Due to technical difficulties, there are segments of the recording where audio is not available.

Full transcript of event:

Giovanna Guidoboni:
Thank you for making the time and being here. You see here President Ferrini-Mundy, Provost Paquette, CBO Jenny Boyden, and senior advisor to the president, Jason Charland.

We have a few slides for you to discuss together. These are the major topics we will cover, not necessarily in this order. You will not be overwhelmed with slides. The goal is to leave ample time for questions and discussions.

This is research forum. Let us just remind ourselves where we are with the R1 endeavor, which as you know now, basically boils down to two major metrics, achieving $50 million or more of annual expenditures for research and development and graduating 70 doctoral research students per year or more.

We are very well on track on that. Just as an FYI, we recently submitted our report to HERT. This is provisional for FY ’25 because it has not been approved by the NSF yet, but we are reporting $217 millions, which is then way above the $50 millions and higher than last year. We are on track for the doctoral degrees, projecting around 80 for the upcoming year.

What did I do? [laughs] Yes, sorry. This is a summary of what I just said, and here you have the number. In the interest of time, I move forward and I pass it to the president.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
I’m about to pass this to Jason Charland, but just to say that this event is offered in the spirit of the town halls that we held with the research community last year. When the new administration came in, everyone had lots of questions about how we were handling things.

Would it be better if I stood someplace and people…You can hear me. That’s fine. OK. Henry said no, so I won’t. Basically, to bring together our research community, and our full research community, of course, is a part of this discussion. It’s great to see you, and I’m trusting there are folks out there on Zoom.

A lot has changed in a year, and Jason will take a moment now to tell us a snapshot about the state of federal research funding. Of course, we’ll be wanting to take questions, so we’ll try to keep presentation to a minimum, but Jason?

Jason Charland:
Thank you, President Ferrini-Mundy. Much of 91±¬ÁĎ’s research enterprise is fueled by federal funding. We’re paying very close attention to the federal budget.

This chart is very extensive, but really, the point is to show you what’s happened over the last couple of years and comparing FY ’25 four numbers to what just landed in FY ’26. I’m not going to go through each agency only to say that there are some changes.

Then you’ll see on the far-right column is 91±¬ÁĎ’s history over the last five fiscal years. Not focusing on the top line numbers necessarily at each of these agencies, but what are they communicating to the research community as far as priorities? Then how do we stay competitive, staying true to what we have a great track record with?

Our partnerships, whether they’re in the state around the country or around the world, and then thinking how we can adapt to changing RFPs or changing priorities within agencies.

We do have a DC consulting firm, Cornerstone, who we’ve had for the last three years. They’re helping keep tabs on things that are coming through, whether it’s solicitations, requests for information, or major reports from agencies.

We are, again, paying very close attention because the federal funding is so important to our research enterprise. I’ll turn it back to the president.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Thank you. I’ll just add a little bit to this. First, I want to thank Jason as well as Jake Ward, who couldn’t be here, as well as many, many of you who are a part of watching this closely. I’ll explain it in a little bit more depth.

You see there, ’24 enacted, which was the last year that there was an actual federal budget up until ’26. Then you see what the president proposed for fiscal year ’26, and those were major reductions. If you look at that agency by agency, you will see what the administration’s initial intention was.

Then when you see ’26 enacted, that’s the result of the work of Congress, where a lot of different voices are at the table in helping the Congress to understand the value of the federal investment. You see big differences there.

That’s the first thing I want to point out, that that’s an extraordinary set of activities that happens as that goes forward. Then finally, if you look down through, you will see the agencies that have had fairly large reductions from ’24, which is the last year we had this budget passed, until ’26.

That affects us and our research community, those at least who access these federal funds, in serious ways. Jason was just bringing me up to speed. The RFP volume, so the RFPs, RFIs, NOFOs that are coming out of the federal government right now are at about 50 percent of their numbers last year.

The agencies are still in different places in terms of their spending and their spend plans for ’26. Folks who have proposals pending right now, I think it’s going to be a bit of a wait, my sense, just because the agencies are still getting ready to lay out these budgets, but the work for ’27 at the federal level is well underway.

This is constant work. I wanted to also acknowledge Cornerstone as well as APLU, which does a very, very good job of tracking where things stand and to assure you that there’s a lot of engagement there.

This does not speak to another big piece of our work, which is the congressionally-directed spending or the earmarks part of the work, or appropriations requests that are another part of the work, and we could go into more depth on both of those.

One piece of very, very good news that I believe everyone has heard — and a lot of people in this room will be affected by this — will be the $45 million earmark secured by Senator Collins in her role as Chair of Appropriations for a new health and life sciences complex. Those dollars are in the ’26 budget and will be forthcoming.

We have some very good news, but the strategies around seeking funding right now are needing all of our collective attention. More on that shortly. I think I have the next one. Yes.

Many of you are tracking closely on F&A. I’m just curious how many are. I’m always interested in it. This is essentially the reimbursement for…its cost recovery for the cost of doing research that for decades now, the government has funded.

You know this, when dollars come to universities to do the direct work of research, there is additional money added in to pay for what it costs to do the, essentially, facilities and administration part of that work. There has been a big set of discussions going on since the new administration came in about the negotiated F&A rates.

Every system, every university has a rate that’s agreed to, an audited rate agreed to with the government that’s renegotiated periodically. This past year, there’s been quite a lot of interesting activity.

There’s been government guidance and decision-making with agencies to lower their rates substantially.

There has been work by the academic and research communities to create what’s called the fair model, which is an alternative for consideration by the government that would not reduce to the 15 percent that has been proposed by the administration, but indeed would result in a reduction and a somewhat major change in how the work would be done.

All of that has been in serious discussion at lots of different places, lots of different levels. Finally, what happened in the ’26 appropriation — and there’s detail on this slide if you care to look at it — is blocking language to block F&A rate changes of any kind until an alternative model can be developed which the entire university community can agree on.

It won’t surprise you to know that the FAIR model, which is the one that’s been worked on in the past year, although there’s widespread support and agreement, it’s not really unanimous agreement among universities as to whether that model is workable.

That work will presumably continue, but it varies a little tiny bit by agency. Then of course, USDA has a separate arrangement completely. F&A is very much up in the air right now. We’re confident about ’26, but all of this ends at the end of September, and then we go back into what will happen with F&A.

I wanted people to know that you have people here very, very actively engaged in understanding and tracking being a part of these F&A discussions.

The next slide, just very quickly, and you can see it, some of you, at a distance. Basically, the green is the dollar value of new awards, the light blue is the F&A budget for those new awards, and the dark blue is grant expenditures.

You see what that’s looking like, and you see where we are in ’26. We’re down because fewer grants are coming in. Probably people have been very busy doing many things, and so maybe the spending isn’t at the same rate, but we are tracking where that all stands.

These are pretty serious pieces of our budget for ’26 and for ’27 and well beyond. I’ll let Jenny go to the next slide.

Jenny Boyden:
Thank you. As all of you know, research has expenses and overhead costs that are part of our budget. The federal F&A recovery is how we pay for some of the lights, the labs, and the administrative support for our scientists and student researchers.

We’re projecting a $1 million reduction in F&A recoveries next year. For FY ’26, the current year, we have a budget of $24 million, and we are on track to achieve our budget for this year. For FY ’27, we’re projecting $23 million. Again, a reduction of a million dollars.

This means that we must be even more efficient in our grant management to ensure that our research infrastructure remains self-sufficient. We are monitoring all of the things that the president has mentioned, including the number of grant awards that are available, the budgets at the federal agency level, what’s happening with the F&A rates.

We’re trying to factor all of that into our going forward forecasts to monitor and track what our F&A will be in the future. As we have talked about in the past, last month, we talked about our FY ’26 budget. I’ve mentioned that we are on track to achieve our F&A budgeted revenue for FY ’26.

However, our overall FY ’26 budget, we are trending about $9 million short. We are pursuing multiple avenues to balance the FY ’26 budget. First and most substantially, I’ll just run through all of them since we’re here.

We are going to pull back attrition savings, so savings from vacant positions will be pulled back centrally. We think that will cover slightly more than half of the $9 million shortfall. We’re also looking at other dedicated funding sources to move appropriate E&G expenses to those funding sources.

We’re reviewing financial aid distributions. If we have lower tuition coming in, if we have fewer students, we’re looking to see if there are fewer financial aid awards being made and if we can adjust that budget number.

Then the final piece is the F&A distribution plan that we talked about some last month. There were a few parts of that discussion that didn’t seem as challenging as others. We talked about pulling back balances for faculty who are no longer here at the university. That’s about $269,000.

Another $43,000 associated with transfers from this year for faculty who are no longer here. Then the last item on this list is staff in large centers would no longer receive their own return of indirects if the center itself receives a portion of their indirect.

What we talked about last month was pulling back portions of balances depending how far away from the median that balance was. People had a strong reaction to that, and we listened to you.

Giovanna and I met with a variety of groups. Jen and I met with the research faculty senate group, and what we are coming forward with now is a revised plan based on the conversations that we had.

For FY ’26 and FY ’27, we’ll be returning two percent of indirect to the faculty instead of what was four percent. This will become part of our budget process from here on out to review what we’re budgeting each year to determine what is financially sustainable based on where we are with federal grants at that time.

Jason Charland:
Do you want to say anything further? Hi, everyone. Just to add that as with any approach, any policy, there are going to be specific situations and unique circumstances that will have to be considered on a case by case basis.

There will be an opportunity for reconsideration in particular cases. You should know that not only is my door open for that, but I know that Giovanna and Jenny’s is as well. Giovanna, I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to add on that.

Giovanna Guidoboni:
Another thing that we are working on together with the OVPR office is a policy that we can post on the website that describes what this ICR return is about and how it is implemented.

Another thing that was discussed in various meetings that we had with multiple constituents of the community was to make sure that the two percent, or four percent, or whatever percent is agreed upon is reviewed annually based on the federal landscape, the budget as Jenny was saying.

The language of the policy anyway is forthcoming. Understanding that the policy per se, as I said, will not include a specific number, but the language that the percent return will be reviewed and approved on an annual basis based on all the factors that were considered.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
We can go to the next slide then to talk about a range of other ways that we’re considering as we think of ways that we’re looking at as we think about…

Man 1:
A major milestone for this university this year is the historic agreement, the Graduate Workers Union on a contract, which is a first university as a way that our graduate workers will be supported as peripheral [inaudible] .

There has been concern that we’ve heard from you about where the source of funding come from for the other spends. Anyway, the source of funding for the graduate worker ratification bonus for workers who are covered are [inaudible] awards or state awards.

I just want to assure you that through a series of conversations, [inaudible] these that will not get awards. If it has, [inaudible] . That is a one time where these [inaudible] to be able to help back.

The other piece that I would mention that’s not here on the slide is that several of you have expressed your concern about understanding tales of maybe [inaudible] the agreement so that you’re able to respond appropriately in your day-to-day work with graduate students. The labor relations team will have [inaudible] .

The labor relations team at the system is working with us to prepare appropriate FAQs and training materials. I realize that many of you are writing proposals right now, and you want guidance and advice about exactly how to put in fringe benefit costs, how to put in stipend costs, and guidance is forthcoming on that.

It’s not only 91±¬ÁĎ where we have to make this work out, but Chris Boynton has graciously said, because voluntold him to be available directly for your questions as you prepare your budgets if you’re putting proposals together now. He can give you the range of information you would need. Right, Chris? Just say yes. Thank you.

The second point I wish to make is that through the partnership that we have with the leadership of the system, we agreed that there would be a $2 million request that would go forward to the administration of the state of Maine, to the legislature and then governor, of course, as a part of the supplemental budget that is being considered right now in Augusta.

So far, we’ve had very good effectiveness with a request for a one-time $2 million research increase, infusion of dollars into our system, which would, of course, largely be here to help with the fact that the federal directions are shifting substantially.

Not everyone sitting in this room, and I’m looking at our star researchers here, not everyone will be able to seek and effectively get funding for the things that they’ve been doing. There will need to be some shifts in direction, and that doesn’t happen overnight.

There are needs for bridge funds. There are needs for seed funds. There are needs for dollars to help create new partnerships to get to places to work with colleagues that may be new.

Those $2 million, if they come through fully, will be available through a process of request and so forth for people to have some seed funding. We’re very optimistic because the reception in the education committee thus far has been very, very positive. I testified on this a couple of weeks ago. You can read that if you really can’t fall asleep.

Then finally, just fairly briefly, our 91±¬ÁĎ Foundation has stepped up and has provided a variety of different kinds of funds — they’re listed here on the slide — where they are soliciting donors directly to provide dollars that have some flexibility for us at the university level on the research front.

We have every intention of trying to support all of you in every way that we can in a very rapidly-changing federal context, and I wanted you to be aware of that. Giovanna’s next.

Giovanna Guidoboni: This is the reality of where we are right now. You can see two graphs here, the total dollar value of the proposal submitted and the total dollar value of the awards received. The current year is the spaghetti line that doesn’t arrive till the end, so the thick gray line as you see.

Basically, in terms of total dollar value of proposals submitted, we are trending similarly to FY ’21. For what concerns the total dollar value of the awards received, when compared with other years at the same time, we are somewhere in between ’21 and ’22.

Now, things are going to improve as we move towards the end of the year. There are several awards that are in the pipeline that are under review. Also, this includes all the volume of the proposals and the words that go through ORA, including, for example, the proposals that go in response to approve the CDS.

Those, even though approved, have not necessarily translated into an application and a submitted proposal. We expect the trend to go up, but it is important to bring in where we are right now.

Why it is important that as we think about how we support our research enterprise across the whole institution, we need to realize that we need to be agile on both the creative side of submitting proposals and responding to the national priorities, as well as internally to support that ideation and also the submission of those proposals.

How can we do that? This is just one example, but it is an important one. A few weeks ago, myself and President Ferrini-Mundy participated in a national summit for the launch of this Genesis Mission.

