate to who we are,” he said. “Our population is too small to support a land grant a la University of Wisconsin.

“But we can offer young people a chance to graduate with a degree that means something outside the state,” Hatlen said.


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