In the wake of recent cuts to faculty positions at the University of Maine at Farmington (where I teach as a professor of English), I was astonished to read in Kennebec Journal reporter Emily Duggan’s May 6 Press Herald article that the University of Maine System has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to outside consultants as part of searches for campus presidents.

At UMF, the system paid (according to Duggan’s article) a consulting firm $110,000 for the search that brought us President Edward Serna. After only three years, President Serna has just stepped down, to be replaced by an interim president. Since Theodora Kalikow retired in 2012, you might say that UMF has had nothing but interim presidents (whether the “interim” was officially part of the title or not), as we are now on our fourth president in 10 years.

A university president’s most important job is raising funds. He or she does so by making connections and cultivating relationships in the community. That is impossible to do when there’s a revolving door in the president’s office. Frequent turnover of the president position is a major contributor to financial instability.

The process being used to select campus presidents is clearly an expensive failure.

Paying the cost falls on the shoulders of the faculty and the students (whose academic lives are disrupted when their majors are eliminated and their teachers are sent packing). Rather than eliminating faculty positions as a budget-cutting measure, maybe UMaine System administrators could try curtailing their own wasteful spending practices first.

Michael Johnson
Jay

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