This has the goal to really leverage AI and support AI for the advancements of science, technology across a very wide variety of different applications. You see on the left, even if you cannot read all the details, but these are the 26 lighthouse challenges that are part of this Genesis Mission.

If you look through, you will see that there are several items or several of these lighthouse challenges in which we are already very strong. For example, in advanced manufacturing, or for example, the operations of building and building science, energy, and power grid and more.

The discussions that were happening at the summit were from how can we educate and train the workforce of the future that will enable such a revolution to how do we support the energy and data science hubs.

On the side of supporting the deployment of AI to design labs in science, in chemistry, in biology that can run 24/7 in an autonomous manner leveraging AI.

This specific mission is an example of something that is clearly a national priority. It is championed by the DOE, and present at the summit were the secretary and the undersecretary of the DOE, but it is meant to span across various agencies.

It is also something for which right now, there is only an RFI that was sent out to gather information from the institutions. Support in forms that are not clear yet has been promised with the intent of having a call for application coming out in the next month or so with teams possibly formed during the summer.

We are closely monitoring that and already preparing on our side to be able to submit proposals as soon as the calls come out. However, so I encourage everyone to keep an eye on that, to get informed, and to think about responding to this. How do we do that?

I would like to emphasize two things. One, the fact that beyond the specific content of this Genesis Mission, I was particularly excited by the shift in paradigm in support of R&D that was championed at the summit.

Basically, a fourfold partnership including academia and education more in general, so universities, but also community colleges, high schools and so on, so this bucket. Industry, from large industry to spin offs or startups, the impact in the economy, both as supporters and partners as well as an outcome of the research.

National laboratories expected to be critical partners again in this new paradigm, and private philanthropy. At the summit, there were indeed various representatives from different foundations.

One thing that really excited me was the fact that when divided into various work groups and people from different institutions were talking about how to think about this paradigm, the 91±¬ÁĎ is already doing it.

If you think about the various partnerships with industry, with philanthropy, including the Harold Alfond Foundation that supports various parts of our institution, not limited to that.

I feel like we have an advantage with respect to many other institutions, meaning the fact that for us, this paradigm is part of who we are. We want to have an impact on what we do because it is part of our mission.

In the next weeks, we are investing time to actually capitalize on what we are already doing, making sure that the stories that we put out there represent these partnerships and make them known.

Please feel free to reach out as you read more about these initiatives and feed us, in a sense, with information and ideas. One practical manner to do that is to be part of this COFFEE and Concept initiative, so Sol, Alan, and Danielle O’Neil are the contacts here.

Basically, the idea is to help fast ideation of concepts, but also ruling out those that have no legs and try to coalesce those that could be addressed in teams by developing quick quote charts one pagers before investing in the writing of a whole 20-page proposal.

Hopefully, by having this kind of fast mindset of idea generation, but also concrete in the sense that it translates in one pagers that others can look at across the university, we will position ourselves to be agile in a sense in creating teams across the universities as new calls come up.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Thanks. Thank you, Giovanna. I think that the Genesis Mission with its coherence and clarity and getting out pretty early in this administration with a plan is something that we will see as both an anchor for other agencies and for where funding will come, as well as a model for other agencies that will be looking to be clear about where they’re going.

Nothing unusual about this with the change of presidential administration. I do want to point that out. There have been several other priority areas, which all map into Genesis as it happens pretty much, but that have been laid out by this administration.

Those are AI, as you would expect, plus workforce development in the context of AI, advanced manufacturing, polar studies, critical minerals, nuclear energy-related and facilities-related questions, quantum, health and biotech, and national security and cyber.

We do pretty well in our already funded research portfolios in these kinds of areas. I think what Giovanna is explaining is that she’s put in place a mechanism to try to offer focus both for the Genesis work, but for any areas that are of interest going forward.

I would add that our emphasis here is heavily on federally-funded work, but we are also stepping up our efforts with philanthropy and corporate philanthropy, corporate foundations for those whose work is more amenable to those kinds of funding sources.

If in the COFFEE and Concepts, some of the ideas that come up are better-suited to corporate philanthropy, we’re putting in place the mechanisms for how to seek that kind of funding. I believe that’s it.

Giovanna Guidoboni:
I would just like to add a few things about the COFFEE and Concepts so that I anticipate some of the questions. This idea came before the Genesis Mission.

We, together with the director of ORD, we originally thought to run a pilot this semester, so it was basically started upon invitation on two particular themes. One, AI manufacturing and materials, and the second one on health and life sciences.

Some of the invitees have not been very responsive, some have been very enthusiastic. I am now opening the call to everyone also because now that this idea seems to be helpful in being agile moving forward, this will be followed up with an email again expanding the cohort with the specific invitations.

Anyway, so just in case you are wondering why that was the case, well, here it is.

Again, even if we are not able as a university to work on this COFFEE and Concepts all at the same time, what I would be very happy to work also individually with center directors and institutes and with deans is maybe something more targeted towards priorities that you identified that are aligned with some of the national priorities.

The important thing is alignment. The goal is to try to be as responsive as we can as fast as we can.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Let’s open this up now to questions. I believe we’re well set up to take questions from this audience, and let’s begin there. There is a mic over here if you’d like to step there. Yes, Ben.

Benjamin L. King:
I had a question about this. This is a question about the graduate student bonus. A few weeks ago, I had heard, and it was a rumor, that the 91±¬ÁĎ system would only fund that bonus for students that were covered by E&G funds but not research funds. That’s been changed, so it’s all students?

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Thank you for that. There was a lot flying around at that time about what was going to happen, including, I heard that, what Ben describes. I also heard that that bonus would be funded for all graduate workers, but that for those who are on research grants, it would be funded by their research grants versus from any other E&G sources.

That’s what I was trying to explain here, which is to say, first of all, the collective bargaining agreement requires that, and double check it with Scott, but that the ratification bonus would go to all graduate workers, yes?

Scott:
Graduate workers employed at the time of the grant.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
It would go to all, but for those that are funded on grants, it will not be that the grants are the source of that funding. We’ve negotiated that with the system, that it will be other funds that will cover that. That won’t affect us.

Benjamin L. King:
Thank you.

Heather Leslie:
Hi.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Hi.

Heather Leslie:
Heather Leslie. School of Marine Sciences at Darling Marine Center. I just wanted to echo Ben’s thanks for that negotiation, and also thank you for holding this forum and for listening to the comments that he’s telling about [inaudible] .

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
I’m still waiting for the question, Heather, but thank you. Suggestions, too, folks. We are all in this together, and it’s a very challenging time. If you have ideas or ways that you feel that we could be doing this even more effectively as we navigate through.

I will say that for those of us who are watching this really closely, we’re seeing a bit of a shift. The grant review task force isn’t needing to meet every day anymore. We’ve been through that wave of terminations, suspensions, individual PIs facing a number of questions, and I want to thank all the people who’ve been a part of that.

FAST, which is the Federal Action Stakeholder Team that I’ve convened that was meeting, what, weekly? Twice a week. That’s meeting now less frequently, about once a month. We’re looking at a wide, wide range of federal issues as they come up and engaging general counsel and others and so forth.

The need for focus has shifted to watching the funding priorities for the federal government, at least as one big piece of where we’re putting attention now, and we all need to be doing that. More questions?

Do we have a means of bringing in questions from the Zoom? Good. I haven’t gotten a text that the power is back on yet.

Jenny Boyden:
I can say it was confirmed to be a Versant issue, not a 91±¬ÁĎ issue, which makes me happy. Should be a lower cost issue for us.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Yes, William.

William Gramlich:
Maybe it’s on now. I think it’s on. Good. I will echo the appreciation of listening about the indirect cost return changes. One thing is also good to hear about the aspect that there’s going to be a little bit more clarity given on how those are determined going forward. I haven’t been here long enough.

I remember when it didn’t happen, and then there was an original discussion of description of there’s this much money that we need to have, we have to keep aside. Anything over that, we’ll be giving back.

Was it actually proposed in the past that departments and colleges would actually get some of this money back? As a clarification question, when it comes to determining the amount of indirect cost returned, it sounds like there’s a methodology for doing that.

Is there a target amount of indirect cost or F&A that the university must get to maintain everything? Then beyond that, we’re trying to get money back to folks? Or is it more we’re going to look at what we end up getting for indirect costs and then determine how to distribute that to people? I’m just trying to get a little bit more clarification regarding that.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
I’m going to start an answer to give Jen time to chime in, but Will accurately describes what happened because I inherited that when I first got here. There was this number, and Cody explained it to me, that the plan at the time was if we get above that number, then we’ll try to distribute it back out. A couple of the people who were here then are nodding.

That is an unusual approach to doing this because it assumes that we can predict in a given year what we would need to recover even when the research landscape is changing quite a lot, and the costs of that research change.

We did go with that for a while, but that was never very popular, as far as I know, in the research office. I’ll turn to Jen before I go any further and get myself in trouble. I think actually, what you’ve raised speaks to the fact that, as the provost mentioned, we will have a review process. We’ll need to look at this every year.

We need to do some benchmarking to what other places do. It’s all over the map in what other universities do. The real point is to be sure that we’re able to afford the research that we are doing.

I think Jen can say more, but I heard at least one volunteer, perhaps for a committee to look with us every year to think about what will make sense when we take a look at all those metrics. Jen?

Jenny Boyden:
There has been two different versions that were used. One was a fixed pool, and that the more competitive we got and the more indirect we gained, the smaller that sliver was for everybody. It had the reverse effect because it was a fixed pool, and so your more successful research got that bigger fix.

That’s when we said, “OK, we got to do across the board.” There have been versions where we talked about giving it out to a greater population, that being departments, but unfortunately, about the time that we want to implement it was when we saw the budget challenges that we’re facing now.

In order to do that, you have to carve that out of our regular E&G distribution, and we weren’t able to make that change. Did I address?

William Gramlich:
My question is mostly about how going forward, of how is this going to be figured out? What are the metrics essentially going to be used to determine what balance comes in? There’s a bunch of different ways to doing it. Is there a best way, a good way to do that?

Jenny Boyden:
We’re talking about is to bring a group together to look at it with the budget-building procedure, is what is the cost of us doing this indirect cost of this research, what is the projection for indirect recovery, and what can we portion off?

The more that we portion off to return to departments or faculty means that — and I’m overstudying my bounds here — but is a larger cut to the departments. There’s only so much E&G.

That’s why we’re saying we need to bring people together during that budget build analysis and process to determine what is that indirect cost of the research, what is that projected recovery, and what can fairly be portioned off without a larger impact somewhere else?

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
I think that’s a perfect answer. Giovanna is going to speak and I’m going to speak, so obviously, we’ve all got a lot of thoughts on this. I would just add that another factor, so lots of variables here, the rising costs of compliance and reporting around research have been quite significant over the last few years, and that has to get picked up this way.

In the very big, big picture, if there’s a cap at 15 percent and indirects become part of direct costs as well as other very project-specific costs, which could be how this could go. If your project is going to require that you build a new zebrafish lab or something, then here’s how that gets costed, very tightly tied to the specific projects. We just don’t know what that will look like.

For those who are interested in this very, very deep and interesting piece of research administration, we’ll need to pull people together.

Giovanna Guidoboni:
Just wanted to clarify that the policy that I was talking about that we will post on the website describes how things are currently now.

I just wanted to clarify that there has not been other decision-making done for a change. The change is in the percentage. The two percent for this year’s return that have yet to be distributed, so not what is currently in the account, as well as the year after, Jenny, if I…

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
26.

Jenny Boyden:
26.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Yeah, we did.

Giovanna Guidoboni:
I just wanted to verify. Anyway. Then moving forward, we will discuss.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
The landscape could be very different by that time.

Giovanna Guidoboni:
Also, another thing that I wanted to add is it was interesting how in listening to various people in the community, some were very aware of the amounts in their accounts and others did not know about that.

If nothing else, one positive outcome of these lively discussions has been raising awareness that there are some funds in the accounts, and so I would like to encourage everyone to consider these funds as incentives for their own research.

I know that some have been accumulated over time, maybe with the intent of supporting a piece of equipment or maybe students. Basically, I am encouraging to utilizing those funds.

I know it is difficult to do especially when the situations are tough, but I think that continue to support research, and creativity, and activities, it is crucial to make sure that we steer even more upward our trajectory.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
More questions?

Woman:
If you don’t mind, I have a couple from online that I’ll cut in with. These are kind of historical.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
One second. Let’s get one from online.

Woman:
The first is from Justin Demmel, and this was from earlier in the presentation. “Do we know whether the enacted funds for 2026 are being spent as directed by Congress?

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Jason can answer that one.

Jason Charland:
The short answer is the spend plans on ’26 are not yet public. We’ll be monitoring that for sure.

Woman:
As a follow-up then, what does it mean for EHR that $600 million more were enacted than what was requested? How will these funds be awarded given the drastic reductions in programs, e.g., STEM K-12 replacing six-plus programs, and funding limits, e.g., $750,000 for STEM K-12 compared to $5 million plus for DRK-12 alone?

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
This is a very inside agency question. How many even know what this is about? I actually do, but kind of. I’m going to turn it to Jason to give a general answer, but it’s a great question. First of all, the director at NSF that he’s referring to has a new name now. It’s not any longer EHR. It’s EDU.

Jason, can you give a general from what you can tell so far about how this will go? It’ll be different, folks. It’s just different.

Jason Charland:
Sure. I think the president had mentioned this when that chart was originally up. You have what’s proposed by the president, and then you have what action is taken by Congress. What we’re seeing on those different levels, ’24 was the last budget that we’re comparing to.

You may recall FY ’25 was a full continuing resolution. ’26 now is a solid budget. Those numbers change based on what Congress is able to finally put through in the appropriations. I think on the agency by agency, it’s important to keep track of the levels from year to year and what these changes mean.

