Dannel Malloy begins speaking at 0:00: Hello I’m Dan Malloy, Chancellor of the University of Maine System. Let me start by thanking President Jackson, Speaker Fecteau, Senator Timberlake, Representative Dillingham and esteemed members of the legislature and the people of Maine for this opportunity to address you. I know that we all look ahead to the time when an address such as this can be given in person in the historic house chamber of the State House. I’m proud to provide this biennial report of the state of our universities to you, my first as chancellor.
I’m speaking today from the University of Maine in Orono, located in the homeland of the Penobscot Nation. Together in our system we’ve come through a year of global pandemic that posed the greatest challenge to higher education in the last century. And our success to date has exceeded every expectation. We’ve done it while implementing a national model for unified accreditation to help our universities share resources and work together in new ways that help to inspire one of the 10 largest philanthropic gifts ever to public higher education in our country’s history.
But our challenges are real. Our budgets are severely strained, and measured by the last renovation age, we have one of the oldest facility infrastructures in the country, burdened by imminent need and a deferred maintenance backlog that together exceeds one billion dollars. In some cases, our physical plant is literally crumbling around us.
We are beginning to confront that problem with a budget discipline to capital infrastructure needs that we’ve not had before. We’re also looking ahead, to emerge soon from a global pandemic that caused more than 100 million dollars in increased expenses and lost revenue, not to mention the burdens imposed on our faculty, staff and students, who’ve been wonderfully resilient, but struggling to stay connected to their learning research and work. We cannot tire in the work to keep them connected, especially among our most vulnerable populations of first generation and underprivileged students.
More on all of this later.
We’ve worked so hard through the pandemic, because we know that keeping our students on track to life-changing degrees means keeping them on the path to social mobility, economic growth and innovation for the future. I often speak of the multi-generational family impact of a college degree.
In the last decade, we have collectively awarded our life-changing degrees to 56,000 graduates, who’ve moved on ready to start families, build communities and work in the very career fields where Maine most needs talent, including nursing and social services, business, education and engineering.
Today some twenty five thousand students are actively transforming their lives through the proven power of post-secondary education at Maine’s public universities. And this does not include 2,500 Maine students who are currently earning free college credit through our system, a record resulting from our responsiveness to the curricular needs of Maine high schools during our pandemic.
Our students are your constituents. They are your husbands and wives, sons and daughters and grandchildren. They are the nurse in Presque Isle who administered the vaccine that will allow you to finally hug your loved ones again. They are the volunteer tutor, who from their dorm room in Orono has been patiently helping your child with their math homework over zoom, while you try to do your job remotely. They are the aspiring attorney who just helped your neighbor obtain a life-saving protective order in the Lewiston district court.
And in some cases they are you. Forty percent of our students are the first in their families to attend a four-year college. Twenty percent are black, indigenous or people of color. Thirty-five percent are age 25 and older, and nearly one half of them are eligible for need-based federal Pell grants.
Our universities have never mattered more to Maine, and through the pandemic we’ve proven the tremendous public return on the investment you’ve made in our university system.
I’d like to briefly reflect on how the University of Maine System and our students, faculty and staff have served our state through the pandemic, and how we’re shaping a stronger future.
One year ago, with covid spreading across the country but not yet confirmed in Maine, we emptied our residence halls and transitioned to online learning for our students.
We understood that we should not send our students on spring break and have them return with COVID to our universities and to the state of Maine communities they call home. Demonstrating a nimbleness too often found lacking in the academy, our world-class faculty transitioned all learning to remote and online modalities within the span of less than two weeks. We’ve protected our employees, including student workers, from pay and job losses even if they were unable to do their jobs remotely. We maintained our students’ academic progress, with 98.5 percent of our students persisting with their spring semester classes, even slightly exceeding the performance from the prior year.
At the same time, we stepped up to serve our state in partnership with Maine’s Emergency Management Agency. Our universities met the moment by converting gymnasiums to shelters for individuals experiencing homelessness, producing thousands of gallons of hand sanitizer for hospitals and healthcare organizations, in partnership with local breweries and distilleries, as well as chemicals used by the Maine National Guard to fit test n95 masks of 4,000 frontline workers.
