ORONO – Helping to lead the University of New Mexico, Brian Foster said Tuesday he is most proud of making the campus more diverse and changing the way hiring searches are conducted.

As provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the Albuquerque campus, Foster hired more women and minorities to be deans, he said.

“I started with a group of white males. Now half are female and one-third are minorities,” he told about 35 University of Maine faculty members who gathered at the campus’s Wells Conference Center to meet Foster, the first of four candidates for UM president to be interviewed.

During previous searches at University of New Mexico, more time had been allotted to screening candidates than to generating a quality pool of applicants. But Foster said he put the emphasis on “getting out and finding the best people.”

He recalled, “That changed the tone of the campus environment and made a statement about how we valued diversity and searched for quality.”

Aiming to offer “some sense of what I stand for in higher education,” Foster, 66, told professors that one of his priorities at UM would be to provide access to college for “those not privileged, but destined for higher education.”

He described himself as a “true believer in the power of higher education. It colors everything I am,” he said. “But if that’s all you have, you’re in trouble. You need passion and direction or you’re like a Maserati with no place to go.”

One way to set a “cohesive and effective vision” for UM is to figure out what “we can do that no one else can,” Foster said.

“There’s no point in UM putting $2 million to ratchet up a program if the University of Southern California already put $200 million into that same program,” he said.

The next step should be to discuss the campus’s unique role in an “open, comprehensive and inclusive way.” As president, proclaiming the university’s role is fruitless if “no one else has bought into it,” he said.

A well-defined institutional agenda is important not only to recruit quality faculty and students, but also to become a force in federal research, according to Foster.

UM should capitalize on its traditional land grant status, he said. The campus is “incredibly well-positioned to do some important things” promoting economic development – the biggest challenge a state has today, Foster said.

Besides supporting small businesses, UM should use its “important networking function” to bring together groups around the state important to economic development, he said.

Something else Foster is proud of is helping promote faculty involvement in decision-making at the University of New Mexico.

After realizing that professors in leadership roles weren’t privy to important discussions on campus, he asked the faculty senate president to be a member of the provost’s staff – making decisions about research, human resources and technology. And he asked the faculty senate president-elect to serve on the dean’s council, which makes decisions about academic affairs.

Faculty brought an important perspective to those discussions, he said. “You’ve got to get people actively involved in governance, and it’s got to be real.”

The University of Maine System’s strategic plan will be a help in positioning UM as the state’s only research facility, according to Foster. The plan is valuable because it “provides a venue for discussion” about the differences among campuses and between the university system and the community college system.

“Those relationships need to be defined,” he said.

Also named as finalists for UM’s top administrative position are P. Geoffrey Feiss, provost of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.; Mary Ann Rankin, dean of the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Texas-Austin; and UM interim President Robert Kennedy. Each individually will spend two days meeting with groups on campus as part of the interview process.

For information on the candidates and their schedules while on campus, visit online: www. maine.edu/umainefinalists.