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Roy Turner is a retired professor of computer science who spent nearly 30 years at the University of Maine teaching and conducting research in artificial intelligence.
As a retired University of Maine professor, I watch the unfolding budget crisis with horror, but not surprise. After nearly 30 years of watching the administration prioritize short-term, across-the-board fixes to its perennial budget shortfalls — usually involving cutting all department budgets by the same fixed percentage — I have become used to knee-jerk reactions disguised as “strategic planning,” “blue sky plans,” or whatever name is chosen to label the pointless exercise du jour — pointless, because to the extent the resulting plan is followed (usually very little), it never addresses the root causes of the issues.
Of course, I believe the Legislature bears the bulk of the blame for the budget woes, since they refuse to fund the university at a level to achieve the goals they want it to achieve for the state.
The University of Maine System, by its very existence, bears another huge chunk of blame. We are a small state, with one research university, one urban university, a good public liberal arts college, and then a few more or less community colleges or regional campuses masquerading as universities. I believe there is no need for a system; all it does is suck resources into another level of administration that would be far better used funding the educational mission of the campuses.
During my time at UMaine, I never witnessed a service that was taken from campus to the system level that improved by being centralized. Making the University of Maine at Machias into a college of UMaine itself was a move in the right direction, but it didn’t go far enough in my view. I think the other regional campuses should also be brought under UMaine’s (or maybe the University of Southern Maine’s) umbrella. Dismantling the university system could in itself, I believe, almost address UMaine’s budget shortfall.
And then we have the administration’s share of the blame, which I believe is massive. In the time I was at UMaine, I watched administrators figuratively breed like rabbits, with new associates and assistants popping up regularly at every level, usually with salaries that beggar those of the highest-paid professors.
If the UMaine administration truly did due diligence in attempting to come up with this year’s budget, then in the interest of transparency, let’s see their analysis of the administrative overhead — for that is what it is, overhead — of UMaine as compared with its peer institutions across the country. I suspect that it would not be a pretty comparison, but perhaps I’m wrong.
Administrators seem fond of “justify your job’s existence” analyses. Let’s see the one they must have done for themselves, hopefully starting with allocating enough resources in terms of faculty and staff needed to address the institution’s mission and run the infrastructure, then rebuilding the administrative overhead needed on top of that. Would the result resemble the current administration? I’d be curious to find out.
And while we’re at it, why, in the throes of a monumental budget gap, did the administration enter into a million-dollar-plus contract for artificial intelligence? The current generation of AI is undoubtedly useful, but in my opinion over-hyped, dangerous (to our ability to think critically, if nothing else) and ultimately wrong-headed in its base technology.
Giants in the field like Yann LeCun have come to similar conclusions. After all, we humans are able to learn from far less data far more quickly, and we only require around 20 watts per brain. So something is horribly inefficient about the current tech. My research expertise, you ask? Artificial intelligence. Does UMaine as an institution want to leap on this particular bandwagon at this particular fraught time in its budgeting process?
Don’t get me wrong: I love UMaine, and it was largely a wonderful place to spend the bulk of my career. That’s why I would like to see it healthy and thriving, so it can continue to serve the people of Maine as it has since its founding.