Helping the Maine CDC stand up its contact tracing program, and conduct outbreak investigations. Sending needed nursing students to virus hot spots like Maine’s veterans home to help with staffing surges and we also graduated lab techs early so that they could get to work.
Providing technical assistance to hundreds of businesses from kelp farmers to large
manufacturers to pivot to new products and markets and navigate new regulations and relief.
Turning pre-k through 12 school and library parking lots across Maine into wi-fi hotspots.
Conducting cutting-edge research on the COVID-19 virus and wastewater testing in Maine communities to slow its spread and so, so much more. These quick actions to protect public and economic health were only possible because of decades of public investment in our universities and their teaching research and development capacity.
So I thank you. Knowing that learning is most impactful and engaging when done in person, and knowing that local economies and communities like Fort Kent and Farmington are deeply dependent on our campuses, we led Maine’s higher educational institutions to develop a framework for safely returning to campus, and then convened our top university scientists in specialties like virology and epidemiology to inform what would become one of the country’s safest returns to campus last fall.
Since then, we’ve conducted nearly 120,000 COVID tests to asymptomatic students, faculty and staff, always maintaining a positivity rate well below Maine’s background rate.
Our students, faculty and staff showed tremendous respect for civil and campus authorities, for their universities and for one another, and with our investments to reduce the spread of the virus we have maintained our plan for hybrid in-person teaching and learning even as other institutions in Maine and across the country had to remain fully remote or unexpectedly transitioned back online.
As I mentioned earlier, the University of Maine System has incurred some 100 million dollars in COVID related expenses and losses, including delayed research.
Our testing costs alone will exceed 27 million dollars over the last year.
Our room and board revenue is down this fiscal year nearly 30 percent due to reduced occupancy, which allows for the space necessary to safely quarantine and isolate those with COVID and their close contacts.
I want to thank Maine’s congressional delegation and the Mills administration for their support. The three federal relief packages passed through the pandemic have been a lifeline, sending sorely needed funds to our institutions that have allowed us to operate without burdening our students and their families with COVID’s heavy burden on us.
Still, the remaining uncovered financial impact from the pandemic equals the annual operating budgets of the University of Maine at Fort Kent, Machias, Presque Isle and the Law School combined.
Over the past decade, our state appropriation has grown on average by less than one percent each year. Contractually obligated wage and benefit costs of our 4,700 employees have climbed between 1.5 and 3 percent per year over the same time, while our tuition rates have actually gone down on an inflation adjusted basis. And we have more than doubled the amount we make available to our neediest students in scholarships and grants that they do not need to pay back, some 95 million dollars this fiscal year alone.
We’re appreciative of flat funding of state appropriations that protected our universities from further cuts at a time when more than ever Mainers need affordable access to the high quality education, research learning and workforce training that only we can deliver.
At the same time, given our very real need and the tremendous return we provide on our investment in the public higher educational system, I urge you to find opportunities to increase appropriations to support our operations consistent with a bipartisan recommendation recently from the education committee.
And we implore you to take bold action, to address the crisis level conditions of our statewide physical plant. Like roads and bridges, our public universities make up some of Maine’s most important public infrastructure, essential to the economic prosperity of our state and the upward mobility of all Maine citizens and communities.
We were fortunate in 2018 to see a 49 million dollar general obligation bond investment in our systems infrastructure. Those dollars are already being deployed to make meaningful improvements across the system that have expanded enrollment in key areas of a state workforce need like nursing and early childhood education.
But even with that money factored in, the total general obligation bonding provided for our systems infrastructure over the past 20 years is still less than the winning bid for this month for a single new high school in central Maine that will be majority state funded.
More than half of our facilities, and nearly three three-quarters of our dormitories, have not been meaningfully renovated since before John Martin first served as speaker.
Nationally just 18 percent of public higher education buildings are as outdated as ours. Over the next decade, we will need 1.3 billion dollars in investment in existing facilities including to ensure ADA requirements and basic health and life safety standards are finally met.
Campuses in Farmington and Orono and Machias are most at risk given their advanced age. Simply put, the condition and quality of our facilities are unlikely to improve overall unless substantially more investment is made in existing facilities each year. And these conditions are allowing for the luring of Maine’s best and brightest students to better resourced colleges and universities in other states with infrastructure far superior to ours.