I think for agencies now, absent a spend plan, it’s hard to speculate. The pace of RFPs is also down, but I think a clear signal of institutional priorities within an agency is reflected in what RFPs hit the streets.

Some of those will be what we’ve seen in the past, and others will be more than likely the new priorities that come through the science administration.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
We’re seeing fewer in general. Imagine ways that agencies might also be trying to think about how to perhaps do fewer.

Then the last thing I would say, and I’m sure Justin does this, but for others who are interested, NSF has an excellent subscription service where you can basically check off every single part of NSF that you care about, and you’ll get a daily or regular reminder of what they’re doing.

They post RFIs. We need to be responding to those, in my opinion, RFPs, of course, but also other webinars and places where we can stay abreast of where they are.

Audience Member:
I wanted to change the conversation to the new life sciences building. It’s fantastic that we have that congressionally-directed spending amount, but the building is going to be expensive, I would imagine. What’s the vision for finding the rest of the funds? Is there a timeline as well?

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
We’re very thrilled to have this. This is the anchor funding, of course, for what would be a substantially larger complex, ideally.

We will soon be naming two different committees with also a kind of overarching group, one that will have the major responsibility of trying to look at programmatic themes and inclusion within that complex.

The other that in tandem, will be looking at the space, the numbers of buildings, the actual costs, the ways that we will get started as soon as we possibly can on the $45 million piece and make the plan for the capital investment that will likely include multiple kinds of sources of funding as we go.

That’s this week if we get there. Not all figured out by any means, but we’re very interested in folks thinking on this.

Audience Member:
Another question. To go back to some of the charts that were presented with the number of proposals and the amounts that Giovanna, you had shown, I assume those were all new proposals.

I was wondering if this would be quite a task, but to somehow project with current awards when they’re going to end. Also for new awards that are awarded, what’s their timeline? Having a better idea of, especially looking into the future, a year down the road, how many of these currently active awards are still going to be active?

Because otherwise, we might be able to anticipate some major some major dips. That would be really critical to know well in advance rather than just hoping it would work out.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
I think Giovanna and Jenny probably can speak to that.

Jenny Boyden:
We do try to do some of that modeling in the finance office. It’s one of the main areas that we were looking at last year when we were also talking about going to a 15 percent cap.

We were looking at the very reduced president’s budget submission, coupled with a potential 15 percent cap. With our current spend rates, where would that put our F&A out over the time of our multi-year forecast?

It was pretty alarming, really. It was bringing it down from 25 to 26 million down to probably 15. Col and Corey can nod if I’m on the right track.

Man 2:
[inaudible] 15 percent, right?

Jenny Boyden:
Yeah. With the 15 percent and the reduced federal budgets, it was getting substantially lower than it is now. We do monitor that on a regular basis, and we…   

Full transcript of event

George Kinghorn:

Good afternoon. I’m George Kinghorn, Senior Executive Director of Cultural Engagement and I would like to welcome you to the State of the University address. We would like to thank you for joining us today in person and via zoom.

We would like to begin with the 91±¬ÁĎ’s land acknowledgement:

The 91±¬ÁĎ recognizes that it is located on Marsh Island in the homeland of the Penobscot Nation, where issues of water and territorial rights, and encroachment upon sacred sites, are ongoing. Penobscot homeland is connected to the other Wabanaki Tribal Nations — the Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, and Mi’kmaq — through kinship, alliances and diplomacy. The university also recognizes that the Penobscot Nation and the other Wabanaki Tribal Nations are distinct, sovereign, legal and political entities with their own powers of self-governance and self-determination.

Chancellor Dannel Malloy:

I am very happy to be here but I do want to say a few things at the outset.  We are seeing a war underway in the Mideast once again.  We should keep in our minds that civilian loss as well as at least six members of our military losing their lives as well, we should hope and pray if we are so inclined that some sort of settlement takes place before more civilians are destroyed and I hope you share those thoughts.  There are unusual decisions being announced in the federal government, money being taken away, sometimes coming back, sometimes never to be seen again.  These are difficult times for colleges and universities, not just in New England where we have a particular issue that we face, which is we tend to be the oldest portion demographically and that causes even more trouble when those sent to us or taken away by Fiats, and we are dealing with a problem on an ongoing basis. 

Let me also say of your university, you have played a large large role in helping all of us in Maine, public and private to understand the difficulties that we are facing, that your university is facing as a result of decisions being made in Washington that are not based on reality, not based on what’s going on at this campus or at any of our campuses.  And we can also hope and pray that we move from that type of government to a more steady application of the rules that they are bringing forward in the hopes that they understand that they hurt the universities, but more importantly they hurt our students.  We know that we have an uphill fight when it comes to making sure that young people come to college or university.  

But what they read and what they hear and what they see happening to us is a true challenge, and I want to say to you in this room that this university has responded very very well, and because of that I will say it again.  Some of our small universities are in a better position today because of the work undertaken by the land grants, our flagship university, our space university, and sharing your great expertise has been very very helpful.  I also want to say that we have made a decision within the system with respect to the bonuses paid for the first contract with our graduate students.  Rather than having that money taken out of dollars appropriated for actual research, the system will step in and make those payments, and I give some credit to the next person to speak, Joan.  I want to say of my relationship with your president, we have a close working relationship.

We decided that that was the best thing for all of our universities and I reference to that already, but I also want to tell you that no one fights harder for their university, no other President fights harder than any other president in our consortium of universities, but this is the biggest — this is the only R1 university in Maine, and you are doing tremendous work.  

I want to say, before I turn it over to Joan in just a minute or so, thank you for what you do.  I frequently refer to those folks who are involved in education, that what we are involved in is raising the next generation.  And educating that generation to be good citizens, to be active in their community, to have the jobs in the work that they hope to have, you are responsible for that.  And we know that when someone in a family receives a degree, it is likely that the next generation will get a degree and the next generation after that will get a degree.

And so I think the steps that this university has taken, what we have seen in retention across all our universities, but also very much here, we can be very very proud of.  And then finally, before I turn it over to my good friend, your president, who I respect so very very much, there is one other group of folks I should have included.

As you know, there have been great difficulties with respect to immigration.  People not being treated properly.  American citizens losing their lives, people who are here legally being forced to prison.  All of that, too, should be on our list of things we want to see as a nation, as a state, as an individual, we need to make progress on that subject as well.  With that, Joan, thank you so much for inviting me.  I’m sorry I missed it last year.  I’m looking forward to your speech, but I look forward every single day to working with you.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy:

Hi, everybody.  That’s okay, good to see you all.  Thank you so much, Chancellor, for the gracious introduction and for your steadfast support of the University.  Including our regional campus in Machias.  Let’s begin with an acknowledgment of the sad and tragic events at the University that happened over the last few weeks.  I like to have a moment of silence for our students Joamaliz Orozco and Kasie Malcolm, who tragically passed away, and for Chance Lauer, who is missing. Thank you.   

Good afternoon, everybody, welcome to everyone who is here and those watching the lifestream.  Is the livestream working?  We will be able to see it at some point.  I want to say the state of the university is strong and evolving.  Right now more than 10,000 prospective students who have been accepted to 91±¬ÁĎ for the coming fall are considering whether they will ultimately enroll here.  We are the most powerful educational and economic engine in the state, and Maine is counting on us.  There are numerous challenges and I will speak to them directly through this talk but we are poised to meet them and move our university and the state forward.  Today I want to thank everybody here for your great work and to urge us to keep our focus on the best interests of our students of the state as together we innovate and adapt to become even stronger and more sustainable for the future.  

So here is why I’m confident and excited about the fact that we are strong and evolving and that we can succeed.  First, we have a dedicated, talented and problem solving oriented community here.  We are good at assessing and adjusting to the shifting landscape around us.  We are essential, perhaps more so than ever to the success and well-being of our students, the state of Maine, and well beyond — a responsibility I know we all take seriously, and in our 161st year we are continuously improving.  Okay.  Are the slides up?  Okay, that was a success.  I should be happy.  Okay.  I’m glad that we are here today as a community as black bears. We have chosen to be here and stay here for a variety of reasons.  Our students have chosen a pathway to a career, advance to other pathways of career and to enjoy their college years and more.  

I want to thank our excellent 91±¬ÁĎ student government inc and the leaders were here today and I know that we have Keegan Tripp who is the president and we may have Alison Emery, president of the student alliance Council and the graduate student government and its leaders, I don’t know if they are here today.

These two organizations present our student body very very well.  I rely on them in our regular meetings to let us know what we can do better and how we can learn together and they are extremely helpful.  I want to also congratulate you, and I had to really look this up. I’m bringing the driver era to the area.  I think that is a good thing so congratulations. 

I would also like to acknowledge the leadership of the 91±¬ÁĎ Machias Senate and its president, Joseph Ferguson.  Machias, congratulations on your recent successes like the annual Haunted Forest and the annual ice fishing derby.  You bring hundreds of local visitors to your events, reminding us how important students are to the fabric of local communities.

Others of us are here because we care about the 91±¬ÁĎ as an institution.  We recognize the important role it has as a source of talent and solutions in our state, nation and world, and we want to do our part in the roles we will have to make it strong and steward it for those who come after us.  I would like to ask that Chancellor Malloy and members of the 91±¬ÁĎ system, I see St. John in the back and Ken O’Leary, the directors of research series and institutes and members of the faculty Senate for a standard — stand and wait so we can acknowledge what you do for this institution.

Thanks to all of you for your leadership and partnership.  I’d like to recognize — we are all here and/or, we are all here because we love to teach and share our knowledge with our students around the world.  I’d like to recognize the 2025 Presidential Teaching Award winners Dr. Gayle Kraus, from 91±¬ÁĎ Machias, and Dr. Melissa Maginnis, from 91±¬ÁĎ; 2025 91±¬ÁĎ Alumni Association Distinguished Maine Professor, Dr. Mark Brewer; and our 2025 honorary degree recipient Dr. George Denton. They are exemplars of the hundreds of committed, impactful faculty at our university.  

Last year, for the first time, Dr. Peter Schilling and his team at the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL) recognized 14 dedicated faculty and graduate student assistants with the SEATLE (Supporting Excellence, Achievements, Transformations, Leadership and Equity) in teaching awards. 

Biologist Dr. Eric Jones won the “Cross Campus Pollinator” award (works across 91±¬ÁĎ and 91±¬ÁĎ Machias) and Dr. Liliana Herakova won the “Starter Culture” award (she works nurturing the next generation of educators.)

Our teachers are fantastic.  Many of us are here because this is a place where we can discover, create, interpret and understand the world around us through research, scholarship and creative endeavors.  As a result of all that excellent work including that of the doctoral students who completed their degrees, 91±¬ÁĎ’s prestigious Carnegie classification was reaffirmed in 2025.  We remain the first and only institution in Maine to receive this high level of productivity and research performance.  And we reached another record high in research expenditures in the 2025 report which is 2024 data.  You may be asking what HERD is —  it’s the higher education and research development survey.  

We are up in that data set from 188 million to 198 million and we sit in the 85th percentile amongst universities.  We have steadily made progress on our research expenditures over the last decade.  Many of the people here know that 91±¬ÁĎ is a critical partner with the state.  For example, Doctor Angela Mech is doing tremendous service for Maine by leading the Spruce Budworm lab to track one of the most pesky US threats to our forest.  The 91±¬ÁĎ Cooperative Extension reached more than 72,000 individuals through online and in-person programs over the last year and over 15,000 young people participated in 4 H camps and learning programs throughout the state.  We have so much to be proud of. 

Others are here because of the course of whatever they do for the university, they care deeply about our students and helping them to succeed in whatever way they can.  I particularly want to thank all of our staff.  At our holiday dinner in December I met a member of our custodial staff Gail Nadeau who took the time to decorate a cart around the holidays because she knew it would bring a smile to the students during a stressful time of the year and I’m sure that  it did.  

457 student athletes at this university pursue their degrees wild playing division one sports and they make 91±¬ÁĎ and our entire state proud.  We have a number of people from our athletics department here. If folks can wave, I would like to acknowledge all for what you bring. [APPLAUSE]  Thank you.  Special congratulations to last year’s championship teams.  Men’s ice hockey won the Hockey East title last March and this fall, women’s soccer three-peated as America East champs. Women’s cross country was the American East champion for the first time in 91±¬ÁĎ history and our women’s  field hockey team achieved a GPA of 3.89, the highest among all D1 field hockey programs. Women’s Basketball has its  first playoff game tomorrow night in the pit against University of New Hampshire. 

Athletics is a vital part of 91±¬ÁĎ and we thank you for all you do.  If you love the outdoors and its day in Maine for that reason you can learn to experience as a listener first.  Karen Beeftink of 91±¬ÁĎ Machias is inviting others to do just that with our soundscape Project, developed with artists and ecologists to capture Maine’s sonic environment.  People care about Maine and its cultural heritage and are there because part of what the state’s public research university does is to educate and preserve and promote that heritage.  I’m thinking specifically here of our Wabanaki center which will move to a renovated building next year which will elevate its community engagement.  If you haven’t visited our outstanding Hudson Museum, you should. 

Finally, I hope a part of while all of us are here is because this community feels like home because it feels safe, it welcomes us, and nurtures and challenges us.  I truly hope that is true of our 490 international students, faculty and staff.  From the 67 countries that they represent.  I know they are here for those reasons and more.  I know many of you are able to  attend — thank you to our international community and we know how vital you are to this university so let’s applaud our international group. [APPLAUSE] 

I also know that being part of a community, especially higher ed  Community right now can be difficult.  The Chancellor named a few.  Many are understandably anxious and fearful about the future in this community and we need to acknowledge that I’m sure we pay attention to that.  Over the last year here, we have done a number of things.  We have stepped up our efforts to prioritize student well-being, belonging and success university wide.  Deeper collaborations among UMSG, the undergraduate-led Committee of Holistic Health and Wellness, and Student Life departments—including Student Wellness (SWell), the Counseling Center, Campus Recreation, and the Academic Affairs’ Student Success Hub—are resulting in a coordinated network of care.  Our new balance rec center gets 1000 visitors a day.  Participants in the counselor center’s holistic health among the center grew 26 percent this year and for the third year in a row we maintained no waitlist for counseling.  Student input has shaped the programs and spaces that we have, such as the mind spa, relaxation station and powerlifting gym which I can verify looks great while all I have done is walk by.  

