It would have been interesting if the latest report on the University of Maine System — released this week by the League of Women Voters of Maine — included a budget for the expanded and improved services recommended. The numbers would have at least given it something new amid a collection of well-known problems.

Not that there is anything wrong with reminding the Legislature and the public that the university system needs additional funding for some really important reasons. It’s just that the report, which took two years to assemble, merely confirmed what already was known about the system, and, with a couple of exceptions, made recommendations that already are part of the system’s agenda.

The league points out the importance of research and development, saying more needs to be invested in these areas; true, but there is hardly a person in the state who would disagree with this. It consludes that university libraries should be upgraded to meet national standards; true again, and the issue is before the Legislature this session. And its observations on the importance of maintaining a liberal-arts core at each of the universities will find little opposition anywhere.

Some of the recommendations might fall under the heading of useful reminders: Distance learning, a mess four or five years ago, still needs help to become more effective. The system’s formula to distribute funds to the universities remains opaque to most people outside the chancellor’s office despite attempts to clarify it. Other suggestions, however, are more troublesome.

Take, for instance, the league’s idea to have the University of Southern Maine duplicate the graduate programs already offered at the University of Maine in Orono, the state’s land-grant university and the system’s flagship campus. The reasons behind the suggestion are logical enough — working people in the Portland area want to continue their educations and cannot quit their jobs to attend UMaine to do it. The solution, however, ignores at least two conditions. The money going to the university system is limited, so broad duplication of programs is out — avoiding duplication was one of the reasons the system was created.

Second, there are other ways to deliver graduate-level courses, not just to Portland but to all parts of Maine. Graduate courses already are offered via interactive television and the Web. UMaine and USM already work together to offer courses live, with either USM professors providing the lectures or UMaine profs traveling south to provide evening and weekend classes. A statewide doctoral program in biotechnology draws on the expertise from institutions around the state, including Jackson Lab, Maine Medical Center and Eastern Maine Medical Center, in addition to the university system.

At the beginning of the league’s report, it favorably quotes a statement by Bowdoin College President Robert Edwards. “In all other states with which I am familiar, a `flagship’ land-grant university, with strong graduate and research programs, disposes a library, laboratories, cultural performances and intellectual concentrations of strength that create a major field of force for higher education in the state — and in the state economy. …”

Exactly so. And that is precisely why diluting the strength of the flagship campus by sending program funding elsewhere makes so little sense.