As the University of Maine System (Orono excepted) desperately seeks more undergraduate students amid declining enrollments in recent years, there is an understandable effort to recruit students from both within and outside of Maine who might otherwise not fill classrooms, laboratories,  residence halls, and, not least, parking lots. Considerable funds have been expended on seeking […]

1) Why not get Brian Williams a job as a fact checker for The New Yorker? The magazine is famous for its zealous fact checkers. Williams will have had plenty of experience in sorting out truth from fiction, whatever the outcome of NBC’s investigation into his apparently inaccurate statements over the years as both reporter […]

As reported in the Bangor Daily News, Bangor School Superintendent Betsy Webb testified in Washington, DC, on Thursday about the allegedly negative effects of the Affordable Care Act’s “30 hour full-time rule.” At the invitation of “Our Senator” Susan Collins, Webb spoke to the U.S. Senate’s Education, Health, Labor, and Pensions Committee, whose members include Collins. […]

So Gov. LePage, along with new Representative Bruce Poliquin, participated in the annual Augusta crusades  to denounce Roe Vs. Wade and to demand its being declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court someday soon. I am hardly the only critic of these and other anti-abortionists to observe their overwhelming indifference to public and private programs […]

It is by now well known that at least two tenured U Southern Maine faculty were recently notified by voice mails  that they were being terminated–“retrenched”–effective January 1, 2015. Using voice mails was, it has been explained, a mistake. A new dean unfamiliar with whatever procedures are ordinarily used somehow decided to communicate with a […]

Unless Democrats retain control of the state legislature and, with Mike Michaud, regain the governorship, the ongoing dismantling of the U. of Southern Maine will extend to U.Maine to a significant degree. True, Orono is in far, far better shape financially than USM, and Orono has emerged from a rivalry  for student numbers with USM […]

As a non-hunter who could not imagine shooting any wild creature unless it were attacking  me or others close to me, I certainly respect Lucas St. Clair’s experience and expertise in opposing Question 1, as per his Op Ed in the Bangor Daily News.He is surely entitled to his views. But casting proponents of Question […]

Reading today’s reports of the pending elimination of some fifty full-time faculty positions at the University of Southern Maine, I once again wonder if Interim President David Flanagan and his hand-picked team of mostly administrators shed any tears over this and earlier plans. One looks in vain for anything about eliminating higher level staff positions, […]

After reading countless comments over the years in response to BDNews articles, editorials, and opinion pieces about public higher education in Maine, I should probably not be surprised at the ridiculous reactions to my blog about yesterday’s State Senate rejection of Susan Dench for the U.Maine System Board of Trustees. In the eyes of most […]

The rejection today by the State Senate of Susan Dench’s nomination for a five-year term on the University of Maine System’s Board of Trustees is not a matter of raw partisan politics, as Governor LePage and even a respected Republican Senator like Roger Katz insisted afterward. Rather, it is a case of a majority of […]