The unmaking of a president

If you’ve been following the news stories about the forced resignation of University of Maine President Peter Hoff, which finally occurred yesterday, you’ve seen the same question posed in various forms: How could system officials push out a successful president just because this spring he challenged what he called “negative and critical comments” about UMaine by the chancellor?

That could be an interesting question, but it’s the wrong one, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. A better question is this: Why were we able to witness a slow-motion defenestration over the last two weeks?

The University of Maine System, meaning Chancellor Joe Westphal and the UMaine System board of trustees, have dropped the president of their flagship campus because for nearly two years they have urged him to be more aggressive at creating public and private alliances, raise considerably more money from alumni and the federal government, bring more enthusiasm to campus and generally lift UMaine to national prominence. These are high aspirations and they are good ones. The university is the hope of this region; raising those hopes is exactly what it should be doing.

Such aspirations demand a high level of performance not just from the president but from everyone connected to the university. They would be a relief to those on campus who already perform at this level (and there are more of these than are often recognized) and would scare the hell out of those who see UMaine as a vehicle for coasting into bucolic retirement.

I’ve talked with Peter Hoff only about a dozen times, mostly at public functions, since he arrived here from California in 1997. I learned early on he wasn’t eager to visit the newspaper, unlike his predecessor, Fred Hutchinson, who would drop by here just for the fun of watching us grab our notebooks and sit up straight while he applied his Maine accent to a Reader’s Digest-quality amusing anecdote. President Hoff didn’t strike me as a glad-hander, and he seemed to wander mentally when the topic of a meeting bored him, as if he wouldn’t feign interest or behave as if someone’s commonplace obser-vations were revelatory. (That reminds me, he politely begged off an interview for this column.)

Feigning interest, high energy, thick skin, skillful timing of “the ask” when soliciting money, making the extra phone calls to ensure everyone feels good about the university are all part of carrying out the changes demanded by the system office. Evidently, the president’s efforts were inadequate in these areas, and rumors started more than a year ago that he would not be in his current job for long.

That’s why the idea that he was discharged over his comments in April, which concerned the chancellor’s plan to reform the system, made so little sense, though that didn’t prevent them from being repeated. I think the reform does figure prominently into President Hoff’s departure in a more fundamental way, however. The description two years ago of what the chancellor was looking for in a president aligns entirely with his strategic plan, released last March.

The plan would give more money to UMaine and in return the university would expand its “statewide and national responsibilities” while its “research capacity and prominence will be increased, both within the system and among national research institutions,” according to the current draft, which should have had an equal emphasis on liberal arts. How well did trustees think President Hoff fit into this vision? Not very, I expect.

Now the trustees have a large challenge of their own. Peter Hoff, whether he is directly responsible for it or not, leaves behind a strong record in areas that count. Enrollment is up substantially. The university’s honors program is strong. Research and development funding has tripled during his tenure. New buildings dot the campus. Certainly there were complaints about his performance too, including that he didn’t cooperate readily with businesses in Maine. But system officials themselves emphasize that President Hoff did his job very well, only now the president’s job description has changed.

Trustees cannot find someone to fill this new, more aggressive, more public role who is just a little better at it than Peter Hoff, and they cannot fill it with someone skilled at only the public tasks. The standard they have set for themselves in Mr. Hoff’s dismissal is to find a president who can inspire faculty, and lead both locally and nationally while accepting a salary that is way below the going rate for university presidents.

That’s a national-caliber assignment, but this is a new UMaine.

The first performance test for the chancellor and the trustees was removing President Hoff. The standard practice is that a president gets a chance to step down and accept a faculty position, which is awkward but bloodless. As in other fields, it happens on a Friday afternoon; by Monday, the former president is agreeing with faculty members that professors’ offices really could do with a little rehab, and would it kill them to install new air conditioning? The process should not occur, as it did on this occasion, on Friday-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday, with ink all over the place and reports that the parties would “continue talking.” Continuing talks? This isn’t Major League Baseball.

The chancellor and the trustees are right for wanting to raise UMaine’s profile to a national level. But just as these aspirations demand top performances in the classroom, laboratory and administration building, they require similar results in the system office, too.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.