BANGOR, Maine — University of Maine System Chancellor James Page believes the system has been too slow to react to the changing worlds of education and economics, and he plans on pushing it to get caught up.
Just one month into the job, Page spoke at the Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce’s Early Bird Breakfast and gave his early impressions of the system’s standing and what it should aim to accomplish in coming months and years.
Following the financial crisis of 2008, community colleges, private institutions and trade schools responded nimbly, improving job training and online learning options while maintaining low costs for students, Page argued.
“They have done great jobs in understanding needs and filling the niche for those needs,” Page said.
That has meant more competition for a limited pool of potential students.
Coupled with challenges such as declining enrollments in Maine high schools and crumbling infrastructure on some of the system’s campuses, the system has to start repurposing funding and prioritizing, Page said.
“Maine’s economic realities are what they are,” said Page, the first Maine native to serve as chancellor. “We aren’t a wealthy state. We’re an old state. We’re behind the curve on many fronts.”
If Maine is going to overcome these hurdles, the seven universities of the system will need to be the catalyst, the chancellor argued.
“The university system cannot succeed — will not succeed — if Maine doesn’t succeed,” Page said.
To help boost the business and economic infrastructure in the state, he said, the system’s universities will need to build Maine’s “intellectual property” and partner with businesses to develop technology and create jobs.
Page said the system can’t hope or assume it will receive more money from the state in the future, adding that “we’ll be lucky to hold our own.”
“We have to show that that investment really does pay off,” Page said.
Page also stressed the importance of distance learning and online course work to the future of the university system. The growing number of online degrees offered nationwide means UMaine not only competes with state schools such as the University of New Hampshire, but “now it’s going to be competing with Stanford,” Page said.
Page said he doesn’t have all the answers to the complex challenges facing the system.
“I don’t have a comprehensive master plan yet,” Page said, telling those in attendance that they should never trust the master plan of someone who has been on the job for only a month.
Page also said he will be eyeing the system’s administration to see whether it can shrink, freeing up funds to allocate toward other efforts to move the system forward.
The system already has taken a few of the right steps toward making its programs more attractive, Page said.
On Jan. 23, the UMS board of trustees voted to freeze tuition for the next academic year and limited the number of undergraduate credit hours needed to obtain a degree to 121.
Page said one of his overarching challenges is to turn what he called a “federation” of seven campuses into a true “university system.” That means more collaboration, simplified transfer processes, and aligned goals that respect the different mission of each university.
That means a lot of work is ahead.
“If it had been simple, it would have been done by now,” Page said.
Humanities and Arts are not going to show a “pay off,” especially to a Republican governor who takes down a labor mural, calls its supporters “idiots,” and certainly isn’t going to want anyone believing in the anti-Republican claim of the academic scientists: that global warming is primarily human-caused.
Humanites and Arts are what give people passion, meaning and strength, even when they are poor and oppressed by corporate arrogance and the darkness of GOP views (for example, less than half of the Tea Party believes the theory of evolution).
We’re destroying education to save it.
You make no sense. The article and the breakfast meeting wasn’t about humanities and arts or the labor mural. What’s your point?
I’m going to reply to you, because I truly hope Chancellor Page reads this. In a sense, he is right to say:
“We have to show that that investment really does pay off”
But we have to do that in a way that champions the real and crucial importance of the Humanities and the Arts. Showing that education “pays off” should not be reduced to considerations of money.
There is much more to life than money, and money does not adequately measure those other sides, such as meaning, passion, self-knowledge, self-esteem, awareness of ethical and cultural factors that affect who we are–and so on. Money, actually, as a standard of measurement, can be deleterious to those other sides of life that are what make life worth living.
So, Chancellor Page, find a way to preserve true education. Don’t let the forces of ignorance, which are harnessed to greed, destroy the crucible of true learning in our universities.
I hope you are reading this, and I wish you the very very best on the difficult journey between Scylla (Ignorance) and Charybdis (the demand to reduce education to cost benefit analysis) before you.
The Chancellor uses the term “pay-off” in a general, not a literal sense. As such graduating competent teachers, writers or historians also qualifies as a meaningful return on investment.
Not to lepage and a few narrow minded legislators
It’s always far simpiler to comment on an event that one never attended, based on the reduction of an hour’s presentation down to a few paragraphs by a single reporter…
“Investment”, like “Sustainability” and even the definition of “Is”, is broad and open to multiple interpretations.
Some folks on these pages need to spend less time consumed by other’s “money”, and focus on the fact our University System appears to enjoy one of the best-prepared, Maine-educated, open-minded, and “thinking” Chancellors we’ve had in a very long time.
Yesterday was a Great Day for our University of Maine.
I missed how the labor mural fit in?? And I truly understand your concern about humanities and art but the main point of education is to learn how to support yourself and pay your bills once the education is over. If you spend $100,000++ on a 4 year degree, you should expect to have learned something that is of some value to a potential employer, if not, you have wasted your time. Chancellor Page should indeed preserve what you term “true education”, but his and the University System goal should be to provide an educated workforce to the employers of this State and country. After listening to him yesterday, it is clear that that is his and the University’s goal.
