Tomorrow, April 7, Quebec will hold an election with four parties hoping to form the next majority in the National Assembly. This is actually only the provincial assembly like every other Canadian province, but as with so much else, Quebec is different and defines itself as unique. The principal parties are the governing Parti Quebecois […]

“We have a lot of staff and a lot of faculty that just aren’t needed to serve our student body at the size it is today.” This was the comment of Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance Rebecca Wyke, as reported in the Bangor Daily News,  during last Monday’s meeting of the University of Maine […]

I have always voted for U.S. Representative Mike Michaud for Congress and would have voted for him again if he had chosen to seek re-election. But once he declared his intention to give up his safe House seat to seek the governorship, I had doubts about whether he really understood what troubles thousands of Maine […]

“History Repeats” is the title of the recent online U.Maine News story about the fascinating and highly important studies being conducted by UMaine’s Climate Change Institute. Under the direction of world-famous Professor Paul  Mayewski, a team of researchers has been analyzing ice cores from Greenland that are nearly 11,700 years old. They have concluded that […]

Tuesday’s Bangor Daily News had a front-page story on Senator Collins once again praising Senator Margaret Chase Smith, whose seat Collins occupies, as her personal model of a “trailblazing lawmaker.” Repeating the same rhetoric that Collins has used since entering the Senate in 1997, rhetoric that will surely be repeated further during her upcoming re-election […]

The timing of this blog with Martin Luther King Day is not accidental. Last month I  attended the launch of a new initiative by Phi Beta Kappa to promote the liberal arts and sciences. Founded in 1776, Phi Beta Kappa is the nation’s oldest  and best known scholastic honor society. The University of Maine has […]

A recently published letter to the editor by a long-time classified employee at the Orono campus noted her keen disappointment at the inability to afford some classes at the campus’ excellent Recreation Center because they were apparently no longer free to classified employees (and perhaps other campus employees). Despite decades of service to U Maine, […]

As is painfully familiar to most ordinary faculty and staff at American colleges and universities, top administrators who, fairly or unfairly, are forced out of their well-paid positions invariably find comparable if not superior positions elsewhere. Where a faculty member in especially the humanities or social sciences who is denied reappointment–or worse, denied tenure–might never […]

In recent weeks the University of Maine System has e-mailed its faculty and staff two successive memos entitled “Administrative Review Highlights” for Summer 2013 and then for September 2013. The use of “Highlights” is no accident, for these outlines of recent developments at the System level are intended to make readers feel good, maybe great, […]

Yesterday, and repeated today, Maine Public Radio had an interesting report on an agreement between the University of Maine System and the Maine Community College System to address a widespread complaint among community college students who seek to transfer course credits to one of the seven University System campuses. Often courses taken at one or […]