All of those are made to foster balance and restoration here.  We are seeing some results.  Changes at the federal level have affected all of us.  Faculty and staff have scrambled to find new funding for their students while at the same time they are reassessing and adapting in their own research and scholarship to align with new priorities and new funding opportunities.  That is not easy work.  Given this landscape that is evolving, our faculty and staff are working to write even more unusual proposals but the environment is very tough.  

So far in fiscal 2026, 275,000,000 new dollars and funding have come into 91±¬ÁĎ because of the diligence and intelligence and excellence of our faculty and staff.  Congratulations.  At the same time, these numbers in comparison to previous years are down.  At this point last year our grant amount was 141.1 million, about double where we currently stand.  So we are looking for ways to support our faculty as they seek external funding and pivot and adapt to address some of the new federal priorities and that’s an element of change that is really quite significant. 

 I want to thank Interim Vice President for Research Giovanna Guidoboni and her team in the Office of Research Development have launched the “Coffee and Concepts” program. Over 40 faculty across campus are working to learn how to write quick quadchart in response to calls for proposals – the goal is to have fast, effective responses, in an “it takes a village” environment. to provide internal feedback and rapid improvement. Two major current topics of focus, in alignment with state and federal priorities: AI, materials, and manufacturing; and health and life sciences and engineering.

Thanks to the very good work of our 91±¬ÁĎ foundation we were able to provide $250,000 in bridge funding to sustain graduate workers whose research was impacted by federal cuts last year.  

Having mentioned the foundation I would like to call to your attention the president of the University Maine foundation, Jeff Mills who can wave —  Jeff has announced his intention to retire in six months from the Maine foundation. I want to publicly congratulate him and thank him for his amazing contributions to the University. [APPLAUSE] 

Beginning in January of 2025, I established several new groups that I want to thank all involved for their effort.  To study and respond to changes coming along with this new administration.  Several senior administrators at 91±¬ÁĎ, along with Chancellor Malloy — and many others turned from some of what they were doing and spent their time on to take up this work.  I want to especially thank vice president Jake Ward and Senior advisor Jason Charland for their incredible leadership in the amount of time they put into tending to our attention to the federal efforts.  Jake and Jason, thank you.  They are here somewhere.[ APPLAUSE ]  One group was the Grant review task force.  After January 20th they met almost every day in 2025.  

Grants that were terminated, suspended, inextricably suspended or being questioned, all received thoughtful direct consideration from this group which was also taking in and learning the federal policy changes in the moment.  All efforts were made to restore impacted grants.  Since last January the group has looked at 176 grants and of that 91 have been restored.  

This is remarkable compared to other universities.  The current federal administration as Chancellor Malloy has noted, has created a number of issues and challenges for universities and for this university.  They have issued 127 executive orders along with countless other documents, many of them really affecting us very directly.  More than a dozen leaders from around the system meet monthly and more frequently earlier as part of a second group, our federal actions group take over — they are assessing in real time and digging into understanding how we can respond to these new challenges in ways that protect our community and that move us forward and not the same time leverage new opportunities. 

 We are grateful to Maine’s congressional delegation, Senator Susan Collins and Angus King and representatives Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden for their ongoing support and engagement and we engage with them frequently over the past 14 months.  In particular Senator Collins who chairs the Senate appropriations committee directly helped to reverse a number of those Federal awards, such as Maine’s Sea Grant and secured new federal spending that recognizes our importance in Maine.  I should note here that I will be grateful to the state legislature and Governor Janet Mills and her administration  for their ongoing support of Maine’s public universities including ours. 

I can tell you that at 91±¬ÁĎ over the last few years the percentage of our E&G budget that comes from the state is close to 40 percent, and it is about half of what covers the 91±¬ÁĎ system. We are also very fortunate to receive an annual appropriation from the state for the Maine Economic Improvement Fund, or MEIF, currently at $21.85M for UMS and about $17M coming to 91±¬ÁĎ.

Now I need to speak frankly about our challenging fiscal situation.  We do not have enough resources to do everything we want and need to do as Maine’s flagship land, sea and space grant  R1 and D1 university.  Not if we want to remain accessible and affordable to the people of Maine, and confront our daunting $1.1B total in deferred maintenance. 

I always read some history of 91±¬ÁĎ as I prepare for these, resource constraints have been since its founding in 1865. In the earlier years (late 1870s, and without the strong legislative support we now have),  things were tense and difficult between the state and the university.  Doctor Arthur Hauck  (1933 – 1958)  saw the university through the great depression, World War 11, and the post war emergence of research universities.

In 1933 he found himself in essentially the same place as earlier presidents without enough money to accomplish his and the University’s goals, that is in the Smith 1979 history.  During the 2008 recession with a reduced operating budget by  $37 million.  I am sharing these two bits of history for two reasons:  This current moment is not the only time 91±¬ÁĎ’s face challenges and there will be more to come. 

Yet with each difficult financial stress the University adopts, resets and emerges stronger, all the while continuing to serve learners and our state’s economy at high levels of excellence and we are doing that now. What I take from this quick historical tour is that we must, as a community, do the best we can to do what it takes to: make progress on improving our fiscal position; sustain what is most core to being Maine’s learner-centered R1 university; and embrace new opportunities and ways of operating to innovate, partner, and grow.

Budget planning, both for the end of fiscal year FY26 in balance and bringing forth a balanced FY27 budget plan is well underway under the expert leadership of vice president for finance and administration Jenny Boyden, the finance team and members of the cabinet on behalf of the organizations they all represent.  

This planning is informed by the ongoing SRE processing close consultation with key university groups, the 91±¬ÁĎ senates, finance and institutional planning committee, the president’s budget and finance committee, the space committee and the President’s committee on operational excellence.  The Dean’s, center and institute directors and school leaders and many many others are all engaged in the work of finding solutions that can work the best for most people. 

 Our FY26 reality is difficult, more so than we initially anticipated and one reason is because of enrollments.  Specifically, while we have seen record graduate and doctorate in enrollment over the years, overall student credit hours this year are down about 4 percent from what we modeled, from what we planned in the budget.  Due in part to large declines in some of our out-of-state enrollments. Our enrollment management team under Vice President Coughlin is absolutely on this and moving us forward, but this is the reality we face. 

Another reason is the cost of operating our large, and in some cases antiquated statewide plant, that costs continues to increase. Higher than planned fuel costs—it has been a very cold winter.  Unexpected repairs and failures like sinkholes, steam pit emergencies, broken chillers and more have meant that we are doing internal midyear adjustments to get the balance.  Our projected gap as of two weeks ago, I want to be careful so I don’t get quoted is partially saying this.  

Two weeks ago the gap was about $9 million for the remainder of this fiscal year, and that is against our $279.9 million E&G budget. And so the teams I’ve mentioned have been working pretty much around the clock to close this so that we balance, which is required in our System, that we balance by the end of this fiscal year. And they have been very very clever and diligent about how to do this.  One time-saving from employee attrition, they have applied grant, gift and special appropriated state funds as well as federal funds when allowable to E&G expenses. Redirecting available FNA recovery dollars judiciously with possible replacement by gift funds in some cases.  For those of you following that particular issue I will come back to that in a town hall we are going to hold next week.  

And then recovering student financial aid funds that are freed up by the lower enrollment.  Some use of strategic funds and more.  So in the coming weeks, we will be balanced by our projection at the moment at the end of fiscal 26 which is good news.

In the coming weeks we will complete the work on the fiscal year 27 budget proposal, fiscal year 27 begins in July so we have to be ready.  I appreciate all that the units did in striving to reach the 7 percent reduction target for 2027.  That was difficult work and affected every unit on the campus.  We announced a $20 million gap in our preliminary FY27 budget early in the planning in October of â€�25, and I am pleased to report that through similar hard work, creativity and collaboration we are very close to having a plan that closes that gap so we can present a balanced budget and preserve our ability to execute our engagement mission.  

Every hire across all units and levels is now reviewed and scrutinized through our critical hiring community which means we will meet at least once a week and then sometimes more.  And then by me. I’m asking new questions about these hires.  Could this be a joint position across units?  How will it help us move forward across strategic areas?  Will programmatic expansion in this area be helpful for students and so on.  Because we are talking about the context and landscape and although it’s generally not reassuring, 91±¬ÁĎ is not alone in this fiscally challenging moment.  

All three credit ratings—Moody, S&P Global Ratings, and Fitch—currently assign a negative outlook to the entire higher education sector, citing rising operating costs, slowing revenue growth, demographic pressures, and uncertainty in federal research funding.  We see daily national news of faculty and staff reductions, hiring freezes or slowdowns, program reviews, and structural adjustments. Over 9,000 higher-ed jobs were cut in 2025 tied to budget pressures. Fortunately, very few of those were at 91±¬ÁĎ. 

We have found ways to be frugal and to be careful with our dollars, and I should note that Moody has recently upgraded our UMS outlook from negative to stable.  I’m sure you can see that a lot of these pieces need to fit together in ways that continue to move us forward.  

Our proposed fiscal year 27 budget will be released as part of the public budget materials as part of the finance facilities FFT committee budget meeting on March 25th.  That meeting is public and you will have the opportunity to see and hear what is discussed.  I’m committed to ensuring that you know what will be presented to the BOT in advance and I’ve scheduled a budget town hall for March 23rd at 1:00 p.m.  I want to give special thanks to the Deans and their leadership teams. Everyone worked hard to get us here but special thanks to them for what they’ve been able to do both for fiscal year 26 and fiscal year 27.  

Finding personnel savings that involved vacant positions, stewarding their funds very wisely, finding collaborations and staying focused on the instructional and research missions, acting strategically to getting us closer to being on track and making hard decisions over these few months, we have a clear path to balancing through these measures with minimal faculty retrenchments or layoffs planned for 2027, so I would like to applaud our deans because they bear the bulk of this burden.

I recognize that challenges are being experienced in different ways by all of us.  I’m especially sensitive to the challenges that our international community feels and want to mention that here.  We need to remember that we are all here for our own reasons and with different expectations of what our experience at this university will be but as a community and as higher education institution, we must find and continue to find ways to be civil and respectful as we disagree and debate, recognizing that we do share common goals, and we need to always communicate better.  We also need to extend grace to each other every chance we get and I’m grateful to see a lot of that in the past year.  We are doing and experiencing many things for the first time at this university in a world that is troubling in so many ways.

We have achieved our first collective bargaining agreement with our graduate workers Union and we are thrilled that has happened and want to congratulate all that made that happen.  [APPLAUSE] we’ve already mentioned the plethora of federal changes and requirements in an environment that is causing turmoil in higher education.  

We have our new Title II compliance which I know people are working diligently on, we have a new research misconduct requirement from the federal government that is getting good work accomplished on that, I want to thank AFUM for their engagement in particular.  We are looking for the budget solutions that are the least disruptive and least harmful to the majority of people here.  We want to responsibly integrate AI, we need to implement new emergency communication systems and that’s moving along with great support from our system, and we are engaging the most expansive campus construction and renovation in decades, so there’s a lot going on, and I’m very encouraged actually that we are continuing to move ahead. Finally as we leave this discussion of the changing landscape and move in, I promise, to the final section of this talk, I ask for your patience and constructive suggestions as we move forward together.  

We must let each other know what we can do better and at the same time we always need to assume that people are trying to do their best here.  So, to the conclusion:  It’s a little bit more talk but you know, we need to talk about re- envisioning, because that has been a very big part of our last year.  We began ambitious and as Chancellor Malloy said at the time, a brave, re-envisioning effort a little more than two years ago.  We challenged ourselves to this question:  What would the 91±¬ÁĎ look like if we were designing it today?  I noted at the time in a paper that is on the website that the world was changing around us and pointed to developments in technology, the responsibilities of higher ed for social mobility and access to careers, declining student population in Maine and so much more as a reason to collectively look forward to that happening.  And that happened. In a draft final report that will be shared soon, Doctor Sabrina DeTurk who is here I think maybe — thank you Sabrina.  The SRE project director has prepared a report.  She notes that the SRE process has been a collaborative effort to reimagine our institutions structure and strategic direction.  That has evolved at least 200 people across groups, hundreds of participants and retreats, town halls and shared ideas.  I want to thank everyone who has been with us on this journey.  It is not over but it is going to evolve into something new, so I want to really acknowledge the good hard work that people have done in the midst of so many other interesting and important challenges.

