While the University of Southern Maine has endured multiple rounds of deep budget cuts over the past year, the 8,400-student university has concurrently been at work honing a new strategic focus: becoming Maine’s metropolitan university.
And the metropolitan university push has met with understandable skepticism among faculty and students, and the public beyond southern Maine. It’s not directly connected to the dozens of position cuts and handful of program eliminations, but its timing has made it seem so. Though the metropolitan university planning group has involved professors and students, there’s a widely held perception among those groups that the metropolitan university concept has been forced upon USM. It hasn’t helped that few have been able to successfully articulate the metropolitan university vision.
Harvey Kesselman, USM’s newly announced president who will take the reins July 1, says he would not have applied to become USM’s leader had the three-campus university not been aspiring to become a metropolitan university.
Kesselman has spent almost his entire 36-year career at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey — which became Stockton University this winter — after receiving his bachelor’s degree there in 1979. He has taught a variety of courses at the 8,600-student public institution and has ascended the administrative ranks. Today, he is provost and executive vice president.
Asked about the metropolitan university vision, he gives the example of a Stockton University sociology professor who involved students in repurposing a handful of Atlantic City parking lots into gardens. The effort didn’t only involve the professor’s sociology students. Science students participated, determining the best setup and soil types for an urban garden. Hospitality and tourism management students devised a strategy to sell the vegetables to local restaurants and showcase the gardens. Local K-12 students participated, and the sociology students could look into whether their participation had any effect on truancy and academic performance.
“You don’t solve problems from just one discipline,” Kesselman said Monday. As a metropolitan university, “the whole structure will promote that kind of activity. That will change the way curriculum is delivered down the road. This doesn’t happen overnight.”
Stockton University is one of 361 colleges and universities from across the county that carries the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, a certification that shows a college partners with community institutions as a regular part of teaching and research. USM plans to pursue the classification by 2020, and Kesselman says he would like to see those standards of community engagement built into USM’s promotion, tenure and curriculum standards.
“They’re not well received at first,” Kesselman acknowledged of new strategic visions.
Building support for and implementing a new strategic vision are far from Kesselman’s only challenges. While he’ll take charge following a round of cuts, USM’s budget difficulties are not behind it. Administrators expect to dip into university system reserves to balance next year’s budget — to the tune of $1.5 million for USM.
As Kesselman — who will be paid a $235,000 salary — moves from New Jersey to Maine, he’ll move from an institution in the midst of a growth spurt to one that’s shrinking. Stockton University has broken enrollment records over the past four years, begun new graduate programs and expanded to new satellite campuses. USM, meanwhile, has lost 12.7 percent of its students over the past five years. The entire university system is reviewing its physical infrastructure with an eye toward shedding excess space.
Part of the answer to USM’s enrollment woes, Kesselman said, is to boost the university’s first-to-second-year retention rates, which have averaged 64 percent over the past four years. “If we could retain even 400 more students, your fiscal problems would start to be mitigated, and that’s a win for everybody,” he said. USM also needs to reach more adult students and attract more students from outside Maine, he said.
And Kesselman has experience working with faculty members who have a stake in university governance. A group of vocal USM faculty members have been the administration’s most vociferous critics over the past few years. Perhaps that experience will prove the most important part of Kesselman’s resume when he starts at USM.
