USM’s vision

It is impossible not to be impressed with a new report from the board of visitors of the University of Southern Maine. Called “A Southern Maine Imperative,” the report is an ambitious, well-targeted argument for expanding programs at USM to meet the current and future demands of the region, even at the expense of duplicating programs at the university system’s flagship University of Maine.

Indeed, under this plan, the meaning of “flagship” would have to change. “The fundamental assumption undergirding higher education planning in the 21st century,” the report says, “is that USM and the University of Maine are equal partners in securing Maine’s future.” The USM board is emboldened for several reasons. The region has both a growing population and a growing shortage of well-trained workers; it has place-bound high-tech employees looking for more, often graduate-level education; it has, in USM, a university that appears eager to do more in the community while at the same time improve the quality of its course offerings.

The challenge for USM is not whether it can grow to include more graduate programs and be recognized by peers as a first tier school by 2010, as the report says it should. With a little patience in attracting the right faculty and building superior research labs, it could be that and more. The question is how such an expansion would be funded, particularly in regard to the other universities in the system, and what a duplication of programs would mean to the University of Maine.

These are serious but not impossible problems. In releasing “A Southern Maine Imperative,” USM properly emphasized that the funding increases it seeks should not come at the expense of the rest of the system and that it would not accept increases that did result in cuts elsewhere. Already, however, it is clear that USM officials are not content with the current system of allocating state funds, which results in per-student funding at UMaine – with all the research and graduate level expenses of a land-grant university -being considerably higher than that of USM.

UMaine and USM collaborate now on some courses and programs, but certainly if considerably more resources are to go into the system to support a USM expansion, Mainers should expect much more coordination to take place. Technology, in the form of electronic course work and lectures, can help some. But at least as important is for the administration and boards of both universities to come together and agree on goals that complement each other, to work together in a meaningful way so that they end up offering more together than they ever could separately.

Their first challenge will be to rally support for Chancellor Terry MacTaggart’s ambitious funding plan for the entire system in the face of what is expected to be a state budget structural gap of $200 million. Without that funding, USM’s ambitions may need to be delayed beyond end of the next decade.