ORONO — Eight years ago, while he was president of South Dakota State University, H. Ray Hoops was approached by a disgruntled department chairman who complained about the university’s slothful janitorial and facilities employees.

Hoops, now a University of Maine presidential candidate, said he knew that those employees were overworked, underfunded and understaffed.

He also knew that there was only one way really to make a point about the importance of understanding and relating with other departments and people. His solution: The next day both Hoops and the chairman spent the day, shovels in hand, helping the facilities staff around campus.

“I have made a career of seeing the other side,” Hoops said Tuesday while visiting the Orono campus.

The anecdote says a lot about Hoops, who is one of four finalists for the post of president of Maine’s flagship university.

Hoops’ philosophy on the importance of interdepartmental liaisons is not unique. But it may be just what the university wants and needs at a time when campus employees say tough economic times have created an atmosphere of cannibalism among campus departments. Some at the university are saying openly that departments and programs are being pitted one against the other for survival. That situation was not lost on Hoops.

“I had an interesting morning,” Hoops told a half dozen students. “I had a lot of people sitting in meetings with me pointing fingers at other people. And that’s not unusual.

“There’s a budget crisis at Maine and people are looking for a reason for it,” he said.

Hoops is a believer in an organizational structure in administration and in delegating authority. But he isn’t afraid to get his feet wet, or in the case of South Dakota, even dirty.

He also has stood his ground.

Early on at the University of Mississippi, Hoops said, he called off a search for a dean in the school of accounting there because it failed to include in its selection of candidates a highly qualified woman who worked on campus.

The search resumed, he said, with the woman being selected as the top finalist who then was named the first female dean in the university’s history.

He has held his ground elsewhere too. While he told UM students Tuesday that he is flexible and willing to reconsider his options, one issue on which he has refused to budge is a controversy seven years ago at South Dakota. It prompted him to resign from the presidency after only eight months.

While Hoops has said he has not publicly discussed the specific reasons, he has reported that he resigned rather than carry out a gubernatorial directive involving personnel issues. If the circumstances came up again, he has said, he would do it again.

Although he told students that his long-term goal is to be UM president, he has been and is a candidate elsewhere. While Hoops did not want to comment on those candidacies, he did say that he is one of five finalists at Eastern Tennessee State. He added that he has on his desk a letter withdrawing from that candidacy.

Hoops was also a semifinalist for the University of Central Florida’s top post for which UM interim President John C. Hitt has been selected. He said he withdrew from that candidacy because he felt there wasn’t a good match between himself and UCF.

Over the past four years that Hoops has been at Ole Miss, the institution has earned a reputation that may wipe clean what he called an “ugly racist history” that had preceded it.

With two historical black institutions in the state, Hoops and the university moved away from the emphasis of recruiting black undergraduates and placed more emphasis on the graduate program. Over a four-year period the number of minority graduate students increased from seven to 366 students and earned the university the annual Peterson’s Guide Award.

During his tenure, when a group of minority students held a sitdown in the administration building protesting the slow progress of changes and improvements on campus, Hoops went back to his basic premise of listening to people.

For a few hours, he joined those sitting down and just talked with them, something reminiscent of UM President Win Libby’s midnight chat in early May 1970 to calm more than 400 emotional students concerned about the Vietnam War.

In Orono, Hoops still has to contend with three other candidates. Among them are University of Farmington President J. Michael Orenduff; and former UM administrator Frederick E. Hutchison, now a top administrator at The Ohio State University and considered by some to be the favorite. Rounding out the four is John E. Van de Wetering, president of the State University of New York College at Brockport.

According to search committee chairman Dr. George W. Wood, the list of four is expected to be narrowed to two or three by around Feb. 5. That list then will go before the system’s chancellor. A final decision may come in February or in March.