The governor appoints the University of Maine System board of trustees and gives the board “final authority over all matters within its jurisdiction. The jurisdiction of the board relates to, and is exercised over … all educational, public service and research policies, financial policy and the relation of the university system to the state and federal governments.”

That’s from the bylaws of the system, easily obtainable and apparently never challenged by legislators. Perhaps they were busy with LD 1241, a bill that strips the board of much of its power as punishment for carrying out its duties.

LD 1241 requires trustees to first submit for approval any of its restructuring plans to the Legislature’s Education Committee before adopting those plans. Do you get it? If you don’t, notice that the bill is retroactive to Sept. 1, 2004, a date before the trustees’ controversial Strategic Planning Initiative was passed.

Chancellor Joseph Westphal already has backed down on the plan because political support for part of this plan wasn’t there. The chancellor offered, when he no longer had much choice, to delay a proposed merger of the University of Southern Maine and the University of Maine at Augusta. The goal of this portion of the plan was to reduce duplication between UMA and the community colleges by changing UMA from primarily being a two-year-degree college to one offering baccalaureate and graduate-level degrees.

The delay in the trustees’ merger initiative places it before the Education Committee, which will kill it. Scorched earth not being sufficient for those whose jobs may have been threatened, LD 1241 would then salt the fields so that no ideas ever grew from trustee meetings again.

What should give the committee pause as it considers LD 1241 today is that its sponsor, Sen. Elizabeth Mitchell, and other university-reform opponents such as Sen. John Martin, have been associated with the Legislature and the university system for years. They are well aware of the financial and organizational problems within UMS, and their own contributions to a practical reform have been … what? Legislation to stop anyone else from making changes.

The UMS merger may have been valuable or it may have been ineffective. All it is now is dead, despite what lawmakers and officials say about it. The legislative intrusion into the work of trustees charged with overseeing the system, however, remains healthy – the question with LD 1241 is whether it will be codified in statute.