These students, once gone, are far less likely to return. We are doing our part. We’re directing more of our operating budget to renovations and repairs to mission-critical existing facilities.
We’ve taken hundreds of thousands of square feet of underutilized space offline, with plans to remove three hundred thousand square feet more, while we are constraining the growth of our new space, except for strategic priorities. We are increasingly pursuing public-private partnerships, where a private sector partner makes an upfront investment we otherwise could not afford, and in turn receives an agreed upon portion of the long-term proceeds from that upgrade.
We’re also doing more of our own revenue bonding thanks to our AA- rating and stable outlook, which allows us to borrow at competitive rates without requiring the full faith and credit of the state of Maine.
And we’re securing unprecedented investments from our generous private and non-profit supporters, as I will detail later. We need your help too.
Whether it’s through direct appropriation, debt service or bonding, investments in our system’s infrastructure now will have a high rate of long-term return in helping us develop Maine’s talent and innovation.
It will also support short-term construction and related jobs at our campuses and centers, that are located in nearly every Maine county, to accelerate Maine’s economic recovery.
Shoring up our public universities has never been a smarter investment. As the pandemic made painfully obvious to too many workers, a post-secondary degree or credential is increasingly essential.
Those who were less educated suffered more. That is a reflection of structural inequalities in college access and attainment that must be addressed by all higher educational institutions, including our own. It is also a consequence of the increasing instability of service sector jobs, and a changing labor market here in Maine and beyond.
New data from the bureau of labor statistics projects that the greatest employment growth will be in occupations that require a baccalaureate or graduate degree. Openings for occupations that demand advanced degrees will increase by more than double the rate of those requiring only an associate’s degree or some college education.
In Maine, our public universities award the majority of the masters, doctoral and law degrees, more than ten thousand in the last decade, and we need more. Because our graduates have a higher skill level and capabilities that allow them to earn higher pay, they can give more back to Maine.
And by the way, our alumni do stay in the state. According to available data, depending on campus, between 70 and 90 percent of our graduates go on to live and work here.
Last month, a study was released, showing that the University of Maine alumni pay 49% more state income tax than average, and that the median income of working age Black Bear alumni is more than double the state’s overall median income.
We need more alumni like these.
Monique Belisle is a first generation college student who realized she needed more than a two-year degree to advance as a nurse. She is one of the nearly 700 community college graduates who transfer into our system each year, now a nearly seamless process,
thanks to our joint commitment to cooperation and articulation agreements.
While the traditional address to the joint convention doesn’t allow our students to share their stories with you, I’d like to invite her to do so now.
Monique Belisle begins speaking at 17:50: Hi, I am Monique Belisle, and I am from Winslow.
My parents had to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. This was a cycle that I sought to break when I had my own children, of which I now have three. While I was able to acquire skills and training through the community college system to become a registered nurse, I quickly came to the realization that I would be limited in my ability to achieve my goals unless I furthered my education.
The pandemic only reinforced this, as most entry-level public health nursing positions require at least a bachelor of science in nursing or BSN. I enrolled last summer in USM’s accelerated RN to BSN program. It will take me 18 months to complete.
As a working mother, and the primary provider for my family, cost was the deciding factor in whether or not I could continue my education. USM’s program is affordable, and it’s flexible for adults like me.
I can earn my degree while still earning a living, working as a nurse at Maine General in Augusta.
When I finish, I plan to enroll in USM’s nurse practitioner graduate program. I will become
a role model for my children, an example that their dreams are within reach. And I will be well
prepared to care for Maine people, with confidence and skill. Investing in education is an upstream approach with extraordinary downstream effects.
Thank you for investing in me.
Dannel Malloy begins speaking at 19:24: Thank you Monique.
Stories like yours are why our universities have been so focused on keeping Maine people on track for their future, even through the pandemic. It’s true that we bucked state and national trends by holding our enrollment nearly flat this fall. But we are seeing a decrease in applications from in-state first-year students, so we’ve stepped up our admissions efforts to counter that concerning trend.
So this winter, we partnered with the Finance Authority of Maine and local high schools to get prospective students and families the information they needed to make good college choices. And we’re expediting acceptances and financial aid offers, so that we don’t lose Maine students to out-of-state colleges, or to the complacency that limits their potential and our economy.
