BUILD CONFIDENCE IN UMS

The University of Maine System’s chronic money shortages are well known, as are the limitations of the state budget as a remedy to them. But this year, lawmakers who would like to see both that Maine’s public universities are adequately funded and efficiently run have an opportunity to meet those goals.

The budget moving along in the Legislature includes Gov. John Baldacci’s proposed $5 million in new funding for the system, an amount that system trustees say will require a 12.6 percent increase in tuition payments from students. Chancellor Terrence MacTaggart has proposed, and found Democratic support for, an additional $6 million in funding, lowering the tuition increase to 7 percent, if further administrative cuts of $2.5 million are made. (To eliminate the tuition increase, according to the system office, would require an additional $12 million over the governor’s proposal.) More negotiations on additions to the budget are expected next week.

Chancellor MacTaggart has so far found $2.7 million in savings within the system office. Further savings on a larger scale, however, would have to be found at the seven universities, and that may become the job of the next chancellor, Richard Pattenaude, who begins July 1. To find those savings, and to provide the public with confidence that their university system is being run well, the new chancellor should consider an independent audit, which would include a thorough review of how well each campus was meeting the goals of its mission and how it compares with national standards.

Legislators can help this process by first agreeing that UMS will need more available dollars than what the governor has planned, but that the added funding should not become part of the system’s base budget. They could approve the added funding for one year, contingent upon a systemwide audit, and agree to reconsider the funding level once the audit has been completed.

Such an audit would likely find that much of each university is run efficiently and doing an effective job meeting objectives, despite funding shortages. Some areas would show that they are well above that, operating at very high levels with minimum budgets. But still others would show that they could be run at least as effectively on many fewer dollars, and reallocating those funds within the system could make a difference with struggling departments. The politics of higher education are such that moving that money around is difficult without an outside observer offering guidance.

Legislators have heard so many speeches, and likely given a few themselves, about the growing importance of higher education, even as they have allowed the state budget percentage devoted to its universities to slide lower year by year. This year’s funding question is an opportunity for them to address the problem while reassuring the public that all the dollars going to the UMaine System are spent effectively.