Faculty are leaving a university in crisis

The Jan. 13 edition of the Bangor Daily News carried a short article under the headline, “Retirement plan yields UMS savings.” The article indicated that 20 tenured faculty at the University of Southern Maine have opted to end their career there and that about 100 others have decided to do so at other campuses of the system. And the USM vice president of academic affairs, as quoted in that article, seems to rejoice that this wholesale departure of senior faculty will afford USM a chance to recruit “younger, livelier and more contemporaneous faculty,” and that “We will see some people who used to teach science replaced with people who do science.”

I don’t know of whom [Mark] Lapping is speaking, but I know that the vast majority of those faculty choosing this opportunity to retire from the University of Maine “do” the subjects that they also “teach.”

One thing that distinguishes UM from other branches of the system is that it is the major research center in the state and awards the overwhelming percentage of master’s degrees and all of the doctorates earned in Maine. In the sciences as well as other fields, in order to achieve tenure and promotion to the rank of professor at UM, a person must have done significant research and publication in his or her scholarly field such as to acquire national recognition. In the sciences, most of the faculty spend a great deal of their time in the laboratory or in the field doing research — research funded almost entirely by outside sources.

The greatest part of funding for the science departments at UM comes from neither the state Legislature nor student tuition but from national institutes and private foundations as a result of winning awards in competition with hundreds of other departments across the country. In non-science departments, senior faculty have published highly regarded articles and books, have delivered papers at regional and national scholarly meetings, and served on the boards of national societies in their respective disciplines.

The very faculty who have achieved national recognition, who have over the years brought millions of dollars of research funding to UM, and who also teach the specialized courses that enable UM to attract highly motivated and talented graduate students to Orono are the very ones Lapping seems overjoyed to be rid of.

Some of the jewels of the UM faculty are taking this opportunity to retire, not just because of the monetary incentives offered, but because of the way UM and its faculty have been treated by the higher adminstration, the board of trustees and the state Legislature. I can’t speak for all of my tenured colleagues, but I am heartily sick of being treated as dead wood and a financial liability to the university and the state; of having to deal every semester, indeed sometimes in mid-semester, with budget rescissions that see departmental support staff fired and operating funds slashed so that, for example, I have to debate with myself whether or not to make a phone call in response to a query from outside the local dialing area (my department gets charged for that!), or to respond by mail.

As for the quality of my own teaching, I know from many years of student course evaluations that this senior faculty member who is choosing to retire is “lively” and quite able to communicate with today’s serious students. And although my values are not exactly “contemporaneous,” I am proud of that fact and feel no need to apologize for being an “older” faculty member.

I had always said that I would continue to teach until teaching ceased to be fun. Well, teaching at UM is still fun, but the amount and kinds of hassle the UM faculty have been subjected to for the past decade or so has turned me off on the university system.

I am leaving. I doubt that a “younger … more contemporaneous” person will be recruited to fill the slot I vacate, a slot integral to the program of my department. We have several vital slots being left unfilled or placed very, very low on the hiring priorities list. The same is true, I suspect, for many other departments whose undergraduate and graduate programs will be effected by the wholesale retirement of more than 80 senior faculty at UM. But then, programs don’t seem to be important to those on high and in state government, so long as money can be saved.

John F. Battick is an associate professor of history at the University of Maine.