OPENING BREAKFAST SPEECH 2013
Welcome back to the USM Opening Breakfast. Thank you all for being here and thanks to Sharoo Wengland and her team who have organized another beautiful event, and thanks to ARAMARK for the delicious breakfast.
We have a lot to do this year. But first I want to tell you some of the things I have learned about USM since I arrived.
I learned that the students we serve are the usual fabulous students from Maine and away, first-generation, traditional-age, transfer, returning adults, and all the rest of our varied populations. And when we succeed in opening their minds to their own possibilities and talent and human heritage, they blossom. Helping students succeed is, after all, what we do.
Our students are evidence of the quality of teaching and learning that you all provide – all of you, every one here is a teacher, every one of you contributes to the fundamental mission of USM.
And I found out that this institution is desperately waiting to be told what we can do to sustain USM.
When I stood here one year ago, I said I’m here to get USM on the right path, and you all cheered, which showed me your commitment to this place.
Over the past year I have studied USM, met with many of you, visited with community members, listened to many suggestions, and made some changes to start bringing us in line with the budget reality.
As a result, the administrative structure of this university is leaner than it was. We are doing some things differently, and others we are not doing any more at all. This work will continue because it moves us toward our goals of student success, community engagement, and fiscal sustainability.
The world has changed profoundly and noticeably in the last 5 years or so. The demographic decline in traditional, college-aged people; Budget and fiscal collapse at the national, state, local and family levels; The rise of competition; The Internet and its consequences.
Whatever we were doing in 2008 cannot be assumed to be true or good today. Not that we are bad or planned badly. This is what disruptive change looks like and it is painful to live through and it is painful to acknowledge the changes.
But guess what, nobody knows the future, including me. None of us knows yet the details of the future that USM has to create. We do know that we can’t go back to the past, just wait out an economic cycle and return to the good old days.
There is no savior who will ride out of the woods and stop the world of higher education from changing. So, should we all just go home? Give up? Lament the failures and blame everyone? Make up all sorts of conspiracy theories about any topic you can imagine—for example—shrinking the enrollment on purpose, instead of trying every best practice strategy we can organize and afford? Or silencing online discussion lists instead of being grateful that people are piping up? Or give up instead of trying to engage programs in new ways of reaching the students we need to serve?
Nope. We can’t give up or go home. Why? Our students need us and our community needs us and the state of Maine needs us. All these need us to meet THEIR interests and needs. And I see how we must position ourselves to carry out this mission.
First, I know our greatest resource is each other—faculty and staff and community members—our creative minds and inventive spirits—and our greatest asset, our students.
Plus, we have Portland. We have Gorham. We have LAC. And we have online.
LAC has perhaps done the best so far. It’s about to celebrate 25 years of successful partnerships with Lewiston, Auburn and south central Maine. It has the advantages of smallness, focused programs, and a history in living memory of community engagement that goes both ways. LAC has a lot to build on and we congratulate this part of USM! There are things the rest of us can learn from our LAC colleagues, and the new challenges that they will be facing along with the rest of us, too.
The Gorham campus has a unique set of challenges. In the past several years it seems to have been treated as a warehouse for students, with no overall vision, with separate fiefdoms, and plan after plan, none ever implemented. Plus a community surrounding the campus, both oblivious to each other.
This we must change – and we are. We have accepted the latest Gorham report, put academic leadership on the campus, reorganized student life, and started to focus on key curricular and co-curricular activities, including with the Town of Gorham.
Plus we are finding out some actual facts. Did you know, for example, that more students commute to Gorham for classes than commute from Gorham to Portland? Who knew? We will determine what that means and see how to turn that to our advantage.
And online. Growing more important every year, reaching populations and teaching in new ways that will affect our on-campus, in-person teaching strategies, bring us different kinds of students, and with the potential to bring higher education to many more people in Maine and all over the world.
And then there’s Portland. A campus smack dab in the middle of Maine’s economic, business, and cultural center.
Folks, this university—all four parts—is sitting on a gold mine of people, ideas, arts, the creative economy, start-ups and entrepreneurs, and potential new partners. Everyone else in the University of Maine System would kill to be where we are and to have the assets we have.
These locations we have, the people, the non-profits and businesses of this community, are key to USM’s successful future. I will continue to engage all of you in thinking and acting creatively around what this community means for USM today.
I’ll tell you one thing it doesn’t mean, though. It doesn’t mean offering a museum of every possible branch of study. That’s over. We can’t afford it, and even more importantly, students don’t want it. That’s what this new world of 2013 means. They don’t have to come here. They have choices, and we need to put in place offerings and assistance that will make them want to choose us.
We are not uniquely wrong or bad, in fact we are not wrong or bad at all. If this were still 2005, with no financial meltdown, no demographic disaster, no significant online competition, no competitive proprietary institutions appealing to our students, we’d be fine. And we could keep on as we were with life, and customary behaviors and expectations. No worries.
But it’s 2013. The world as we know it has changed, and we must change, too.
The question, the challenge, is—how do we create a sustainable higher education institution, a re-crafted USM, to serve our students and our community, one that becomes an integral part of our communities?
And the answer is… we do it together. That is where the hope lies. Each other. My job is to lead the USM community in this effort, to listen to all ideas, take the good ones and turn us in their direction.
I said earlier that changes and cuts will continue to make us sustainable. But cutting by itself does not nurture our strengths or build anything new. It’s like pruning the bushes and clearing the flowerbeds to get ready for the new garden.
What in our garden should be fertilized? What new should we plant? We must make these choices to invest the resources we have now so we can grow resources for the future.
That’s the work we are going to do this year, in fact, this semester.
Over the summer, small working groups consisting of the President’s Council and Provost’s Staff took dozens of planning documents that you produced, dusted them off, and did some preliminary work around what our markets need from us, and what we can do, as well, if not better than, our competition.
Contrary to what you may have heard, no decisions have been made about programmatic eliminations, mergers, or additional new org chart changes.
The next step is to kick off an inclusive process so that the whole USM community has the opportunity to take the information developed over the summer, and through the fall work together on how to make USM more distinctive and attractive to prospective students in our market area. By very early in 2014 we will have a good set of next steps for USM.
We don’t know what these next steps will be. We will figure them out together. Meanwhile, we’ll have to keep supporting students, engaging the Portland, Gorham and Lewiston-Auburn communities, and balancing budgets while we take the next steps along the road.
This university has a lot going for it. Despite tough times let’s not lose sight of the accomplishments since we last met for opening breakfast.
Here are just a few examples:
Faculty Commons
Project Log-in
Tourism and Hospitality
Cybersecurity
Digital Humanities
Weekend Student Programming
LAC’s 25th Anniversary
Confucius Institute
And let’s not forget, with the impending start of classes, the excellent, fundamental, that life-changing work of this university goes on.
That is the work I want to support for you. Many of you have devoted your careers to USM. Providing higher education is a great calling. How we do that can’t be the same today as it was in many of our yesterdays. But with your help, I want to guide USM to a path that will sustain it in these times.
It’s a new year. We have wonderful possibilities ahead!