Out of all of this, undertaken in this period of unusually rapid shifts and turmoil, our university has produced an extraordinary set of next steps and outcomes. At least 100 actionable ideas in fact.  The SRE concept of being a learning centered R1 University is in place and pervades what we do.  We are now a destination university for students who want a research learning experience in their first semester.  More than half the student body in this academic year at 91±¬ÁĎ engaged in authentic research experiences, leading to an increased rate of retention and sense of belonging and distinguishing our medium-sized resource constrained R1 as a place where undergraduates can come and do research.  By building on our lessons and foundations of SRE so far, I’m now proposing that we think of 91±¬ÁĎ as being in a continuous improvement mode which is critical to the health of institutions like this one.  It is not that SRE is done, and now we move on, it is that SRE becomes a part of who we are and what we do in ways that are more standard and a part of our normal structures.  The most recent formal work was that of our SRE implementation groups launched last spring.  Let me think about the participants who have worked so diligently over the last many months.  The college APR and RPR reports were delivered to the Faculty Senate on February 27 so these reports are making their way into the hands of those who have the opportunity to review and study them and make their own comments and continue to look at these areas.  I’ve heard a lot of questions about the relationships of the SRE effort to the budget development.  Any budget reflects the priority of an organization. When we talk about strategic budget development and shared values, we need to be sure there’s a clear enough set of priorities, commitments and shared values that guide the choices that we make.  That is, our values and commitments and priorities guide the budget.  The budget is the reflection of what we value.  And it’s even more important in a time of tight fiscal situations to have those framing principles in mind.  For those of us who’ve been working on the budgets of 25, 26 and 27, we’ve been fortunate to have had such tenants.  Some emerging from SRE and some emerging naturally in an environment where we are reflecting on our own activity over the last two years.  I’ve already mentioned learner centered R1. The commitment to prioritizing learner access and success. The need to expand our audiences of learners and expand online education.  The need to be sure we are relevant in what we are. The need to serve as Maine’s R&D department, to be a national leader in research, to maintain a national reputation that attracts dollars and students, to reduce silos and have more interdisciplinary integration.  To streamline our organizations and structures. To find administrative efficiencies at all levels and have more coordination, and to learn to look at negative and positive consequences of proposed change.

As the formal phases of SRE blend into our current structures and lead us to new ones, as a community we do self reflection to question entrenched practices and programs and structures and use data far more developed than it was two years ago.

So how are we doing?  Has the University been re- envisioned in significant ways since May of 2024?  I claim yes.  Part of the state of the university is that it looks different than it did two years ago and for the good.  Was SRE the cause of every change?  In some cases yes, there’s a direct straight line from the SRE work to the change and in other cases the most I would change is that the changes are in line with the conversation and work we’ve been doing around SRE.  We are well along in re- envisioning and enacting 91±¬ÁĎ for today and for tomorrow.  It is evolving.  Here’s a few quick examples.  

Take a look around.  We are different.  There’s more than 120 capital projects underway at 91±¬ÁĎ and 91±¬ÁĎ Machias with our SRE articulated commitments of being a learner centered R1 and Maine’s R&D department at their core.  The GEM factory of future building, designed from the beginning to integrate student learning with the cutting edge R&D that will open this fall. And I would like to credit Dean’s Emily Haddad and Giovanna Guidoboni, and ASCC director Habib Dagher along with many others in coming together in the spirit of reducing siloes and becoming a learning centered letter R1 facility.  I see them all here, so good job. [APPLAUSE].

That facility is funded by a combination of federal, state and philanthropic funds that reflect strong support for 91±¬ÁĎ’s leadership. The BOT Loft, in the Advanced Manufacturing Center, opened last summer. They offer certification and micro-badges to meet the standards of the Smart Automation Certification Alliance.  And as part of the same renovation, with funding from the Harold Alfond Foundation is the new Maine College of Engineering and Computing Student Success and Advising center – real evidence of our commitment to meeting students where they are and enabling them to succeed and be ready for the workforce. I’m told not only MCE students use the facility but others take advantage of it as well.  

There’s more to come.  The food innovation lab, the health sciences complex brought to us in a $45 million congressional directed earmark by Senator Collins, the sawmill training and education Center, the Forest biomaterials innovation center, that PFAS and Catalysis lab, the Black Bear Academy day care expansion, the Maine environmental analytical lab in Deering, and Boardman Hall. All of these facilities will be reconstituted and developed with a learner centered letter R1 theme driving how those will evolve, and we know those are essential to our success. The Alfond Funded renovation of the Shawn Walsh Center and Hockey Arena are improving the experience for our black bear athletes, fans and our community.  Same with the new balance soccer and track and field complex all transforming the campus.  The area outside of Wells’ comments is just beautiful.  At Machias, the Reynolds gym renovation and new basketball court are a point of pride for the whole community.  Fogler library has launched GLAAM which sounds like it may be about beautification only, it’s about galleries, libraries, archives, arts, and museums as well as a landscape design service learning project, very consistent with some of the themes. But from SRE  we have new capacity and tools for looking at ourselves and new data, new experiences coming together across many disciplines to agree on criteria that matter and to let each other know when we don’t think the criteria are correct and new processes for coming to recommendations.  The academic program portfolio and review implementation group undertook 91±¬ÁĎ’s most comprehensive ever compilation of quantitative and qualitative indicators of the status of every one of our academic degree programs, and there is much richness in that particular work. They invented ways to categorize, have an integrative review process by deans and others and provide perspectives from the deans and others about ways to realign, align and rethink the criteria, generate revenue, and sunset programs if needed.  So we are starting to get very good at asking ourselves the right questions about the relevance and sustainability of our academic portfolio and how we can improve it.  

One example I would cite that happened during this time is we launched the Down East nursing track through 91±¬ÁĎ Machias through 91±¬ÁĎ Augusta—so we are partnering. It’s a way in those local areas in Washington County nursing can become a more viable workforce option for students. 

In the parallel Research Portfolio review implementation group, the approach involved many many interesting dimensions and a very comprehensive survey of the campus from which we learned a lot about how people feel about our research enterprise and how we can make it better.  The survey results made clear that extensive and very important research and scholarly activity happens well beyond our research centers and institutes which we knew, but having that in the survey results indicates the importance that our faculty feel it needs to be afforded to that point.  We’ve learned that the data collection around research is revealing that our own systems for tracking and assembling data are very underdeveloped in this area but as an R1 we have to improve that so there has to be an effort to improve those systems together.  We also need further discussion about what ROI for research actually means, because we have a wide range of research and scholarly enterprise and creative activity there and ROI will look quite different depending.  The manufacturing materials and workforce acceleration implementation group has demonstrated how to accelerate our impact across multiple domains, for instance the ASCC and the bio products research Institute have a new collaboration now breaking down silos and leveraging integration. 

Finally, the fourth implementation group, the Administrative Business Services Group, was charged to identify ways to restructure and optimize selected administrative functions into more unified organizations. There has been progress in that area, with various reorganizations large and small underway, including that the Dean of the graduate school is currently reporting to the Provost, a structural shift that was recommended strongly throughout the SRE work. And we established a new administrative excellence advisory committee which will work from the very good Provost’s Administrative Barriers report from 2024 and the SRE recommendations as we continue on.

Questions asked and suggestions made during the SRE activities as well as the changing landscape around us have led to a number of review groups and task forces that are working hard to make recommendations and assemble information, including the Collins Center for the arts task force, rise center task force, a new workforce pell task force which I chair with Vice Chancellor St. John, and a new medical school pathway task force that’s coming soon.  What’s next for SRE?  We updated the website today.  It includes a tracker that now has 40 projects listing re- envisioning’s underway now and we will eventually continue to refine and upgrade that.  Watch the site for a comprehensive two year report on SRE soon and I will also add a new concept paper SRE 2.0 including some of what I’ve talked about here.  The notion of continuous improvement as a theme for our university.  Efforts to re- envision our academic portfolio and our research portfolio will continue and gradually be integrated into the existing structures under the EVPAA / Provost and Vice President for Research. So the real final conclusion. Let me return to what I said at the beginning.  I hope you agree that the state of this university is strong and evolving.  That is because of the commitment of our community, our ability to assess and adjust to a changing landscape with civility and respect, and our SRE-driven capacity for continuous improvement.  I want to thank every one of you for all that you bring to the 91±¬ÁĎ and the 91±¬ÁĎ Machias.  Thank you for coming to the 2026 date of the University address.  We are going to queue up a Life in the Pines video and then we have a small reception for folks outside.

[ MUSIC PLAYING ]

I would say Maine is cold but warm.

Cold for the temperature, but nice warm people.

The really cold winter, which is always fun to be bundled up and go play out in the snow with your friends like a child.

It’s always just sweet because I feel like we come together during the winter.

It feels very cinematic.

The DI experience here at 91±¬ÁĎ, it’s very unique.

Being so engrossed and so enthralled with the people and the experiences here, while still being able to drive 20 minutes and be in the middle of nowhere.

That experience is just so amazing.

My favorite part about 91±¬ÁĎ has honestly been the people I’ve met here and the campus itself.

It’s wonderful to walk around the campus and see all the leaves change color.

The flora and fauna of Maine, it hits a nail on the head.

I love it here.

I don’t want to go.

I’m thinking of the sign you see when you cross into Maine from New Hampshire. You know, Maine, the way life should be.

I think the state of Maine might be my favorite state in general in the United States.

It’s a beautiful state.

I mean, hey, we literally go to school on an island.

It’s great that the school is mid-sized.

It’s not like super small liberal arts, but then again, it’s not like 40,000 other kids.

It’s like a pine tree, very strong, very sturdy.

And the experiences that you have here are going to last through all the seasons of your life.

, as well as .

The recording of the Town Hall meeting began late, the video commences with interim executive vice president for academic affairs and provost Gabriel Paquette’s presentation on the Strategic Re-envisioning (SRE) initiative.

Transcript

Gabe Paquette:

…fellows got together to address a number of areas that were understood to be of absolute critical importance. Those working groups have now given way to four smaller implementation groups that have taken this earlier work. That is the town halls, the various work products developed by the working groups led by the provost fellows, and tried to take those to the next level.

I just wanted to say parenthetically that I’ve been really honored to work very closely with many of the leaders of the working groups, as well as obviously serve on the implementation group.

I can say that all employees and students associated with this university will be very pleased, I think, by the creativity, the esprit de corps, and the absence of cynicism that all of the individuals involved in these processes have demonstrated. It’s made me very proud to work at this university as we drive things forward.

This slide shows the challenges as well as the opportunities and the ways in which the SRE is beginning to address those. I do want to emphasize that the SRE is not only about teaching and learning and research, but actually about other parts of the university as well.

Every part of the institution must be examined, since the solutions that we’re going to develop, the responses to problems and challenges, are, of necessity, integrated ones. I would just mention here two of the implementation groups, let’s say, and the challenges they face.

The Workforce Alignment Group, for example, we’re trying to strive to ensure that the 91±¬ÁĎ, the offerings that we have, are aligned with workforce needs. We’re trying to ensure that our graduates are prepared for the future job market through strong industry connections. Fortunately, the manufacturing, materials, and workforce acceleration is doing precisely that.

Similarly, we’re trying to ensure, given our scarce resources, that we are efficient, especially as we allocate resources. Here, the Administrative Business Services Group has evolved to now becoming a President’s Advisory Committee on Administrative Excellence that was just launched recently. This is, I think, very exciting.

I’ll spend a little bit of time now, though, talking about the Academic Portfolio Review and then the Research Portfolio Review. I think that we are now very well poised to take advantage of the fruitful and insightful contributions and data collection analysis that have occurred since May 2024 and begin to move towards action.

On this slide, you will see the current state of play for two of the implementation groups, the Academic Program Portfolio as well as the Research Portfolio Review Group. I’d just like to, here, thank Deb Allen and her team in OIRA because the APR data in particular has been very difficult to compile and analyze, and her group has led the way there and deserves great appreciation and recognition for that.

We’re finally in a place where we’re actually able to ask the question, where do the various academic programs at the 91±¬ÁĎ stack up against important metrics as well, as how do they stack up relative to each other in this particular moment in time? We’re using both quantitative measures as well as qualitative ones.

I just want to emphasize here that we’ve been incredibly transparent, especially of late, in sharing the data that has been developed by the groups. Various composite metrics were shared with the Faculty Senate executive committee in early September.

Then, more recently, we shared a data workbook as well as a methodological appendix document with both the Senate and also with the deans to share with their faculty. I encourage those of you who have not yet seen those documents, to reach out either to your faculty senators from your college or to your dean or, indeed, write directly to me. I’d be happy to share those documents with you.

Something very similar is happening with the Research Portfolio Review Group. There, an assessment framework for centers and institutes has been developed, as well as a tool for strategic action planning.

I won’t say very much about that, except for that the APR Group and the Research Portfolio Review Group have been working in concert very closely. I would like to acknowledge the leadership of Jason Charland and Sandra De Urioste‑Stone in that work and also being such great collaborators with us.

I mentioned data collection and analysis. I now want to dive into that just a little bit more. First, thanks to Deb and her team, we were able to collect data related to quantitative metrics. Those are listed on the slide. I’ll just mention a few of them just to give you a flavor.

We’re looking at enrollment in major, student credit hours generated, job growth capability, doctoral degrees awarded, and others. Those important quantitative metrics are displayed here on this slide.

We then sorted programs into three categories. The first were programs of distinction, that is, those programs that are doing extraordinarily well according to various metrics.

Programs that are in a steady state, that is, they’re making good contributions, credit hours are being generated, graduates are succeeding, but perhaps haven’t quite risen to that level of excellence. Then programs in need of review, which, according to a range of quantitative metrics are not performing as well vis‑‡‑vis other programs at the university.

After those categorizations were made, deans were then asked to either confirm or recategorize programs based on their detailed local knowledge. Detailed local knowledge, of course, is not just their own experience, but also working with their chairs and directors to find out whether or not, essentially, the metrics were misleading in some way.

Give you one example. If, for example, a particular program had two faculty retire very recently, they might be generating fewer credit hours, because we’re only looking at a snapshot, particular moment in time, as opposed to looking across a longer period of time.

Deans will be aware of that program, department chairs and school directors will be aware of that, and their local information helped to inform that either confirmation or recategorization.

Now, I’m happy to say that deans are in the midst of college‑wide discussion. Not only with their chairs and directors, but actually with their entire faculty and staff.

In discussing programs of distinction and programs in need of review, how can we potentially build on areas of excellence and distinction? How should we approach programs in need of review? How can we position them from positions of weakness to positions of strength?

It’s in that context that we’re applying a qualitative rubric. I’ve just spoken before about the data that had been collected and then analyzed, and the metrics that were created, including the composite metric. Now what we’re doing is we’re applying a qualitative rubric.

