When Stephen Pelsue looks at the students in his master’s degree program in applied immunology at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, he sees many who have been sent for advanced training by some of the area’s most dynamic employers, like Maine Medical Center and the Foundation for Blood Research.

In fact, to a great degree, USM’s applied immunology program was designed by the region’s biomedical community.

“I like that community-university cooperation,” says the former Jackson Laboratory researcher.

It is just this kind of community connection that has given USM a pivotal role in the fastest growing region of the state.

USM’s accompanying growth in enrollment and prestige over the years, however, has worried some people at the University of Maine, which has often been referred to as the state’s “flagship campus,” or even as the “jewel in the crown” of its public system of higher education.

In the 1990s while UM’s enrollment fell, USM’s grew to the point it now has the state’s largest student body. Meanwhile, some of USM’s programs have developed a regional reputation, and many of its professors earned their degrees from prestigious graduate schools.

The relative status of the two campuses reached a new level of discussion last fall when USM’s Board of Visitors issued a report declaring the goal of making their campus the “equal” of UM. Although Orono may be located near the center of Maine geographically, it’s never been clearer that Portland is the state’s population center, and area residents want a university campus to match their area’s economic vitality.

In its report titled “A Southern Maine Imperative: Meeting the Region’s Higher Education Needs in the 21st Century,” the board of area civic leaders declared that southern Maine expects USM to be a “first-choice institution for students,” while also continuing to provide educational opportunities for residents who are tied to the region by jobs and families.

It asserted that “Maine must have two university centers offering undergraduate and graduate academic programs, each critically important to the economic and cultural vitality of the state.

“The fundamental assumption under-girding higher education planning for the 21st Century is that USM and the University of Maine are equal partners in securing Maine’s future.”

The report calls for changes in the way state funds are allocated to the university system’s seven campuses, changes that would increase USM’s allotment relative to other campuses by $7 million by the 2006-07 academic year. At the same time, the report calls for USM to gain more financial support from the region’s businesses and industries.

Nevertheless, despite the high-flown rhetoric, the report’s words were measured.

In trying to place the two universities on more equal footing, the board was quick to state that southern Maine has “no patience with any form of destructive competition between campuses … .”

University of Maine System Chancellor Terry MacTaggart characterized the report as a “strong, clear visionary statement to help USM develop.”

But it will do no good if it triggers an “institutional ego debate,” MacTaggart said. Since the state cannot afford two research universities, USM and UM must play “complementary and coordinated” roles.

Walking a fine line

USM officials know they walk a fine line between service to southern Maine and expensive duplication of programs in a state that traditionally has been stingy with dollars for postsecondary education. It’s an issue officials have wrestled with since the state’s teacher colleges were welded to UM in a seven-campus system more than three decades ago.

“We are trying to pursue programs and degrees that make sense for the industries and people of southern Maine,” said USM President Richard Pattenaude. “The last thing we need to do is imitate Orono.”

Professor Richard Maiman made a typical comment when he described the development of a new master’s program in creative writing at USM. “It was crucial that the program not look like anything Orono offered,” said the political science teacher.

The tension between UM and USM is a story being played out across the country. State land grant universities, which were placed in rural areas accessible to an agrarian economy, are being challenged by new urban institutions, Pattenaude said. “That history creates an inherent stress.”

The problem with UM is that Orono “has always been a backwater. That’s the nature of land grants,” said Trish Riley, chairperson of the University of Maine’s Board of Visitors. She earned her BA and MA at UM in the 1970s, and now heads the National Academy for State Health Policy based in Portland.

Because of its location, “people fail to see that UM is a statewide university with a statewide mission,” Riley said. And given the state’s “limited appetite” to fund higher education, UM is “a good base to build on.”

But it’s not as if Mainers have to favor one campus and dispose of the other.

“It’s not one, or the other,” according to Peter Hoff, president of UM. While it is important to have a strong urban university, it should not come at the expense of the land grant, he said.

Even before the 1990s, the history of the seven-school University of Maine System was marked by stress caused by competition for the state’s scarce higher education resources.

Roughly 9 percent of Maine’s general-fund state budget is earmarked for higher education. Last fiscal year, 13 percent of combined general fund spending for all 50 states went to higher education, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.

A seminal 1986 report on the university system written by a commission that included the late Edmund Muskie noted that on one hand the system was draining resources from UM, and on the other that USM was both underfunded and overextended.

A battle over whether USM would offer an engineering program back in the 1980s in some ways settled the nature of the dispute to come.

Despite the Muskie commission’s “conviction” that such a program should not be established, in the end, USM got the program.

Today the new engineering labs in the John Mitchell Center on USM’s Gorham campus, a former normal school, illustrate who won the battle.

According to Jim Smith, the first engineering faculty member hired in 1986, the program’s creation was a direct factor in subsequent expansions by the local semiconductor industry.

“In areas that are vital here, we have to have the offerings,” Smith said. “There is no way that UM can service this region except in a peripheral way.”

But USM still treads gingerly.

If there’s a need for an advanced program, the school first looks at some kind of partnership with UM, President Pattenaude said. Officials from both schools meet regularly to discuss graduate offerings.

To sidestep costs, he said, the school borrows equipment or lab space from local businesses, especially if the program is being set up at the behest of the business.

