PORTLAND, Maine — Harvey Kesselman told faculty members Thursday he would bring stability and transparency to a University of Southern Maine presidency that some faculty have argued has lacked both in recent years.
Kesselman was the third of three finalists for the school’s presidency to visit the university, following former Maine House Speaker Glenn Cummings and West Virginia University business college Dean Jose “Zito” Sartarelli over the past week.
Each candidate was scheduled for a two-day visit, including open meetings with various stakeholder groups and stops at all three of USM’s campuses — in Portland, Gorham and Lewiston.
Kesselman has worked at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey since 1979, holding a wide variety of jobs that touched on nearly every aspect of higher education.
Currently the provost and executive vice president at the school, he has held senior level positions overseeing finance, student affairs, administration, institutional research and education. Kesselman has also maintained his position on the college faculty for more than three decades, carrying a teaching course load in addition to his other duties.
Kesselman said that breadth of experiences put him in a unique position to be responsive to diverse stakeholder groups at USM, where faculty and administrators have been at odds over shared governance and recent budget cuts.
He also said that as a northeastern Division III athletic school with multiple campuses and about 8,500 students, The Richard Stockton College is very similar to USM.
“If you look at my background, you’ll find I’ve held every position,” he said during an open meeting with USM faculty in Portland late Thursday morning.
“I’m interested in this kind of university in this part of the country,” Kesselman continued.
During his visit earlier this week, Cummings — currently the interim president at the University of Maine at Augusta and a former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education — said his intimate knowledge of Maine students, educators and politicians sets him up well for the USM presidency.
Sartarelli, with more than 30 years experience with international pharmaceutical corporations, told faculty last week he has a track record of finding big donors and recruiting new students from all corners of the world.
Kesselman’s pitch Thursday was that he’s helped build a school very similar to USM from every step on the higher education ladder, so he understands how to be inclusive in decision-making. And as someone who is still a teaching faculty member in addition to his executive vice president job, he knows the pressures on both.
“You can work through almost any problem by working through the faculty and the Faculty Senate,” he told a classroom full of professors. “You have to respect shared governance.
“That doesn’t mean I can’t say, ‘no,’” Kesselman continued. “You don’t get ahead in higher education without saying a couple ‘nos,’ but I’m going to say it to your face and I’m going to tell you why. And if you can out-argue me, you just might get a ‘maybe.’”
Kesselman’s message of shared governance comes at a time when that’s a point of contention at USM between the faculty and administration.
Faculty members have filed several grievances against the administration of interim President David Flanagan over his elimination of 51 faculty positions and five programs — steps Flanagan said were necessary to balance USM’s budget. Faculty have also criticized the president for not adequately including professors in the decision-making on how to deal with the budget crisis.
Whoever is named the next president of USM will be the fourth person to hold the position since 2012. The previous three have had contentious relationships with the faculty.
Kesselman suggested he could put an end to both of those trends. He said his 36 years working at The Richard Stockton College show he’s not a short-timer, and that he’d expect to stay at USM for at least eight years if chosen for the post.
“George Washington had it right,” Kesselman said of the first U.S. president, who served for two four-year terms. “Eight years is about right. I’m good for eight years.”
The three finalists for the position were selected from a pool of about 80 applicants by an 18-member presidential search committee made up of system trustees and staff, university staff and students.
The search committee will select one of the three finalists to recommend to University of Maine System Chancellor James Page, who is expected to bring that selection to the university system’s full board of trustees in the spring for final approval.