You are right to say that the Arts give people much, but it’s too bad that higher education has co-opted and sanitized them to such a nauseating degree. I pine for the days when music was literally played in the street or on the front porch, and when Grandpa was the best story-teller in the world, though he never had a degree, nor was he ever published due to being illiterate. The greatest artists of the past very seldom had anything to do with any academic institution and I believe that they were far more organic in their art than most are today.
There were manufacturing and other enterprises that fostered the arts and have been written up. Singing was a passion in more than one work place.
All the current arts & humanities crowd does is divide up students into ‘performers’ and ‘ audience’; training the performers at great expense and holding events where they perform….even political propaganda murals are a source of ‘work’ worthy of funding no matter where the money comes from.
Maine has specialized arts and crafts schools for the truly talented. Subsidize HAYSTACK, etc. and stop trying to have UMS duplicate everything simply because it has access to public funds.
It is long overdue, and perhaps too late, to restore the original mission of the Land Grant college under the Morrill Act. But it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get the new Prexy to reflect on then and now.
Absolutely. You know, the way you put it, I never thought that indirectly UMO may actually profit from the works of these artists. It really is up to us to bring back the spirit of spontaneity and real interactivity to the Arts. Hopefully, people will get bored enough to do something about the present dearth of inspiration.
Huh?
I was at the breakfast and it was clear that Mr Page understands the problems that Maine and the University system face. Being on the job for a month, he has no solutions but it was clear that he is ready to work on the problems. Change in Maine comes hard and it is doubtful that this man will be allowed to do his job given the politics of this State but he seemed up to the challenge and willing to take it on.
Cut your spending.. Waste resources
Here’s something that won’t be well received on several
fronts but would benefit the state’s economy and boost overall system enrollment-
there needs to be much broader based engineering college in southern Maine
(USM) including graduate degrees. The
Portland area and University of Maine system both suffer due to UMO’s
stranglehold on the engineering program.
Do we really need to spend tens of millions to try to duplicate the engineering infrastructure, technical and supporting classes, faculty lines and critical mass already at the University of Maine to serve a state with 1/250th of the nation’s population? The cost to a university to educate an engineer is also higher than for any other major, and the money will come from … ? (the answer isn’t tuition)
Yes we do. The state can spend all the money it wants to educate engineers but if they don’t stay in Maine then its all for not. After graduation there’s a good probability they’ll look for employment locally, with more opportunities in southern Maine there’s then a better chance of that educational investment staying in Maine. Likewise it provides a source of educational opportunities not currently available in the state’s largest metro area. It would allow for greater expansion potential in existing Maine companies and would greatly enhance the state’s ability to attract new entrepreneurs from the Boston area and further. You want greater job growth in Maine, here it is. There’s a myriad of ways it can be accomplished, and like I said, many of them not popular, but if this state’s to grow you need to think outside the box and invest in opportunities that will provide magnitudes of return. If Page wants change, this is one big way to get it.
Cut sports……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Good, productive comments. Now he has some selling to do within the organization. One question I would have is why any university campus has a public relations manager? USM has one and it totally befuddles me as to why I ought to be happy paying for it as a resident, non-Florida escaping, Mainer. Unfortunately, it is a system that has not been productively managed for a long, long time.
I wonder what those ‘missions’ of the various ‘universities’ are? What makes Farmington different from Presque Isl. and Machias? In the past, each one has competed with the other in the same career track; so now they’re all ‘different’?
The system is a byzantine empire and it’s crumbling under the dual attack of relevant community college training and technical education, and the globalism of web based universities like Phoenix.
Even worse are small colleges like Husson, which guarantee a graduate a job….now what parent would pass up investing there?
Always was puzzled on why there was a president and a chancellor; both with ample staffing.
ones for the whole state univ system, then each school has it own pres., similar to the local school sys where you live?
Translation: We want more money.
I’m predicting this man will try to close some of the universities, and I’ll let you surmise which ones.
I commend Mr. Page for the daunting job on which he embarks. When the concept of “Super U” came up some forty years ago, my first thought was “OMG!!”
The end result is now — splinter campuses, called “universities” and they are NOT — leeching funds and competing with one another. It was an exercise in Pork Barrel 101 and still is.
A COLLEGE grants four-year degrees; a UNIVERSITY does rigorous research and grants terminal degrees, as in doctorates. One of Maine’s splinter campuses does neither of the latter and graduated 67 people two years ago. That’s not even the equivalent of a local high school’s numbers!
Distance and onine learning capabilities dictate that it is time to have the two major universities in the state, let the rest be state colleges with their own particular thrusts, and do serious paring down of a “System” operation that employs way too many people at salaries that most Mainers would love to have! UMS = BLOAT!