We’ve grown graduate programs, with enrollment of nearly 20 percent this spring, as Mainers like Monique are continuing education as the path to staying relevant in their career, and realizing greater pay or prospects.
And perhaps most importantly, with science and civil authorities continuing to guide our work, we’re making plans to welcome students back to our universities this coming fall, for the most traditional in-person college experience that we can safely provide.
We can’t wait to give our campus communities and local economies that rely on them the return to normalcy that we all want. But it would be a terrible disservice to the people who lost their lives, or their loved ones, and all of those who have suffered if we don’t carry forward lessons that we’ve learned during the pandemic to do business better.
Perhaps none of our universities are more open to doing things differently than our Law School, which is now under the leadership of former Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court Leigh Saufley. I’d like you to hear directly from the dean, and I know you will join me in congratulating her on her well-deserved induction this past weekend into the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame. Leigh.
Leigh Saufley begins speaking at 21:40: Thank you chancellor. I am a proud graduate of the University of Maine and the University of Maine School of Law, where I now serve as dean.
I honestly don’t think I could have found a more exciting time to come back to the system.
Building on the hybrid and remote delivery models that Maine Law and our sister universities deployed over the past year, as well as the new smart classroom and clinical technology that will be coming soon thanks to a just awarded one million dollar USDA distance learning and telemedicine grant, the University of Maine System is expanding education and professional training to place-bound students in the less urban areas of Maine, in a way that works best for all of their busy lives.
Among the graduate, undergraduate and certificate academic programs that will now be available to earners statewide thanks to UMS and to USDA investment are nursing, education, including early childhood, cyber security, computer science, health care quality and patient safety and law.
This is huge.
Until last March, in part because of a long-standing American Bar Association prohibition on routine online learning, Maine Law’s courses have only been offered face-to-face in the Portland building. That didn’t work very well for many Mainers, including a number of them who were, or are, currently serving at the state house. Hi Maggie and Trey, keep up your great work.
And limitations on distance learning exacerbated the lack of lawyers in Maine in many counties. Today, more than 80 percent of practicing lawyers are located in only four of Maine’s counties. That limits access to justice, not just for low-income and elder Mainers, but also for businesses, entrepreneurs and people with a wide range of legal issues in underserved areas.
But now that the dedicated faculty at Maine Law have demonstrated that they can effectively teach online, and our students have demonstrated that they are capable of making the most of
distance learning — have I mentioned that the passage rate for the bar exam administered this
fall was at an all-time high?— I’m confident we will soon have the opportunity to connect students across the state, at a time when access to justice has never mattered more.
Thank you members of the 130th Maine Legislature, for everything you are doing for our state and for our students.
Dannel Malloy begins speaking at 24:35: Thank you Leigh.
Technology is really just the tip of the iceberg in how we’re transforming. Last July, as we were preparing our safe return, the New England Commission of Higher Education granted unified accreditation for our system.
With unified accreditation, for the first time in the country, a system of universities will be judged based on how well they work together to meet the accreditation standards for program and institutional quality.
Let me be clear about what unified accreditation is not. It’s not one university taking over any other, but rather all of our universities being required to work together to share programs and resources, as they were meant to be when the system was formed 50 years ago.
Presidents will continue to lead their universities, which will continue to offer programs both by themselves and when they have the resources to do so, but also in partnership when they don’t.
Our universities will find new ways to equitably share tuition and fees generated by programs they offer in partnership with each other. And you’ll still be able to cheer for your favorite university sports teams whether it’s the Black Bears or the Beavers or any other of our universities that may field your favorite team.
Think of the University of Maine at Fort Kent delivering its nursing program in Presque Isle, or Presque Isle offering its educational programs to Fort Kent students there. Or the University of Maine at Augusta and the University of Southern Maine partnering to provide an online master’s degree in cyber security. It’s the University of Southern Maine and the University of Maine graduate business faculty working together to offer an MBA, which has nearly tripled its enrollment since our faculties partnered to offer the program. And in time, it will be academic courses everywhere in our system available to every student in our system no matter where they are enrolled or live.
It’s been discussed for decades, and some important groundwork for it was undertaken by my predecessor Jim Page and we thank him.
