Board of Trustees Vision Presentation
Sept. 10, 2006
Robert A. Kennedy, President, University of Maine
At UMaine, you are in a great place!
Our Admissions office and marketing materials use the slogan, "At
UMaine, you are in a great place!"
We're delighted to have all of you with us on campus—indeed, you are in
a great place!
My motto certainly is "I'm in a great place" and, almost exactly one
year into my presidency, I appreciate the opportunity to tell you why
that's true for all of us.
The beginning of a new academic year is always an exciting one and for
presidents, chancellors and trustees, a lot of that relates to enrollment
news.
And for us, that could not be better.
We welcomed just under 2,000 new students about 10 days ago, including:
• The largest class of Maine high school graduates in our history—4%
larger for in-state students than last year and coming from all parts of
the state.
• As a whole, the class is 7% larger than last year's incoming class.
• Our incoming class also includes a 19% increase in out-of-state
students, which equates with an astonishing 55% increase in out-of-state
students since the fall of 2004!
• Last Thursday, Governor Baldacci and the Chancellor helped welcome the
first 12 Ph.D. students in our Graduate School of Biomedical Science
which, I think, is one of the most exciting, important and
precedent-setting academic programs in UMaine's 141 year history.
• The GSBS—approved by the Board last January—is literally helping to
redefine UMaine's mission and role state-wide.
• The Graduate School of Biomedical Science's first class is made up of
eight women and four men—nine of whom have Maine roots—with two students
from China.
Some of the students have been out of Maine for education or jobs, and
now they're back to be part of GSBS—talk about a reverse brain-drain!
And our meeting here in Buchanan Alumni House—as wonderful as it is—has
a symbolic meaning; our campus is in transition.
Wells Conference Center—where the Board usually meets when on campus—is
undergoing a renovation that will truly create a first-class conference
center–-important not only to our students, faculty and staff, but also
to those in the surrounding communities.
We are also renovating all of our dining facilities and condensing our
residential dining halls from five to three—as approved by the Trustees
over a year ago and funded through auxiliary services.
One of the most exciting projects is the ongoing work on our new Student
Recreation Center.
Several of us had the opportunity to take a hard hat tour of that
facility last week and it is going to be incredible!
With over two acres of floor space inside, it's in a beautiful setting,
adjacent to our vast trail system that's used for running, hiking and
biking.
It's a $25 million facility, and scheduled to open next spring or early summer.
It will surely transform the student experience at UMaine.
And while it is too early to say for sure, we are quite confident that
it will attain "LEAD" certification as a "green building". If it
does, it will be the first student recreation facility in the U.S. with
this designation—befitting its woodsy setting on campus and its role in
student health and wellness.
This fall (October 13th in fact!) will see the opening of a new
building—which epitomizes all of the things that UMaine emphasizes and
is so well-known for.
The building is our new Student Innovation Center, where bright and
motivated students will work with our entrepreneurial faculty to learn
what is involved and how to start businesses—the facility and the
program really are one-of-a-kind and they illustrate our student-and
research-oriented strengths.
We've had a great many students, like Chris Frank, Sheridan Kelly and
Rory Eckardt – to name just a few – turn their dreams and ideas into
real businesses in recent years.
We've been fortunate enough to be listed among the top 10 states in the
country in terms of spin-off businesses generated by universities; this
is no accident—since the MEIF was created, UMaine has generated more
intellectual property than all other beneficiaries of these funds
combined!
The Student Innovation Center will bring that kind of activity under one
roof, and we think it will make a tremendous difference not only to
UMaine, but to a state that is in need of the economic spark that comes
from real entrepreneurism.
Modernizing and improving the campus infrastructure are part of my
vision for UMaine's future.
Another part, of course, is our comprehensive fundraising campaign,
which is going very well.
We raised over $18.3 million in fiscal year ‘06, and we're off to a great
start in FY07.
Certainly a major event this last year was the Bank Of America gift of
the Hutchinson Center—formerly owned by MBNA and leased to UMaine for $1
a year—with a value of approximately $6 million and an incalculable
value to our students and mid-coast Maine.
And the Hutchinson Center wasn't included in our record fundraising last
year because it came in too late in the Fiscal Year.
The Hutchinson Center—in its six years of operation—has really been an
inspiring success story for people in that under-served part of Maine
with 1,200 students registered every semester and another 500 in Senior
College.