That is essentially a way of assessing whether or not programs are truly those of distinction or in need of review. That work is taking place right now, led by the deans in conjunction with their faculty. Of course Faculty Senate is involved in that at every step along the way.

Now, as a result of that work, as a result of the application of that qualitative rubric ‑‑ here, I’ve provided an example of several of the rubric criteria ‑‑ we’re going to be in a much better position to determine whether or not a program that we offer at the university should be grown or maintained, or perhaps modified significantly, and, in extreme cases, closed or eliminated altogether.

I realize that this particular slide has small type. I should say also that, renew my invitation to write to me and I’ll provide you with the workbook as well as the methodological appendix document that I referred to before.

Essentially, you can look at a number of the different criteria. One, for example, would be reputational risk.

Of course, there’s a certain degree of subjectivity here, but I think that when you look at programs holistically, using a range of quantitative as well as qualitative data, it’s possible to reach conclusions, to guide action, to determine whether or not investments should be made, programs should expand, or whether or not they should be reconfigured and, in some cases, eliminated.

As I’ve said, deans are now working very closely with faculty and staff in their colleges to apply this qualitative rubric to the programs that have been identified, either as those of distinction and perhaps worthy of further expansion, new investments, or those programs that have been determined to be, according to quantitative as well as qualitative data, ripe for reconsideration, if not, elimination.

Here on this slide, we see, essentially, some of the potential outcomes of this work, the work that’s taking place right now, and some of the recommendations that will be made by December 15th by deans, obviously in close collaboration with their colleagues, with their faculty colleagues.

There are a whole range of different actions that are possible in the short, medium, and long term. Some of these are listed here.

I do want to emphasize, however, that program closure is a last resort. At the same time, our analysis as a result of collaboration shows that the status quo is not viable for reasons that I think you’ll understand even better after my colleague Jenny Boyden speaks and tells us about the current budget situation.

We need to align our resources with our priorities, and that is an imperative that we must follow at the university now. This slide, as I’ve said, suggests several of the possibilities, several of the recommendations that might come out of this phase of the SRE process by the middle of December.

I mentioned earlier that the Research Portfolio Review Group has also been engaged in a parallel and comparable effort. Perhaps I shouldn’t say parallel, because, as I mentioned before, Jason and Sandra have made sure that they’ve been working very closely with the Academic Portfolio Review group.

Under their leadership, they’ve developed a framework for the RPR, and they’re asking, “How do research centers and institutes contribute to and advance our university’s mission?” Here, I can draw your attention to the various dimensions on this slide.

They’re looking at the contribution to learner‑focus research activities, research expenditure and funding productivity, the level of internal collaboration at the university, as well as the level of external collaboration and engagement.

I’ve already spoiled the ending, which is to say that what happens next. The steps that the deans are currently undertaking will be completed by December 15th, and that’s very exciting, as I anticipate receiving those recommendations.

The RPR’s analysis and planning continues apace. The Administrative Business Services Group’s work will inform the newly formed presidential advisory committee that I have mentioned before. The manufacturing materials and workforce accelerator group will establish stronger coordination across colleges and research centers as well as public‑private partnerships.

Here we stand at a exciting, if somewhat daunting, juncture. If we work collectively and do this right, as I expect we will, based on what I’ve seen since May 2024, I believe that the 91±¬ÁĎ will be set up for success in both the short and the long term.

That success means that our learners will be better taken care of, that students will be able to succeed, not just at the university but as they leave the university to pursue professional opportunities, and that our university as a whole is making contributions that the state and, indeed, the nation expect of us.

I look forward to fielding questions later on after all the presentations are finished, but I appreciate your time now.

[pause]

Gabe: Sorry, Jenny. I should have introduced you. Jenny Boyden.

Jenny Boyden:

Thank you. Thank you, President Ferrini‑Mundy and Provost Paquette for the opportunity to talk a bit about budget today. I’ll probably start with, I’m a budget nerd, so I apologize in advance, and somebody can give me the honk if I go on too long. Let’s start with just some basic information about what we mean when we talk about our budget.

Each year, each campus within the system presents a balanced budget to the board of trustees. When we talk about that, we’re talking about our education in general funding and our auxiliary funding. Those are the two funds that we present to the board. We also budget for certain designated operations, including MAFES, Cooperative Extension, and MEIF.

What really drives the budget? It’s the revenue and expenses, obviously. Revenue is enrollment in student credit hours, tuition and fees, the state appropriation, financial aid, the percentage of our residential students versus our out‑of‑state students, research revenue, F&A cost recovery.

Our expenses, as you’ll see when we get to some later slides, are really driven by our compensation and benefit costs. We try to encompass some inflationary increases in our budgets when that’s possible, investments in strategic priorities, capital expenditures, including debt service, and contractual commitments.

Our role is unlike any other in the state. We are Maine’s R1 research university with a D1 athletics program, and it’s land, sea, and space grant flagship. This is a profound, multifaceted responsibility that includes our vital coastal regional campus in Machias.

We are, as stated here, a cornerstone of Maine’s heritage and its future, driving cultural enrichment, leading academic advancement, and ensuring community impact from every corner of Maine. Our budget is a blueprint of how we do that.

Let’s start by looking back at fiscal ’25. We did better than budget. We had budgeted to use just over four million dollars’ worth of reserves to balance our budget, and we did not use any. We actually ended up transferring over a million dollars into reserves at the end of the fiscal year.

Some things that contributed to that were higher‑than‑anticipated F&A recoveries and the efforts of everyone here and all of our financial managers to control costs. We implemented some things last year that are continuing. The critical hire review process, I feel, was very successful for this university to be able to evaluate which positions are hired and when.

We’re using that even more now as we evaluate the grant funding and whether or not that grant funding is dependable at this point on if we should fill a position.

Our approved FY ’26 budget also includes the planned use of reserves. Let me take a second to walk you through ‑‑ Oh, one of my numbers slid over ‑‑ to walk you through a little bit about the FY ’26 budget.

If we start with the revenue pie chart, net tuition and fees are budgeted at $129.7 million. That’s about 47 percent of our revenue. We receive $109 million in state appropriation. Indirect cost recoveries, we have budgeted at 24 million, and sales, services, and other is 15 million.

This is really the mix of our revenue picture. Again, about 47 percent from tuition, 39 percent from state appropriation, 8.5 from indirect cost, and 5 from other sales and services.

If we look at our expense side, that’s what the $279.9 is, supposed to be over there on the right, 67 percent of our costs are compensation and benefits. 33 percent is operating, so that’s everything else. I can say 10 to 11 of that is fuel and utilities. I’m looking back for a head nod. I’m close on that number.

Once we start to peel out some of those facilities costs that are more difficult to manage, that are driven by weather, the amount of funding that is operating, that is not discretionary but is changeable, it starts to diminish.

Let’s talk a little bit about where we are right now. We just had census, and we’ve probably all been hearing since the start of the semester that enrollment and credit hours have come in below what we budgeted.

Our student credit hours at fall census are 3,199 under budget on the undergraduate side, and 216 below budget on the graduate side. The estimated net fiscal impact of this is six million dollars. This is just on the revenue side.

We’re going to assume everyone stays on budget on their expenses. That’s part of our strategy. We have to address a six‑million‑dollar revenue shortfall in the next eight months. We’ll talk a little bit more as we go forward. We will have to adjust our spending to reflect this decrease.

We’re actively working with the provost and the vice president of research and dean of the graduate school to strengthen our spring ’26 enrollment and to maximize fall‑to‑spring retention. The FY ’27 budget process is going to be based on some of this information.

I’ll say thank you to Deb Allen also for providing me with some nice enrollment slides. This is a bit of an enrollment history for undergraduate enrollment at 91±¬ÁĎ. Our in‑state enrollment is at the highest level since the fall of 2020. We have seen a bit of a decline in out‑of‑state enrollment, and that includes international students.

Machias has leveled up. There was quite a sharp decline for a while, but their enrollment from ’24 to ’25 is leveling. What stands out to me about the Machias enrollment is the percentage of out‑of‑state students. They have 64 percent of their degree‑seeking enrollees are from out of state.

[pause]

Jenny:

This slide offers some different comparisons based on where we were in fall of 2024 and what we projected for fall of ’25. If we start at the top, fall of ’24 for 91±¬ÁĎ in‑state undergrads, we were at 5,333. At that time, we were projecting for our budget to be at 5,525.

What we’ve actually come in at in the fall of ’25 is 5,433. From our projected number, we are 92 students below budget. It’s a little more stark on the out‑of‑state side, and that really is why the financial impact is so large, because of the mix of students.

[pause]

Jenny:

On graduate, we are pretty steady. There is an increase in in‑state graduate enrollment and a slight decrease in out‑of‑state. Again, another look at graduate comparisons. What I will highlight here is the record‑breaking number of doctoral‑seeking enrollees.

[pause]

Jenny:

We talked about enrollment and the student credit hour changes that are driving the six‑million‑dollar shortfall. Let’s talk about some strategies on how we can close that, or at least hope to mitigate as much as we can.

We need to maintain our sales and services revenue. That is certainly helped by our strong athletics that are happening right now. We appreciate that, as well as other sales…Lost my place. Apologies.

Reducing our compensation costs, this is through the critical hire review process as we look at what positions are being filled, what needs to be filled, and when. We are evaluating that twice a week. We meet to review hiring requests.

Also, the provost’s office will be looking at low‑enrolled courses, managing part‑time overload, and we’ll all be managing additional compensation costs. As I started with, we really need all of you to help us keep this at a six‑million‑dollar shortfall by staying within your budgets.

If that means things may have to go to gift funds or some things may not be able to happen, reach out to finance. Talk to us. If you need help brainstorming how to manage something, we are here to help you however we can.

My team in the back, they will do whatever they can to be helpful and assist as we work through this, but it really will come down to managing the expenses so that we only have to deal with the six‑million‑dollar revenue shortfall.

The last point isn’t a way to close the gap, but it’s almost a bit of one more risk. President Ferrini‑Mundy mentioned the F&A revenues. We’re obviously continuing to watch the grant receipts that we come in, changes that are made to terms and conditions, what’s going on with the different models that are being proposed.

We’re also watching what’s happening at the state level with our state appropriations. There is an approved budget for fiscal year ’26 and fiscal year ’27, but I also know that the state will face other challenges as they work to present their fiscal ’27 budget and decide what portions of the federal budget reconciliation bill they will comply with on the tax changes.

The last projection I had seen was that full conformity could be $400 million a year. That will be something that the state has to wrestle with this winter, and how that is implemented could impact us. I just think it’s important for us to be aware that that’s a risk out in the future.

As we begin the FY ’27 budget build, here are some more risks and challenges and some revenue potential. Our student credit hours are currently declining, especially in non‑state residents.

Our state appropriation and F&A recoveries, as I just mentioned, those are affected by government decisions. We don’t have a lot of say. We do what we can to influence and provide as much information as possible to the decision‑makers, but some of that is a bit out of our control.

Our residence hall capacity is at a maximum, limiting our ability to attract more non‑resident students. One of the things that we did this fall that I think was very successful was we held an enrollment summit.

We had a meeting with finance, enrollment management, academic affairs, auxiliary services. How many people were there? Probably, 30 people? 30 people. We all met together in a way that I don’t think has happened before to talk about some of the opportunities to increase enrollment and some of the constraints that we face.

One of our constraints is our ability to house students. If we only have the capacity for 1,950 freshmen, we are going to be challenged if we try to recruit 2,100, and then not be able to provide them housing. We need to talk together about what our strategies are and how we adapt to make sure we’re making the best choices for the university.

We also have capacity challenges in sales and services. If we’re selling out the Alfond for hockey, we are not going to be able to sell more than capacity.

Compensation and benefit costs continue to rise in a highly competitive talent market. Absolutely. We, I think, have current contracts for all of our bargaining units, and that’s helpful for this point in time because we know what the increases will be for next year. We’ve been told by the system to budget four percent for compensation increases.

For next year, our fringe benefit rate at this point is staying the same, 48.6 percent for full‑time employees, 8.2, part‑time. Those percentages are staying the same. The compensation number is budgeted to increase by four percent.

We have inflationary pressures that are driving cost increases. I know the inclination is, we just need to increase our budget by that percent or by CPI. That’s not often what’s happening at this university or any place, because there’s just not the capacity for that.

When that doesn’t happen, but your costs continue to increase, you have a service contract for a piece of IT software that increases by five percent a year, and your budget’s not increasing, we have to make some choices.

I’ve already said we have to stay on budget. What’s not going to happen in order for you to fund that additional five percent cost on the technology increase, or are we not going to do that? We’re going to have to make those choices.

We have an aging infrastructure that drives additional maintenance, capital expenditures, and debt and interest payments. The sign, the sign is great. I should put up that sign.

[laughter]

Jenny:

I appreciate everyone’s patience. We’re doing great work in facilities. We’re getting a lot of things done. We’re fixing the steam traps that have failed. We’re putting up barriers where we think there could be a problem. We’re building new buildings.

We also have some, like the steam pits, some things that are less exciting and visible. A lot of the road work that’s been disrupted this year is because we’ve been doing electrical infrastructure underground. That’s not an exciting…Nobody’s going to go to a ribbon cutting because we put in a new underground electrical conduit.

[laughter]

Jenny:

That’s just not going to be a fun thing to have, but they’re things we have to do. The other big, not fun thing will be when we figure out what we do with UMEC and how we make sure our steam plant is sustainable going forward to provide heat for the campus. Those all relate to our additional maintenance, capital, and debt and interest payments.

Where we have opportunities. From our summit that we had, definitely people thought we could build more online offerings and programs. We should encourage the marketing and promotion of programs with growth potential.

That’s things like criminal justice program, the survey engineering and technology program, the MBA. Those are areas that are growing and have high demand. How can we market and promote those programs with growth potential?

