PORTLAND, Maine — The first of three finalists for the University of Southern Maine presidency told faculty at the school Thursday that recruitment of more students would be his top priority.
On Thursday, Dr. Jose “Zito” Sartarelli started a two-day visit to the university, with stops scheduled at all three campuses. He told professors he has the track record — and overseas experience — necessary to attract students and donors for a school where dropping enrollment and flat funding have created annual budget crises.
“We have to get our numbers up,” he said with a nod to USM’s “metropolitan university” rebranding effort. “If you don’t get your numbers up, it doesn’t matter what you call it. You could call it ‘Harvard 35’ and it won’t matter.”
In addition to Sartarelli, the University of Maine system announced last week that interim University of Maine at Augusta President Glenn Cummings and Harvey Kesselman, provost and executive vice president at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, are finalists for the USM presidency.
Cummings and Kesselman are scheduled to visit the university for two days each next week.
The university — which has campuses in Portland, Gorham and Lewiston — has been without a permanent president since Selma Botman resigned in July 2012. Since then, the office has been occupied by temporary appointments, for about two years by former University of Maine at Farmington President Theodora Kalikow and since July by former Central Maine Power Co. CEO David Flanagan.
Sartarelli, West Virginia University’s chief global officer and business college dean, had three decades of experience working domestically and abroad with pharmaceutical corporations before starting work in academia in 2010.
Sartarelli told faculty members Thursday in an open meeting that he hoped to leverage that background to help recruit new students and donors to USM.
Relations between the university’s administration and faculty have been strained going back to Botman’s tenure — she was the subject of a facultywide “no confidence” vote before her departure. The simmering tension boiled over in recent months, as Flanagan proposed the elimination of 51 faculty jobs and five academic programs as part of a response to what he called a $16 million budget deficit for the coming fiscal year.
The faculty union filed grievances against the administration over the cuts, and many professors have argued vocally that they weren’t properly consulted on the budget before the eliminations were made.
Against that backdrop, faculty members asked Sartarelli on Thursday about his views on faculty involvement, as well as whether the school can effectively recruit new students with five fewer programs and 51 fewer faculty members.
“We have had students who wanted to take classes here but can’t because there aren’t professors to teach them,” said Lorrayne Carroll, associate professor of English and head of the local American Association of University Professors chapter.
Sartarelli didn’t wade too deeply into the budget controversy, saying he’s “assuming [administrators] did what they did with the good intentions of sustaining the university.”
But he said he would maintain an open-door policy and, in his position at West Virginia University, he seeks input from faculty early in the development of his annual budget.
Sartarelli, who was born and raised in Brazil, said that while his administration and faculty may not always agree, “if we do not reach out to you [for input], you have all the reason in the world to be upset.”
Sartarelli worked in various capacities for major pharmaceutical corporations Eli Lilly and Co., Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson from 1980 until 2010.
In 2010, he joined West Virginia University, first as Milan Puskar Dean of the College of Business and Economics, then later adding the role of chief global officer.
Sartarelli claims enrollment in the West Virginia business school has doubled — reaching more than 2,700 students — since he arrived in 2010.
He told USM faculty Thursday that the gains he’s seen in West Virginia have come despite decreasing high school populations in that state, bucking a common argument for why Maine universities are seeing enrollment drops. Part of that his business college gains have come from international recruitment to the college, which Sartarelli said grew from 72 in 2010 to nearly 200 three years later.
He said at USM that he would consider creating or restoring programs to help international students learn English and acclimate to Maine, as well as deploying more recruiters abroad to attract students.
In his cover letter to USM’s presidential search committee, Sartarelli notes that under his watch, the business college grew from $29 million in net assets to $45 million, and he said the school raised a record $30 million in donations in his four years at the helm — with an additional $9 million on gifts expected.
“Job No. 1 of any new president [at USM] should be, ‘How do we recruit new students?’” Sartarelli told the faculty Thursday. “Recruitment, recruitment, recruitment, enrollment, enrollment should be job [No.] 1 of a new president. If it’s not, you should be suspicious.”