We brought it to our Board of Trustees for approval just six months into my tenure as chancellor, and received approval only months into the pandemic that has and will continue to require us to work together like never before. It was the promise of unified accreditation that led Maine’s most prominent philanthropic
organization to bet big on our success. This past October the Harold Alfond Foundation announced the largest investment they have ever made would be in our system. Their generosity will benefit all of our universities, and ultimately all Maine people.
Our flagship research university, led by president Joan Ferrini-Mundy, has a key role in this initiative. Now in addition to her leadership of the University of Maine, and the University of Maine at Machias, I recently asked Joan to take on the additional responsibility as the University of Maine System’s Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation.
I’d like Joan to tell you more about the 240 million dollar Alfond grants, and how we see both the Alfond grants and unified accreditation leveraging our flagship research enterprise to significantly increase our impact on Maine and our nation as well as our international reach.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy begins speaking at 28:18: Thank you chancellor.
The Alfond Foundation’s vision and leadership give us opportunities unlike any we have ever had. It’s a vote of confidence, and an expectation of excellence that will enable us to strengthen student success and retention, including by redesigning gateway courses that are barriers to academic advancement and through high impact research learning experiences and credit varying internships and opportunities early in their college careers, for students to become engaged, and to become prepared to enter the workforce directly upon graduation.
These funds also will enable us to expand engineering, computing and information science statewide, at the undergraduate and graduate levels, in partnership with k-12, higher education and the private sector, to deliver the technical workforce, the highly skilled workforce and innovation workforce that are critical to moving Maine’s economy forward.
The Alfond investment also will help drive economic recovery and growth in Maine, through the integration of business, law, education and public policy, and increasingly engineering and computing, made possible by the great interdisciplinary ideas from faculty, using the affordances of unified accreditation, and through the University of Maine Graduate and Professional Center.
With these funds we will maintain excellence in Maine’s only Division 1 athletics program while enhancing gender equity, and providing state-of-the-art facilities for the state’s youth and high school athletes, as well as for community events.
We are required to raise at least 170 million dollars from public and private sources to leverage the Alfond gift, which cannot supplant state appropriation. We’ll need your help to do that, including the urgently needed investments and infrastructure noted by the chancellor. We also hope we will consider adding appropriations for university R&D where state funding has been flat since fiscal year ’16 despite the increasing impact of that R&D on promoting industry, business and community growth in Maine.
We are already moving and are more and more nimble and inclusive in addressing the needs of Maine, and helping to define its place in the world. It’s something we’ve long done well but that we must do better.
Because at the center of every state report, from the 10-year Maine Economic Development Strategy, to the Climate Action Plan, to industry-initiated roadmapping like FOR/Maine and SEAMaine are recommendations for more talent and innovations that only our universities have the statewide relationships, expertise, infrastructure, programs and reach to deliver.
UMaine’s R&D strengths are strategically tied to the state’s natural assets.
We develop doers who have the knowledge and skills to solve real world problems and lead change in Maine communities and companies, including those that they start themselves.
More than 10,000 existing businesses in the state were founded by our graduates. We’ve charted the way for the resurgence of Maine’s heritage industries like farming, fishing and forestry, while fostering the formation of promising new ones like clean energy and additive manufacturing, creating jobs and opportunity and protecting Maine’s environment and quality of life.
Through intentional investment and coordination of teaching research and public engagement across the system made possible by unified accreditation, the Harold Alfond Foundation, and we hope with increased state appropriation and federal grants and contracts, we can be an even more positive force for the progress and prosperity that all of Maine and beyond well deserve. Thank you.
Dannel Malloy begins speaking at 31:48: Thank you, Joan.
As you’ve heard throughout this speech, the state of our universities is strong, and more so than ever despite pressing finance and facilities challenges.
Throughout the last year we’ve shown that our innovation and hard work go further when we are unified with a common purpose that reaches across and beyond our university’s boundaries. Challenging the status quo.
Now looking forward as we always are doing, we will be relentless in the pursuit of making the life-changing benefits of public higher education available to every Mainer. No one can be left behind if Maine is to move forward. We hope you will join us. Thank you. Thank you for your attention and thank you for the support that you have lent to our universities.