We should expand programs for learning in the workplace and meeting the needs of Maine employers. Three years ago, we committed to the board that we would balance the FY ’27 budget without using reserves.

I’m going to go to the next slide and I’m going to show you where we’re starting from to get to that commitment. These are just initial numbers. This is like status quo.

Based on enrollment and student credit hours this year, we would project initial revenues of $274 million. Based on current staffing and current operating costs, expenses would be $294 million.

At this very early stage, and I can’t stress that enough, we haven’t even sent out expense templates to all of the departments yet, this is our very early analysis, we would have a gap of $19.8 million. That’s what we have to address. Over the next few months, that’s what we’ll be working to close to zero. It’s pretty stark.

Let me walk through the timeline a little bit. In November, we’ll hope to finalize some strategic plans for our FY ’27 budget templates to be sent out to all of the departments.

December and January, we’ll work with the unit and department levels to identify any opportunities for revenue generations and savings, as well as departments ‑‑ I probably should have flipped those ‑‑ departments and units will be submitting budget templates. The finance office will review those submissions and ensure all targets are met.

Starting in February is where we start to engage with FFT and the Board about our budgets. In February, we have a preliminary presentation to the system leadership. In March, our full budget is due and we do our first presentation to FFT. In April, we do our second public reading. In May, the board takes up the budget and approves it.

That’s where we are. I’ll just flip back to this one for a second. This is where we’re starting. This is a path forward. We have lots of ways that we’re going to engage.

We have a meeting tomorrow with [indecipherable 33:20] . We have the President’s Advisory Committee on budget. We will have regular conversation with all of our departments and our partners in the academic affairs and research as we move forward and develop a plan on how to close that gap. That is it for my slides.

[pause]

Amanda Klemmer:

Thank you, Jenny. Now we’ve move to the Q&A portion of the town hall. We do have a question online to begin. Can I ask for a volunteer to help with the microphone, if that’s at all possible? Thank you, Daisy.

I’ll start with an online question just to get them rolling, but then we can go back and forth between questions online and questions in the room. Just a reminder to all 176 folks online, please submit questions as you think of them. The first question is, what are the primary causes behind the recent decline in out‑of‑state student enrollment? Kevin.

Kevin Coughlin:

We have several hypotheses and there are several factors that we’re looking at. One, we did very well in fall 2024 at the expense of many competing institutions that have more levers that they can push.

For example, some of the flagships in and around the Northeast are able to push well into their wait lists to go get students that normally they wouldn’t enroll at those institutions to make up for some of the pressures that they’re facing. That has a negative impact on the students.

Where our natural draw is, we placed a lot of negative pressure on our discount rates. Perhaps, we were thinking we put in one or two more controls on our discount rate than we actually needed to, thereby making it slightly more expensive for out‑of‑state students to join us than it had been in the previous year.

In February and March of 2025, things were looking very positive. I was asked, is there any reason that we wouldn’t adjust what we were looking for as far as our base budget number in headcount and student credit hour?

I didn’t have the evidence to tell someone ‑‑ who is in a position to fire me, actually ‑‑ and say, “Don’t do that,” when all the evidence would suggest that I would be being disingenuous for me to say that, so we adjusted upward expectations.

Those three things combined to have an impact on our comparison with the budget projections.

To be fair, given some of the constraints that we had run into, the fall 2024 performance was always going to be a difficult hurdle to get over, and we are still trying. In spite of what the budget thresholds are going to be, there’s going to be the starting point for where we have aspirational goals. Did that address the question?

Amanda: Thank you, Kevin. Any questions from the room? Joan, you have a question?

Joan Ferrini‑Mundy: [inaudible 37:11] Thank you [inaudible 37:14] Kevin, or perhaps Provost Paquette. It would be good at this moment to say a little bit about what we’re doing to mitigate this, what we can say in this kind of a setting at least.

Kevin: Can I take a crack at it?

Gabe: Sure.

Amanda:

Yeah.

[off‑mic speech]

Kevin:

Based on our discussion in October, the summit that Jenny had highlighted, we have begun all sorts of non‑traditional and traditional ways of pushing the enrollment machine.

Some of the traditional ways ‑‑ we are reexamining the way we manage our discount rate to moderate some of the controls that we put in place. We’ve opened up a lot of new avenues where we do full‑on national searches across multiple programs that historically we might not have.

We are putting counselors into places where we have not been able to in the past. For example, Florida. We will be doing a critical hire search for an admission recruiter in Florida, where we had one for a good chunk of fall 2024, we did not have any out‑of‑state. We, in fact, used those as when they became open, we cut them as budget control measures for the entirety of the fall 2025 cycle.

We will be putting a person in Massachusetts. Here’s where the biggest loss was in Massachusetts. Massachusetts is facing some of the same type of demographic pressures that we are facing. They will be getting very aggressive, though. There are a lot of institutions there, as I said, with many more levers to push than we have.

They are still our largest source of out‑of‑state first year students by far outside of Maine. We cannot afford to give up on Massachusetts, so we are committing an entire staff member to go pursue first year and undergraduate transferring students in Massachusetts exclusively.

We will be working with Scott Marzilli and the rest of the provost team to build a proposal for a re‑up program to go get stop‑outs that have been stopped out for more than two or three years. We’ll be working to push Finish Strong and Black Bear Advantage programs to bring in students that aren’t necessarily traditional but are undergraduate transferring students.

The president has had, what, one or two pretty fantastic ideas. I have to admit that we’re going to be pushing some of those programs where we think about high value majors in survey engineering, technology, and industrial partners that we perhaps not have optimized to the greatest extent we conceivably could.

These are just some of those things. We will be pushing more and new things.

I think at this point the marketplace is so unstable because, as I highlighted, February, March of last year looked like we were going to beat the daylights out of fall 2024, and we did not. Some of our statistical models will be failing. The idea is fail, fail quickly and cheaply, learn, and start something else. Thank you.

Amanda: Thank you, Kevin, any questions from the room, besides the president?

Joan: Sorry.

Daisy: None.

Amanda:

OK. I’ll go to another online.

The question is, with the SRE review of academic programs and overall assessment process, has the potential growth of academic programs by either moving to a fully online modality or adding more flexible modalities online been factored into the rubric? Will a change of delivery modality be considered in determining overall program growth and new revenue potential?

Gabe:

Thank you. That’s a great question. I think that that’s exactly where we are. Those are the questions that should be asked. That’s happening as part of the application of the qualitative rubric.

Where are there potential for growth? Would a modality change be important? Are there certain unexplored avenues in terms of areas of strength that would be responsive to student demand? Yes, yes, and yes. That’s a great question. That’s exactly the point we are in the process.

[pause]

Amanda: Eric.

Eric: That’s…

Amanda: Microphone.

Eric: One of the things that struck me, and again today with the presentation of the SRE metrics, is the partitioning of academics and research, but under the umbrella of promoting a learner‑centered R1, where those two areas necessarily need to be integrated. I’m wondering if you could speak a little bit towards the vision for integration of those two areas under the SRE?

Joan:

I’ll start that one and then others may wish to…

If there were two or three key messages that I took from the work that we did over the last year around SRE, one would be the one you’ve just expressed, Eric, that we can never be a learner‑centered R1 unless we have deep integration and, I would call it, conceptual and programmatic integration between the academic work of the university and the research and graduate school work of the university.

There have been a lot of very concrete operational suggestions coming through SRE, as you’re well aware, about organizational structures and so forth. I’m very, very heartened now by what I’m hearing about the collaborations between the two groups that the provost mentioned, the APR group and the Research Portfolio Review Group. They’re meeting together, as I understand it.

They are looking at solutions that would cross so that, although, the original data for each was within the specific domain over which they sit, the solutions that are possible now can cut across, can involve work that centers and institutes might be engaged with, that would bear upon the academic program decisions that get made, and vice versa.

We already have some very nice examples. I would point to ASCC and commend Habib and Giovanna and others who’ve thought hard about how we build up academic opportunities in the context of R&D situations with the kinds of credentials and potential new majors and things that are being discussed there.

It’s a work in progress, for sure, but it’s happening in a new way, I would say, over the last several months. I would ask that Gabe or whoever worked on…Jason add more if you wish, or if Sandra’s here.

More to say, or is that enough?

[crosstalk]

Joan: Yeah. It’s very high on the surface here.

Amanda: Stay there for a second, might have a question.

Joan: Sure.

Amanda: The question is, can you give us…I need a microphone. Can you give us a very high‑level overview of what the 91±¬ÁĎ system is looking at in the future and how we can expect that change?

Joan:

I can do my version of that, for sure.

I can also tell you that there are a lot of good opportunities to learn about what the system is doing by watching the public portions of board meetings of FFT, the Finance, Facilities, and Technology Committee. Those meetings, as well as Academic and Student Affairs are very, very instructive to get a feel for how the system is moving and what’s being prioritized.

I’ll mention a few things. AI is front and center in a very, very big way. As you may know. Vice Chancellor Low had additional responsibility added to his title. I believe he’s called the Chief AI Officer for the system now.

If you’re not aware, he is offering a variety of courses and professional development options. Has anybody here done one of the $25 lunch hour things? I took his course, so Jason and I get to raise our hands for that.

He has decided to just make himself a national expert because he finds it interesting, I believe. Some groups on campus have had him in to visit to help them think about how AI plays a role. It’s clearly a system priority. There’s a new AI Task Force report that has been released, I believe, to the board. I served on that group. It’s all about getting out a bit ahead.

One of the most interesting parts of working on the report was that I made a call to a number of you for examples from research that are AI dependent, and they’re making their way into the report now because that’s a piece that sometimes gets left out of the discussion and all the very complex issues around instructional uses with AI. Peter is here and he’s very much out in the front on that.

AI is one. Alternative…How to think about it? Alternative audiences beyond our traditional audiences of learners for higher ed are very central for this system leadership right now.

You see their foray into 90‑credit degree programs, and we’re still awaiting final NECHE approval. The 91±¬ÁĎ at Machias stepped up, and Megan and team have put forward a 90‑credit degree offering.

These are very particular. They need to be aimed at returning adult audiences, and so there are some fairly high bars to cross. I think we need to do more of that. We’ll see how it goes with Machias.

The concept of direct admissions is something that this kind of inclusion and making sure that people really do know that this system is a resource to everybody. That’s very, very high on the list. Are we able to get students in earlier because we can make it easy for them to apply?

Related to that would be what we have in the form of Finish Strong, a program that is meant to help people who have some college but who haven’t finished to enable them to finish conveniently and easily. The online is going to be very central, and it’s coming through in almost every discussion.

Finally, if you take a look at the 91±¬ÁĎ at Presque Isle, their work in CBE and their YourPace programs are doing extraordinarily well internationally. These are programs attracting students in large numbers, and their numbers are increasing regularly.

These efforts to be as inclusive and accessible as we can as the state’s public higher education system, to as wide a range of learners as we can seem to be dominating the discussion at the system level. As the flagship, there’s a fair bit of pressure upon us to be in the lead when we can in these areas. We have some good opportunities.

Amanda: Thank you. There is online a follow up to Eric’s question, just for some more clarification.

Joan: Can we make somebody else stand up here? No. I will till it’s not me.

Amanda: How exactly? Because we are moving forward with the academic portfolio review and those metrics, whether qualitative or quantitative, but they do not include research metrics for those academic units.

Joan: I’ll leave that to the provost.

Gabe:

Thanks very much. It’s a good point that’s been raised. There have been efforts to create what we’ve called a holistic contribution margin or holistic set of metrics that would incorporate research into them. That’s certainly a long‑term goal. It’s obviously complicated to do technically.

In addition to that, my feeling is that the qualitative rubric that we have can, at least in a somewhat crude way, try to combine or at least take into account contributions to research which are not captured in many of the quantitative metrics that tend to be focused on things that can be easily counted.

This is something that we’re aware of, something that we’re actively working to address, but, certainly, at least in my view, not something that should impede the progress we’re already making. We’re not ignoring it, it’s being taken into account, but perhaps not as perfectly as we’d like it to be.

Joan: Perhaps we could put Deb Allen a little bit on the spot to, just off the top of her head, tell us how you might think that challenge going forward and how we might actually try to incorporate some sort of a research measure? It is not a straightforward question.

Debra Allen:

One of the challenges we ran into last fall was we don’t have as much research data available to us. There’s a lot of data, but it’s not compiled in the same way that the academic data are. I’m looking at the research data people here, too. It’s more complicated.

One of the things that we talked about last fall and I think we talked about a little bit, too, in our last meeting of the Academic and the Research Portfolio groups was to create a team that would come together, to work together to develop these metrics. I think the goal is we have this goal, and we just need to take action on that.

I’m hoping we can just move ahead and start doing that as part of that collaboration of the two groups. I don’t know if you want anything more specific, but that’s…

[crosstalk]

Joan: …get your insights.

Debra: Yeah. That’s what I’m hoping. It definitely was one of the things we talked about last fall in the SRE.

Amanda:

Thank you, Deb. Any questions from the room?

[pause]

Audience Member:

Thank you, Deb. I just have a follow up, being a bit of a data geek myself. Can you give an example of ‑‑ you don’t have to say how you’re going to calculate ‑‑ what metrics are you thinking of on the research side?

I’m thinking like we collect all this information for everyone who goes up for promotion or tenure or review, if they have a research appointment, they spit out lots of stuff. I know that’s not consistent, but is that the type of stuff? Or things like publications, grants, applied for, that type of stuff?

Debra: Yes.

Joan: Can I interrupt?

Debra: I just wanted to mention. Gabe, do you want to start?

Amanda: One second. One second. One second. One second. One second.

Debra: Should we talk about the [inaudible 52:14] that you mentioned at the Faculty Center?

Gabe: Sure.

Debra:

Yes, that is exactly what we’re thinking about. One of the challenges we’ve run into is the faculty activity reporting database. That is very challenging. It’s really hard to get data out. We’ve been trying to solve that issue. There’s been challenges with it more recently where there’s components that are starting to break.

