Letter: Maine center should be in the center of Maine

To the Editor;

When I read the Oct. 22 Bangor Daily News article about the proposed Maine Center for Graduate Professional Studies, I got angry. This article discussed  the University of Maine System (UMS) plan to “unite graduate programs for aspiring businesspeople, lawyers and public administrators under one roof” — in Portland. I got angry about this: because Maine citizens were only hearing about the plan when it was virtually a done deal — with the Board of Trustees to vote on it the very next day and the first phase of the project scheduled to begin in January 2017; because northern Maine was, once again, losing out to the more moneyed and influential south; and because the name of the proposed Center seemed to leave the door open for a continuation of the youth, money, and brain drain from the second district to the first.

Since I didn’t have time to read the 80-page Business Plan referenced in the BDN article, all I knew about it, when I decided to make the 3-hour trip from Calais to East Millinocket the next day, was what I had read in the paper.

Although the plan (which I have, since the meeting, had a chance to study) does a good job making the academic case for combining these programs to meet 21st century business needs, and does a good job detailing “Maine’s challenges” (most notably, the shrinking economy and the aging, shrinking population) and how they could be profitably addressed by such a Center, it seems to me that many of the statistics cited in the plan (e.g., the U.S. Census map on page 11) lead quite logically to the conclusion that it would be much better for the “entire State” (something the plan gives ample lip service to) to site the Center in the part of Maine that has lost the most in the past two decades, rather than the only part of the state that is thriving. (Portland’s unemployment rate is low, its population is increasing, and its real estate prices are very high.)

Indeed, the fact that “only 1 percent of all graduate students” at the University of Southern Maine currently come from outside the state (p. 12) suggests that the attractions of the 1st district may be part and parcel of what has led to the hollowing-out of the 2nd.  (“Students from all UMS campuses seeking an MBA in conjunction with undergraduate degrees in other fields” are cited, in the plan, as one of the “markets” the Center is projected to serve.) We don’t need another reason for our citizens to head south, folks. We need an attraction of our own.

Much is made, in the plan and the BDN article, about how most of the funding would be through grants and foundations (one of the trustees actually stated that it involves no risk at all). It says on page 4 that the projected capital investment would be “approximately $150 million, with over $100 million raised from foundations that invest in education reform.” Not only is there no mention of where the other $50 million would come from, but the fine-print footnote at the bottom of the page points out that “the magnitude and feasibility of this effort will bear further discussion, both inside and outside the UMS.” In other words, taxpayers may end up being on the hook for the Maine Center after all. If that is the case, it should be built where it will really do the most good — in so many ways.

Despite some talk at the Board meeting about how the location of the Center could be decided later (in Step 2), the plan, as written (and approved by the Board, as expected), clearly names Portland as the place where the Center should be built. (A majority of the 15 governor-appointed UMS trustees appear to have very strong ties to the Portland area; five of them actually live in Portland, and two live close by.)

Although Cape Elizabeth’s Eliot Cutler et al (Cutler was hired to develop the plan) were likely counting on Portland-area businesses to serve as internship, collaboration, and potential placement sites for Center students, there is no reason why Bangor area businesses couldn’t serve these purposes just as well — especially since part of the plan is, ostensibly, to provide a more qualified professional talent pool to run more rural businesses and municipal entities in the state.  (Bangor could also provide jobs for the many part-time students who attend the MBA programs, in particular.)

As those of us who have attended college know, once you get there, you might want to stay there, or in the immediate vicinity. The centrally-located vicinities of Bangor and Orono are gateways and resource centers for the shrinking North and are much better situated to “bootstrap” regrowth in “the real Maine” than Portland ever could be.  (The projected cost for the building’s development and construction is $93.6 million, with 798 construction jobs projected “during the period of construction.”)

The best argument for siting the Center in Portland may be that most of the programs that would be combined into one building already exist in Portland. That being said, however, most of these programs appear to be quite small, with dwindling student populations! Indeed, of all the programs proposed to co-exist in the Maine Center building, only the Orono MBA program  appears to have had an increase in enrollment this year. Although “the MBA program has the biggest untapped market potential” of the Maine Center programs (p.25), the University of Southern Maine’s  MBA program appears to have experienced the steepest decline in enrollment across the 15 years of the p. 20 graph!

Why do the trustees seem to be okay with cannibalizing an Orono program that is currently holding its own to prop up Portland programs that are not? (I hope the Chancellor’s and the lop-sided Board’s new “One University” initiative is not just going to be euphemistic “cover” for funneling everything to Portland.)

One of the students interviewed for the Maine Center’s promotional materials received an MBA from Dartmouth in 2003. She is quoted as being very “excited” about the Maine Center’s interdisciplinary objective and indicates that she would have applied to it if it had been available when she was researching business schools. If such a student would choose Portland over Dartmouth, largely based on the program it offered, why not Orono?

The Maine Center is touted as a ground-breaking, innovating, “reinvention” of higher education — that “disrupts” a status quo that is no longer working for Maine. Since the trustees have approved of disrupting the status quo to this extent, why not go the whole hog? Why not site the Maine Center at the Orono (flagship) campus where it belongs? Because the status quo of Portland getting all the goodies is not working for the biggest chunk of Maine.

Melodie Greene

Calais