University of Southern Maine

USM, Meet UMA

A Little Conversation Will Go a Long Way to Building a Future

On Monday, September 20, 2004, the University of Maine System Board of Trustees unanimously approved a strategic plan to reorganize the System in an effort to improve the quality of higher education in Maine and access for the people who live and work in our region. While the plan in its entirety impacts USM in a many ways, what has received the most attention within and beyond our community is the call to integrate the University of Maine at Augusta with USM. Now charged with the task of implementing the plan over the next five years, USM and UMA have begun the next step of identifying questions and answers that ultimately will drive the integration process.

Given the enormous impact on the USM and UMA communities the integration will have, USM President Richard L. Pattenaude has called for careful consultations with colleagues at UMA and “deliberate and systematic planning.”

“This is enormously complex and careful work made more so by the fact that many of our colleagues at UMA are not pleased with how this has gone so far,” says Pattenaude. “Conversations become very real and very human and that's an important level of planning and implementation. In this situation, by going slow, you give everybody time to adjust and to have a voice.”

And deliberately is exactly how the University intends to proceed. Early on, Pattenaude issued a request to the Board of Trustees to build enough time into the integration plan to allow the USM and UMA communities to meet and collaboratively identify what issues and areas must be considered to achieve best outcomes during integration. What has emerged from the collaborative session is a two-phased UMA/USM Integration Process Timeline designed to facilitate conversations and collaboration for careful implementation planning.

Phase I of the UMA/USM Integration Process Timeline, which began in October 2004, calls for careful exploration and analysis by parties representing parallel work groups on both campuses. In early October, Senate-based teams on both campuses were formed and began meeting independently to start the process of identifying issues and opportunities related to a possible integration plan.

UMA President Charlie Lyons says this information-gathering period is of utmost importance to the success of the integration process because the talking groups will be the ones to truly identify where many of the hurdles to the integration plan reside.

“By sharing their feedback and concerns, our faculty, staff and students will learn about one another and give us some of the real questions that need to be addressed,” says Lyons.

Pattenaude agrees. He says feedback from this exploration phase is particularly important as it ultimately will help drive Chancellor Joseph W. Westphal's progress report to the Maine State Legislature on January 25, as well as his March 14 report on integration progress to the University of Maine System Board of Trustees.

“That's another reason we started by asking for these conversation groups—to identify the issues and concerns,” says Pattenaude. “These kinds of complexities are best addressed by conversation among those who do the work.”

Preliminary findings from those meetings were expected in mid-November 2004, and conversations continued through December 2004. Some of the initial challenge areas identified within the groups include complexities in different tuition levels, disparate curricula of programs with similar names and promotion/tenure standards and processes.

Phase II of the UMA/USM Integration Process Timeline, expected to begin on March 15 following the Chancellor's report to the Board of Trustees, represents a transition planning and startup period. During this period, Pattenaude and Lyons say they envision a blended process in which one transition team of USM and UMA faculty, students and staff, led by UMA and USM co-chairs, will begin preliminary work to develop a work plan. The actual writing of a multi-year implementation plan is not expected to begin until summer of 2005, followed in September by the actual 3-to-5-year implementation.

Pattenaude says that one of the key issues during Phase II will be the determination of what is the most effective and appropriate level of autonomy for UMA as a USM campus. As the process of integration begins, he says one certainty is that the University will seek to proceed with minimal disruption.

“This is not about faculty traveling or students traveling,” says Pattenaude. “Much of integration and blending depends upon how independent and freestanding UMA is willing to be as a campus. Lewiston-Auburn College runs with a fair degree of autonomy: staff, local governance, a local advisory board, and local corporate partners groups.”

Pattenaude also says that while USM does not have definitive answers regarding how the integration will pan out, his sense is that the vast majority of people at USM will be unaffected.

“Our faculty, staff and students are naturally concerned that these significant changes will draw resources and/or divert attention from “Transforming USM,” our own aggressive plan to achieve regional excellence and national recognition, says Pattenaude. “One of my key responsibilities is to safeguard progress made to date and continue USM on its trajectory.”

“The potential outcome has to be more educational opportunities for students,” says Pattenaude. “If it doesn't help students it's not worth doing. I firmly believe that students in the central Maine will have greater opportunities when this is complete.”

Lyons agrees.

“I have maintained from early on in the process that the real measure of success is allowing the Augusta campus to serve the 175,000 people who live in our immediate central Maine area much better than we could ever do on our own,” says Lyons. “The victory here is that Augusta gets to be everything we said we want it to be. Everything we want to be, we are going to get. To do that, we have to change the letterhead. And that is what people are finding so painful-the loss of their freestanding, autonomous UMA.”

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