The University of Maine has a perception problem. At a time when it says it faces an ongoing budget shortfall and has shrunken its academic staff and offerings, among other cuts, the university is adding to its athletic department.
All the arguments for adding another senior associate athletic director — the need to raise money and build relationships with the community among them — may be valid. But when a campus is shrinking its academic footprint — the raison d’etre for any university — enlarging the athletic department by adding a new administrator raises questions about priorities.
Last month, UMaine announced that it had created a new athletic department position for head football coach Jack Cosgrove, who ended his 23-year tenure with a 3-8 season. Campus and university system officials stressed that Cosgrove was taking a pay cut — from $184,000 per year to $100,000. His salary, for now, is coming out of the president’s discretionary fund, money from donors that is not designated for a specific purpose. The university plans to hire a new football coach to replace Cosgrove.
His job duties center around fundraising, especially from the Alfond Foundation, community relations with local high schools and other organizations, and developing leadership programs for coaches and student-athletes. There are no set targets he must reach, but his “progress in achieving the goals and objectives set for the year will be reviewed,” the university said in an email.
What the university failed to explain was why this new position was a priority when it could have to reduce staffing to meet financial and demographic reality.
Cosgrove is the second senior associate athletic director UMaine has hired this year. In the summer, it promoted softball coach Lynn Coutts to replace Eileen Flaherty, who left to work as an athletic director at a Massachusetts high school. Coutts was coming off a 22-22 season, her best during her four seasons as head coach.
Coutts, who is paid $75,000 a year, has a long list of specific responsibilities including overseeing compliance with NCAA rules, Title IX, financial aid, student-athlete conduct, sports medicine, sports performance and equipment. Her work is evaluated annually by the athletic director.
At a time of declining enrollment and revenues, it is hard to justify adding administrators when teaching and other staff are on edge about their futures. Hiring additional administrators isn’t unique to athletics or the Orono campus.
Last year, the university system’s trustees passed a budget that took more than $11 million from its reserves and eliminated 150 positions to balance the system budget. The biggest cuts were at the University of Southern Maine, but the University of Maine’s spending on personnel decreased by nearly $5 million between the 2015 and 2016 budgets.
Then, last November, administrators of the University of Maine System warned that the seven-campus system could face a $90 million budget deficit by 2020. The deficit has since been revised to $53 million, but it remains a big gap for the system to close.
Cosgrove’s new position is emblematic of the university’s difficulty in making hard decisions. Declining enrollment and state support are not new problems, but the campus, and the system, have been slow to adapt to them. For too long, making small changes was the norm when prioritization and new thinking have been needed. Only recently has radical change been proposed, through UMS Chancellor Jim Page’s One University plan, which includes a unified budget for the system. The plan remains controversial and not fully detailed.
With fewer financial resources available than are needed to maintain the status quo, the University of Maine System faces difficult decisions about its priorities. Once those priorities are set, campus officials must judiciously ensure that limited resources are directed to those areas.
