Richard Pattenaude gazed out over the campus of the University of Southern Maine from his seventh-story office in the University of Maine Law School building. Though the building is white, not for one second will USM’s president let you think he works in an ivory tower.

No. He is someone who wants to be down on the streets, on the frontlines helping people change their lives through education, as his was. And he makes sure his school follows his lead.

An essential way he defines a university is by its role in serving the surrounding community, Pattenaude said. “A great university is not just in its community. It is of its community.”

The external work that the USM faculty does is part of “the ethos of this place,” he said. “Part of our job is service.”

And luckily for him, USM is blessed with an energetic, service-oriented faculty, Pattenaude said.

In the early 1980s, while working at a research university in upstate New York, Pattenaude had an epiphany. “I didn’t feel I was having a direct impact on people’s lives. It was a little too abstract.”

Pattenaude sought out schools with major community service components where he could make a difference in people’s lives. After he left SUNY-Binghamton, he worked at Central Connecticut State University, a school whose mission statement says that “public service is expected of all members” of the university, prior to coming to USM.

Pattenaude was born in Seattle in 1946 and raised just outside the city. “I was the cutting edge of the baby boom,” he said.

He would become the first person in his family to earn a college degree.

His father was a bus driver “who knew the importance of education.” His mother obtained a GED and became the librarian at a neighborhood public library in Seattle.

He attended San Jose State University in California, a school he describes as similar to USM, and it “transformed my life.” There he earned a baccalaureate in economics in 1968.

Then he spent two years in the U.S. Army. It first sent him to Texas for six months to learn Vietnamese and then to Vietnam as a prisoner of war interrogator.

After his tour of duty, he leapfrogged a master’s degree and headed straight into a doctoral program in political science at the University of Colorado, earning his doctorate in 1974.

His first job was as an assistant professor of political science at Drake University in Iowa, where he doubled as associate dean of arts and sciences. It was a pattern he would follow throughout his career.

In 1980, he moved to the State University of New York at Binghamton, taking on the jobs of associate professor of political science and associate vice president for academic affairs.

It was there that he became disenchanted with the abstractness of the research university, and began seeking positions at schools like San Jose State, more urban, with many first-generation college students.

He found what he was looking for at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain. In 1986, he took over as its vice president for academic affairs and professor of political science.

“It is a place that affected people’s lives,” he said.

In 1991, he took the job of president at USM, a school that “fit all” his criteria, and where he has been able to apply to the full his vision of a service and community oriented university.