Regarding your May 20 front-page report on University of Maine System trustees approving a round of cuts (“UMaine System trustees OK round one of cutbacks”):

Before I made a permanent move to Maine last year, when I earned a doctorate at age 74 in another state, a leading scholar working with AARP patronizingly called me “a prime example of lifelong learning.”

He thought I had done it just for “fun” or something to do. No, like most who earn a Ph.D, I had acquired tools I expected to use. I am now an adjunct professor in gerontology in another state, and recently contributed to a journal on aging in the UK.

I find in Maine there are people like me who, for many reasons, had their education cut short and are looking for something more than the noncredit Maine Senior College Network has to offer. Maine is rich in lobsters and blueberries, and measured by median age, rich in old people like me – we are the oldest state in the U.S.

Increasingly, people like my husband and me are choosing to retire here. Trustees and planners at University of Maine campuses need to look on us as an untapped resource and aggressively recruit us as full- or part-time students. This will increase much-needed revenue, create more intergenerational diversity on campus – a good thing – and produce a cadre of people better trained to contribute to life in Maine.

Judith Church Tydings

South Thomaston