BANGOR – It was a grim time when Terry MacTaggart agreed to take over as chancellor of the University of Maine System in December 1995. The state’s economy had only just begun to creakily edge away from the 1990-91 recession.

The period since has provided ample opportunity for the system’s seven campuses to do what MacTaggart thinks public colleges ought to do. And that is “put their shoulders to the economy” to help power the state’s economy and lift personal incomes by creating a better-educated work force.

But back in the mid-1990s, the Legislature was batting around bills that would have dismembered, disemboweled and decapitated the system.

State aid for the system had seized up because of the recession, falling 5 percent from the 1989-90 academic year to 1995-96 levels.

Over the same period, tuition had been jacked up across the system. For example, it leapt 83 percent for a full-time, in-state undergraduate at the University of Maine.

And after reaching an all-time high in September 1990, the system’s enrollment plunged 8.5 percent by September 1995.

Despite the difficulties “I knew [things] could be turned around,” said the 54-year-old MacTaggart, who is stepping down as chancellor at the end of the month.

He knew coming into the job that “the bonds between Maine people and higher education had to be strengthened.” And MacTaggart set out to do just that.

But, for his first 18 months in Maine, MacTaggart said he just did “a lot of listening.”

He found that people had realized that higher education was a necessity and not a luxury any longer. The mill layoffs in the early 1990s drove home the point that a person couldn’t just step from high school into a job at the mill, he told the Bangor Daily News.

People now saw the university system as a means to a better life, MacTaggart said. But it had to be affordable and accessible.

Political leaders began to see how the university system could leverage the economy and improve personal incomes, he said.

As the economy improved, the state began to pour more money into the university system, having increased its appropriation 41 percent since 1995-96.

With greater state aid, the university system has been able to hold tuition increases in check.

After reaching a low point in September 1997, enrollment has rebounded, rising by almost 8 percent. However, it has not yet regained its 1990 peak.

When he took over, MacTaggart said his five-year agenda had three major goals. The first was to increase the number of Maine high school graduates going on to college. The second was to increase the work the university does in support of the economy. And the third was to adjust the culture of the system to make it more “entrepreneurial and service-oriented.”

“It made no sense that Maine had a high high-school graduation rate and a low university participation rate,” MacTaggart said.

The one thing the system could do about it, MacTaggart said, was to make itself more affordable.

“We made the case [to lawmakers], not just for university funding, but also for financial aid,” he explained.

Lawmakers nearly doubled the amount of financial aid for low-income Mainers. That, coupled with tuition increases held to the rate of inflation for the past four years, means “people with the inclination now have the wherewithal” to go to college, he said.

MacTaggart said he wanted to instill an attitude in the system that a goal of a public university is to educate a lot of students.

A “driving force” in serving more students has been the 10 major university outreach centers across the state, along with more than 100 interactive television sites, MacTaggart said.

People see them as easy points of entry, small and comfortable places, he explained.

On a visit to the Thomaston center, which is housed in the old Thomaston Academy building, along with the public library, almost all the people he met taking classes were women “who had seemed to have had a tough life, and who weren’t going to go to Orono,” MacTaggart said. They held down a job, had kids and “feel comfortable where they are.”

A crucial element in all this, and a perennial controversy, has been the ease or difficulty of transferring credits among the sites, centers and campuses.

MacTaggart said that it has been a priority for the system’s trustees to make sure credits can be transferred if courses are substantially the same. But if courses are significantly different from place to place, students should know that up front, he said.

“We’ve made substantial improvement,” he said. “We’re probably as good as anyone in the country and we were substantially worse before.”

There are still challenges facing the system, he said. Both affordability and access need a lot more attention, according to MacTaggart. Another one is the perception of the system’s quality.

The University of Maine System works in the shadow of three prestigious private colleges in the state: Colby, Bates and Bowdoin.

The University of Maine System’s job is to tell students that they can get an excellent education in the system, one that can behoove them economically, he said.

Though stepping down as chancellor, MacTaggart is not leaving Maine.

“I like it here,” he said, citing the state’s physical beauty and the opportunity for outdoor activities, including snowshoeing. Also, “the straightforwardness of Mainers is refreshing.”

The system’s board of trustees has created a brand new position for MacTaggart: He will become the first “university system research professor” and will be attached to both the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy at UMaine and the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine.

He has already begun researching a book that looks at how effective half a dozen states have been in using higher education to improve per capita incomes. He is trying to glean “the critical success factors.”

The book could end up being a “blueprint” for Maine, he said.

For his subsequent research, MacTaggart said, he would like to present and publish papers that educational and legislative leaders can use to make decisions concerning higher education.

To date, studies on higher education in Maine have been episodic and based on different data, he said. “I see these as regular, brief, cogent intelligent reports backed up by the same data.”

In his new position, which is scheduled to disappear in five years, he will earn $116,000 a year, equal to three-quarters of what he earned as chancellor.

His vision of the university as an economic engine permeates his thinking.

But with the exodus of so many Maine college graduates from the state, some worry that the university system is just priming the economic pumps of other states.

MacTaggart counters that to attract employers the state needs an educated and ample work force.

“Do you want to have a fighting chance by having an educated work force or not?” he asks.