And USM can ask to borrow UM faculty to provide Orono-based programs. Modern communication technology and computers help.

Robert Kennedy, UM’s vice president for academic affairs, cites a doctoral program in computer science from Orono that has been translated to Portland as one of the successes. But it is still an evolving program, and one of the few in-place joint ventures.

Competing for students

One resource USM and UM are competing increasingly for is students.

Ali Hathaway, 22, is a fifth-year senior at USM who grew up in Hampden.

She chose to go to USM, in part, because she wanted to play soccer and basketball and doubted she could play at a Division I school, such as UM.

Hathaway also knew that USM was on the verge of offering a sports medicine program, a course of study she wanted to pursue. And to top it off, USM was about to open a new field house.

Because she grew up in Hampden, she didn’t even apply to UM. Hathaway said she wanted to go away to school.

And while “I love my family, and they’re up there,” she said, “when I think of my career and career opportunities, they’re here or farther south.”

She already has a summer internship lined up in Boston, which she hopes turns into a job in the fall.

The mirror image of Hathaway is Chris Moody, 23, who is scheduled to graduate from UM in May with a major in psychology and a minor in sociology.

Though he grew up in Gorham, he didn’t even apply to the state university in his back yard.

“I wanted a change,” he said. “I wanted to get away from the Gorham area and expand my horizons.”

Also, at the time he applied to colleges, he viewed USM “more as a community college,” Moody said. “I came to UM because of the resources, the library, the faculty, the research.”

USM is less of a community college than it used to be, but the number of full-time students is still slightly less than half of its enrollment.

Nearly three-quarters of UM’s students are full-time.

USM officials like to note that on a headcount basis, their enrollment has surpassed UM’s since 1996. This fall, 10,282 students enrolled at UM, while 10,820 students enrolled at USM’s campuses at Portland, Gorham and Lewiston.

USM’s enrollment overtook UM’s because the student body at Orono shrank 30 percent between 1990 and 1997, plunging from an all-time high of nearly 13,300 to barely more than 9,200, before rebounding.

This was caused by the recession of 1990-91, which crimped family incomes, as well as state aid to the university system. Tuition skyrocketed 70 percent.

These factors were coupled with former UM President Fred Hutchinson’s effort to boost quality by curtailing enrollment. The plan backfired because state aid was reduced as the student body contracted. It was a demoralizing time as some UM departments saw their budgets and staffing slashed to 1970s levels.

Even when it comes to graduate enrollment, the two campuses are about equal, although the nature of the programs is different.

UM offers 25 doctoral programs and 60 master’s degrees; USM offers two doctorates and 21 master’s programs.

All but three of the UM doctoral programs are in engineering or sciences, as are 36 of the master’s programs.

USM’s one doctorate is in public policy and management, and just four of the 21 master’s programs are science or engineering based.

A sign that USM is geared to the needs of the area’s economy is that it offers 19 graduate level “certificate” programs, which are aimed at the needs of working professionals, while UM only offers five.

Salesmanship

Today UM professors and administrators aren’t nearly as vociferous as they used to be over the perceived threat from USM.

The USM Board of Visitors report didn’t faze UM’s Faculty Senate president. In fact, Michael Grillo, a medieval art historian, described it as a “wonderfully ambitious document” that underscores the importance of higher education. But it also raised two real issues facing the state, he said.

One is the growing North-South divide, which will persist as long as “southern Maine continues to grow and northern Maine continues to dwindle,” he said.

The other is Maine’s limited economic base, which curtails the resources the state is able to give higher education, thus making it a “poor idea” to try in any way to recreate in Portland what already exists in Orono.

UM officials and professors express confidence in what they do, but concern that the word doesn’t always get to the public as well as it does from USM.

Doug Allen, chairman of the philosophy department in Orono, said that since taking over in 1997, Hoff has raised UM’s profile, but over the years USM has been the better self-promoter.

UM has been very good at promoting its professional programs, such as engineering, but it has not been as good at promoting its liberal arts programs, said Allen, who in January became president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, an international organization. “We are fulfilling our mission but we’re just not proclaiming it.”

Hoff agreed that “the relative notoriety of our science, engineering and forestry programs takes away from the fame of our liberal arts programs.”

However, he noted that UM is the only public institution in the state to have a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, putting it on par, in this regard, with Bates, Bowdoin and Colby colleges.

Hoff proudly points out that the state’s research and development initiative was born in Orono.

He also trumpets the fact that UM’s Top Scholars program, which provides tuition scholarships for the valedictorians and salutatorians of Maine high schools, is paying off. The number enrolling has risen from 35 in 1996, the program’s first year, to 92 this past fall. That means a third of all Maine high school valedictorians and salutatorians are enrolling at UM.

“If UM has had a problem, something we are correcting, it is getting the word out about what we’re doing,” said Larryl Matthews, dean of engineering at UM.

In engineering, Matthews is looking to set up “advanced manufacturing centers” in conjunction with the technical colleges to help build the state’s infrastructure.

A strategic plan being drafted at UM includes a call to redefine the public service mission of the university, to focus on becoming an “engaged university.”

But for many officials at both schools, the real issue highlighted in the intercampus funding competition is the amount the state invests in postsecondary education.

“Rather than arguing about how to cut up a fixed pie, it would be more productive to see how we can enlarge the pie,” Matthews said.