In all my years of experience as a faculty member and administrator, I have become convinced that few boards of trustees are willing to systematically review the institution for which they are guardians and propose drastic needed changes. Many hold tenaciously to their views concerning the university or the geographic area they represent and fall short of really dealing with the academic and financial issues that lie before them. Often when planning exercises are conducted, plans end up being composites of compromises that have satisfied the status quo.

This certainly is not the case for the University of Maine System board of trustees who have studied the institutions of the system carefully as well as the conditions in which they find themselves and have put forward a draft strategic plan that is far-reaching and substantive. In each case, the members of the board put the interests of the entire state first, and they did this primarily by giving up their “turf” issues, understanding that true leadership, at this moment in time, necessitated putting everything on the table even their own self-interests.

One challenge that the trustees faced was that they needed to provide a balance between sustaining academic excellence and working with fewer resources. The first five of the strategic directions put forward in the plan by the board and the chancellor call for building and sustaining excellence in the faculty, academic programs, research and development, libraries and distance education. These strategic directions are critical to the system since no academically respectable institution in the country can make claim to greatness without strategic investments in its faculty and programs.

The strategic plan is practical and realistic since it does not call for the simple solution of solely adding new resources. At the heart of this plan are three additional critical strategies of accountability, centralization and redeployment of existing resources. It asks the system to make hard decisions and choices so that it can invest in itself.

In addition, trustees and the chancellor knew that they needed to support the communities of Maine where the universities reside and be respectful of the contributions these institutions make to the cultural, social and economic life of these communities. These institutions are enablers of their communities and are vested in these communities for the long run. Instead of ripping these institutions out of their communities, the board found consolidation to be a viable and critical strategy in accomplishing the goal of building excellence while being financially prudent. Campuses will be united administratively and academically, allowing them, for example, to offer graduate programs in the northern part of the state, where until now this has been prohibitive economically.

By consolidating into four institutions from seven, savings will be realized that can be used to invest in only four institutions: a strong national land-grant institution, a small public liberal arts college, and two comprehensive institutions that will have missions that speak to needs of the state of Maine: a rural comprehensive university in the north and an urban comprehensive university in the south. The state will have a clearly defined university system that will provide the students of the state with quality programs and robust educational opportunities. Furthermore, the plan recognizes and is respectful of the role of the community colleges by allowing them to fully embrace the mission of access, ceasing the competition with the community colleges by phasing out the university’s two-year programs. Students will have it all, but not everywhere and not at every institution.

The faculty will benefit greatly from the system’s move from a loose federation of universities in competition with each other to a well-articulated system of four well defined institutions. They will be able to work across institutional barriers as researchers and colleagues and have interesting and important opportunities to teach students at other locations. The consolidation will, for example, allow a small psychology department at one institution to be enriched by now having additional colleagues from other institutions with whom to engage intellectually. Research opportunities will also be available to more faculty members.

Fundamentally, this, of course, is about the students. In my opinion, it is the responsibility of the board of trustees and the chancellor to ensure that the students are the recipients of a first-class public higher education. When the ability to provide academic excellence comes into question as it has recently, then a board must act with integrity, rise above the politics and set a corrected course. This is what has been accomplished in the University of Maine System Strategic Plan.

Elsa Nunez is vice chancellor for academic and student affairs for the University of Maine System.