While we are raising money mostly for scholarships, professorships and
faculty chairs in our fundraising campaign, we also want to continue to
improve the campus by renovating more of the lovely historic buildings,
as we did with Lord Hall, which you visited yesterday.
We are looking at places like Alumni Hall, Fogler Library, Coburn Hall
and Memorial Gym for that type of restoration project.
Another part of our vision is to focus on faculty excellence—we
literally have the world's leading experts in some critically important
areas for our economy or society.
Chemical Engineer Hemant Pendse is one of the world's leading experts in
biofuels—turning wood by-products into various products like ethanol and
plastics, and reducing our dependency on foreign oil. For this, he and
his colleagues received over $7 million from the NSF this last year to create
the first research forest biofuels refinery in the U.S.
And we have several faculty like Rosemary Smith, Mike Manson and Darrell
Donahue who are doing cutting-edge biomedical research as part of our
new Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences— developing things like
"micro-machines" that work inside the body, identify cancers within
individual cells in a collaborative with the Sloan Kettering Memorial
Cancer Center, and working with a Bangor surgeon to develop a new kind
of "foam metal" that can "infiltrate" and repair bones, sort of like
Crazy Glue.
Just this week we hired a person to lead the Maine Institute for Human
Genetics and Health, a joint initiative between UM/EMHS/JAX which will be
one of the important components of UMaine's expansion into biomedical
research, in this case cancer biology.
And there are numerous more examples—certainly some of the most well
known are UMaine's work in the areas of wood composites and climate
change.
I am equally proud of our students—who are really the most important
focus at UMaine.
Kelly Dorgan, a Ph.D. student in oceanography who studies the mechanical
behavior of marine sediments, has been named to Popular Science
Magazine's "Brilliant 10" list, highlighting the brightest young
scientists from around the U.S.
A five-person student team, under the direction of Prof. Denise Skonberg,
recently won first place in a national food development competition for
a snack called YoBon Berry Bites—frozen blueberry yogurt covered in dark
chocolate—and they taste every bit as good as they sound.
And let's not forget our student-athletes, as a group.
You know about their great performance in competition—where 17 of our 19
varsity sports competed in post-season play last year.
But I'm even more pleased with their performance in the classroom. In
the past year, Black Bears competing in the America East Conference had
an average GPA of 3.11—with 140 or our 233 student athletes named to the
America East Honor Roll, with one-half of them having a GPA of over 3.5!
We have also received some good news in recent days from some of the
national rankings publications, which are in the news in late August
every year.
The Princeton Review has, for the third consecutive year, listed
UMaine as one of the "Best 361 Colleges in the U.S."
We are particularly pleased with that ranking, because it is based in
large part on surveys of our students.
And, for the first time, the Maine Business School has been ranked in
the top 150 undergraduate business programs by U.S. News and World
Report.
And our engineering program continues to be strong – ranking #149 in U.S.
News.
And while this is good news, I believe we are and can be better.
We are undertaking a series of steps—under the leadership of our new
provost, Edna Szymanksi—to help get UMaine the appropriate recognition
for academic quality.
One of goals that we feel we can achieve—and one that is deserved—is to
be included as one of the top 50 public universities in the country.
That verifiable goal—being recognized as one of the top 50 public
universities in the country—is included in our new strategic plan that
the provost and others are implementing; it is also included in annual
goals for our academic units.
The provost is also expanding our Living-Learning Communities to include
more academically oriented opportunities for high-achieving students. In
many ways, our very successful Honor College will serve as the model we
will follow.
Other parts of our vision for UMaine, in addition to new programs like
the Graduate School of Biomedical Science, expansion of our programs
statewide at the Hutchinson Center, and joint faculty appointments at
the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor or at the Gulf of Maine Research
Institute in Portland, include several academic reorganizations that are
underway. They will have positive programmatic and fiscal implications.
I expect to come to the Board in the next few months to present and seek
your approval for these needed and exciting changes.
Part of our vision, of course, includes Maine pragmatism and fiscal
efficiency: we are constantly looking for efficiencies in all aspects of
our operation.
VP Waldron does a wonderful job. Take for example the recent electricity
rate negotiations, which have the potential to literally save millions
of dollars over the next few years.
I hope I've left time for your questions. But I want to say how much I
appreciate Terry's leadership and the great support we receive from this
board.
We are in a great place!
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