University of Maine System Chancellor Joseph Westphal wants a $400 million bond over 10 years to rebuild and expand the system’s buildings and related infrastructure. Doing this, he says, will attract more students and re-searchers, create new opportunities for learning and reduce the cost of maintenance. Sounds good.

The likelihood of the chancellor getting the $400 million soon is exactly zero, as the governor’s bond package made clear last week. But by asking for a gargantuan amount he accomplishes several goals without harming the university system. For instance, the chancellor has the opportunity to discuss what lousy shape many of the university buildings are in. He can compare what other states have done for their state university systems. He can be supportive of his presidents’ goals without having to take a small bond and chop it up among them. And when he fails to get the $400 million, the chancellor suffers no political loss because no one expected him to get the money anyway.

Chancellor Westphal first mentioned the large bond last September, but it is a measure of the work on it that lawmakers are only barely familiar with the idea. The Senate majority leader, Michael Brennan, a former chairman of the Legislature’s Education Committee, laughed when he was asked about it this week and said, “This is the first I’ve heard of it.” Chancellor Westphal said he hopes to include the Maine Community College System in the bond campaign, but wasn’t sure whether its leaders supported the idea.

Raising a huge amount of money over the next decade to improve university infrastructure might be a great idea -it has certainly worked elsewhere – or it might be a bad one; the chancellor has made a major proposal without yet demonstrating its value. The Education Committee, which will hear this and other education-related bond requests, can help. It should direct the chancellor and his presidents to make the case for the bond to the public, and further make the case for a large private-donation match.

Committee members will know the university has successfully spread this idea if their constituents start to see the university system as a crucial economic developer – not just in research but for the livelihoods of thousands of average Maine citizens; if they understand the larger mission of the university system; and if they understand how the money would support the mission.

It would be lawmakers’ jobs then to decide whether putting that much money into the system rather than elsewhere or anywhere at all was in Maine’s best interest. But the first challenge is to understand what is at stake. Informal discussions about it aren’t enough; the action required now is test the idea in public.