There is an RFP out right now, and that was mentioned at Faculty Senate last week. We’re hoping, too, that that will also give us additional data.

What we’re seeking is more having APIs get the data in. That will put us in a much better position because the data will be all in one place. That is exactly the kind of data that we’ve talked about, as well as research expenditure and other data that we currently have.

Joan: I’ll just add that, what I like about the discussion, particularly the suggestions that you made, Adam, are we can be careful to recognize that we say research and we have a broad meaning of research. It includes scholarly work, it includes creative production. All of that needs to get picked up.

Amanda:

Thank you. Any questions from the room before I move to some of the online questions?

[pause]

Amanda: OK. This is a hard question for you to answer, Joan, and I acknowledge that, but I think it’s on everyone’s mind right now. That is around Anthem Healthcare and the extreme difficulty that’s going to pose to most employees on this campus.

Joan:

Yes, I anticipated this question. Although, I’m not at all expert in this process. This is a system‑level process. I do know that the system has been pretty forthcoming in holding town halls and Q&As. I don’t know if they have anything upcoming and scheduled, but I certainly have been a part of conversations where I’ve carried forward this concern that we’re hearing here.

I will speak to a related concern, too. As we see in the shutdown of the federal government, as we see SNAP benefits ending, that’s a concern for our community as well. I might call on Andrea to speak to that. I don’t have much that I can say on the Anthem. I really am not expert, but it is a system move.

We need to be sure to get our questions, your questions to Amie Parker, the CHRO, and to look at their Q&A materials and see what we’re able to learn and to watch what unfolds over the coming weeks.

I know the timing is also getting to be pretty challenging, so understand the concerns. Don’t have much that I can say to that, unless we’d like to hear from Andrea about a separate, but also critical, well‑being matters. Just briefly on SNAP.

Andrea:

Thank you. Actually, this whole semester, I’ve a seen a large increase in financial concerns for a lot of students for a variety of reasons. The SNAP benefits, we’re anticipating within the next week we’ll start seeing a barrage of students and staff who are going to be impacted by this.

The SNAP benefits are usually distributed on the 11th of each month. Starting with November 11th, those will be terminated at the moment until the government can open back up again.

We are prepared. From a student perspective, we have a couple of options. Sodexo is very, very kind and generous in giving us an allotment of meal swipes that we can award to students who don’t have meal plans. We do have an emergency fund that has donated dollars from very kind people off campus.

We’re working with the foundation to make sure that those give annual dollars to the Black Bear Exchange, which is our food pantry, are lined up to make their annual commitments so we can continue to keep the exchange stocked for those people who will have that need.

Then we have, obviously, in Student Life, if you have students who are approaching you individually, we are happy to meet with them and have some creative mechanisms depending on what the situation is.

In addition to that, which is not getting as much publicity, but it is a true fact, there’s been some glitches in our GI Bill recipients and they have not received their living stipends. Some of them, some chapters have been impacted for, actually, the month of October. They are without support as well.

Amanda:

I just wanted to say, at Machias, that we did have a food pantry that closed actually three years ago, and we are restarting that now. That’s made possible through a donation from an external entity. We’re excited to see that and are putting that in the Student Success Center.

[pause]

Amanda:

This is a long question, so I have to read the paragraph. Recognizing that this is an easy question to raise and a harder one to answer, is there a thread through the SRE process that emphasizes a willingness to be different and resist isomorphic pressures, whether from a PLU or higher ed more broadly?

The concern is that if we do what everyone does, we aren’t in a resource or demographic position to compete effectively. Are there Maine‑specific educational pathways, research areas, and program offerings that maintain a future distinctive character for the university in a world where state flagship R1 isn’t a guaranteed‑to‑survive?

Joan:

I’d like to propose that I’ll just start it and I’m going to call on two people, Gabe and Jake, to hear responses so Amanda can re‑read the question as needed.

That’s a very wise and interesting question. The board of trustees held a retreat recently, and I was in discussions there where I raised our uniqueness. I said, even among systems, most don’t have a single R1 research university.

I mean, the big systems that often become popular in the press SUNY or UC system, any number of places, where we stand out in a very different way. With that comes a lot of responsibility and, I think, opportunity to be very clear about our value in the state of Maine.

I think there were some metrics that I saw a little bit that could get closer to helping us think about uniqueness and ways that we can market to the state of Maine. At the same time, we face so many of the same kinds of problems that many other institutions face that I’m not sure uniqueness alone will solve our problems, but it could be a major factor. It really could.

I don’t know if Jake or Gabe wishes to, I can’t really make you do this, but you’re welcome to. Yeah. Show them the question if you want.

Gabe:

Thanks so much. Really good question.

One of the things that would have been easy at the beginning of the SRE process ‑‑ thanks, President Ferrini‑Mundy, for giving us the time to actually engage in a longer‑term deliberative process ‑‑ is to take ways of evaluating programs that were developed without any of sort of institutional specificity, without any knowledge of the state, our own history as an institution, and to apply those and to then make decisions whether or not those are investments or eliminations.

I think we’ve actually resisted that and, quite importantly, tried to develop, according to our own lights, ways of understanding, assessing our program so that we can make appropriate decisions.

I think that we face, as the president said, challenges that all other institutions face. The answers that we can arrive at are probably going to be ones, hopefully, that are better informed by our own circumstances and history than they would have been otherwise.

That’s one thing really in favor of the way we’ve approached SRE. It hasn’t been to simply think about cookie cutter forms of valuation and then answers that would have been easy, but certainly would have missed many of the specific strengths that we have as an institution.

Jake:

I might take it from just a little different angle, which is a little bit more about the uniqueness of Maine relative to our size of our state, our connectivity, the type of industry, the type of K‑12 education systems that we have, and be aware that with so many direct connections we have, we always talk about being one or two steps away from any one person.

Many other states, many other systems may not have that same type of thing. Are there ways to think about how we market and develop and attract students that could be really unique to Maine and small rural states, our pathways to engage kids and families and companies from K‑12 levels on and things like that?

I think we have great pilots where we’ve done this. How do we turn those into scalable opportunities for the institution in ways that the national organizations and things aren’t just paying attention to?

I really don’t believe we should be following the top 10 institutions in the country. I think that is much the value proposition of what higher ed is to any individual and to this state different than what has been for the last 30 or 40 years. I mean, I think we went back to 1865. We were in great shape.

Amanda:

The cows in the picture?

[off‑mic speech]

Amanda:

Any questions from the room?

[pause]

Amanda: There is a question online because you made the amazing announcement today that Giovanna and Scott are going to be taking over the Vice President of Research and Dean of Graduate School roles. There was a question just clarifying more about the splitting of those positions and how it will fit into our future direction as a university and the SRE work.

Joan:

Sure. Much of this has happened, and the decisions and the conversations have happened in really just the last couple of weeks. At this point, we’ve announced exactly what we have to announce at this point, that Giovanna will serve as the Vice President for Research, Scott will serve as the Dean of the Graduate School.

Both are in short‑term appointments of slightly different types due to their own personnel and personal circumstances. I hope you’ve seen, though, that you’ve had presentations by two interim leaders here. People in interim jobs are in this job full force. I don’t want there to be any misgivings about people’s commitments to the work.

We will be having the dean of the Graduate School in this period report to the provost, which has been a part of some of the organizational changes that have been proposed in SRE. We are in a period of time where we have a little bit of an opportunity to step back and continue to look at organizational possibilities with this arrangement.

We’re very grateful to Giovanna and to Scott for being willing to jump in at this moment in a process that I’m confident will continue to build on and further the strength of both our research mission and our graduate mission.

Again, the collaborations right now between the OVPRDGS and the EVPAAA offices are extremely strong. The expectation is that that all continues, that there’s appropriate integration and consultation as we go forward. We’re in a short‑term moment where we also can step back and take a look at how things are going.

Amanda: We have about four minutes left. Are there any last questions from the room?

Joan:

Can I ask one?

[crosstalk]

Joan:

It’s not really a question, it’s just a comment. I want to be sure that we acknowledge the outstanding job that Jenny did on…Everybody was fine, but Jenny did a great job really laying out, and I hope you all appreciate the clarity of that budget presentation and the challenges that we face.

I would underscore her point that that big scary number for 2027 is what we’re diving into right now to take a look at how we can use our strategic re‑envisioning ideas, both for revenue generation and for other kinds of rearrangements to solve that problem.

I don’t want people to go away from here at all with any sort of hopelessness. We can address this and we have year after year we managed to figure this all out, but we’ll need everybody’s engagement and we’ll need everybody’s best ideas.

Over the next few weeks, you will see opportunities to work at the college level, of course, with your deans and leaders and more university‑wide also. Really want to tell you that that’s our next big work is to get the ’27 budget in order. Thank you all for that. It’s not a question, I guess. I asked and answered my own question. Sorry.

Amanda: I don’t know if you want to wrap up. It’s about that time.

Joan:

Sure. I just thank you everybody. These sessions are very, very important for our campus. I believe we could do them perhaps with more frequency. At the same time, there’s a fair bit of preparation to them. I appreciate that you all took an hour and a half out of very busy days with a lot going on here to come together and show your commitment to this university.

I appreciate directly hearing from people and want to know what you think, want to hear ideas, want to hear your worries. Let’s continue to be the connected community that we are and move forward into fiscal ’26 and ’27. Thank you.

(background sounds only)

Remarks:

Good afternoon. I’m Joan Ferrini-Mundy. I’m the President of the university. We are deviating from the program just a little bit because we have a special addition to the program. I’ll speak with you more formally later. Let’s give the band another round of applause, and the dance team.

More of a welcome coming. As I was drafting my remarks today, I had a section about students and alumni.

I wrote, “Today, my husband Rick and I had lunch with our friend Merritt David ‘DJ’ Janes. DJ is an accomplished stage actor and singer who has performed on Broadway and in national tours of Broadway shows like ‘The Wedding Singer,’ ‘Sweeney Todd,’ ‘Shrek the Musical,’ and more. He’s appeared on this very stage with Broadway Rocks.”

Three hours ago, at lunch, I told him we were having this convocation and asked if he’d make a cameo appearance, say hello to you, and he accepted without hesitation because he just loves 91±¬ÁĎ. Without further ado, welcome Merritt David Janes, 91±¬ÁĎ, Class of 2004. DJ.

Good afternoon again. No more singing in this part, but wasn’t DJ wonderful? Thank you so much Provost Paquette. Hardy Maine hello, Class of 2029. Welcome to the Fall 2025 Convocation gathering at the 91±¬ÁĎ. I want to thank you all for choosing the 91±¬ÁĎ.

I’m now in my eighth year as the President and I learn something new at this great university every day. I guarantee that you will too. We have 2,078 first-year students. There are 471 new transfer students. You represent 46 states and 22 countries.

133 of our Division I athletes have been here for a few weeks already, beginning their training. Bridge Week students have been here for a week. Maine Hello is today. It’s great to begin to meet you all and to get to know you and help you settle into your new home.

This time of year, for me, always brings back a little bit of that first day of school feeling. I hope you feel that too. I’ve been in an academic setting of some kind every fall since I started kindergarten in Portsmouth, New Hampshire a while ago. You might be thinking, “She’s from New Hampshire. That’s a rival.” It’s all OK.

Classes begin next Tuesday. Take a “first day of school” selfie to keep, but more importantly, maybe send it to someone who cares about you. You can send it to me if you’d like. I’m on Instagram and I can get it that way, I suppose.

I ask you to focus now for a few minutes, as Provost Paquette so ably helped us to begin to do, on the academic part of university life. A convocation, an academic convocation such as this, is a longstanding tradition in universities, dating back centuries. At some universities even today, it includes regalia and ceremony that you will see when you graduate.

This tradition has evolved at 91±¬ÁĎ over the years, but it’s fundamentally an occasion for us to come together as a community and welcome our newest community members. There’s so much I want to tell you about our university, now your university.

One great thing about universities is that more than a quarter of our community is new every year. You shape this community as you’re here. Let me remind you that we’re a world-class institution with a Research 1 designation that comes because our faculty staff and students are breaking ground in research and scholarship.

I could brag about the honors that our faculty have received. We have members of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Thousands of books, academic papers, and professional presentations by our current faculty staff and students have been done. You will be meeting them, working with them, learning from them.

I don’t need to tell you about some of the other interesting things going on because you can see the construction on the campus. You can see the new factory of the future Green Engineering Materials building, the GEM building, right across the street as it’s going up.

The work on our iconic Shawn Walsh Hockey Center and Alfond Arena, the new soccer field, and the new track and field complex all signaling our investment in our university’s future and in your success.

Just yesterday, I got to meet two honors college students and learn about their work. Ruth Griffith developed a novel methodology to quantify economic fluctuations across the regions of Maine in her honors thesis. My guess is Ruth didn’t anticipate, the day she walked in, the day she was sitting in these seats, that that’s what she would do.

Madeline Myers received the Stanhope Study Abroad scholarship to fund her study of bioarcheology in Greece, where she worked on coprolites — You could look that up. It’s quite interesting — as a part of a Climate Change Institute project.

Maybe you’ll start a company, like alums Amber Boutiette and Patrick Breeding, Class of ’17, who founded Marin Skincare right here in Maine, a growing company that specializes in products that use lobster glycoprotein, or be the inventor of a life-saving device, like alum Dr. Bernard Lown of Lewiston, who graduated in 1942 and invented the original defibrillator.

I doubt that Amber, Patrick, or Bernard expected to make such a difference in the world when they got here at the beginning of their 91±¬ÁĎ careers. Probably most of you haven’t given thought yet to how you will shape your time here so that you’ll be able to make the kind of difference you wish to make when you leave.

We could talk a lot about excellence in athletics, with women’s soccer winning their America East conference title, men’s ice hockey winning Hockey East. Men’s and women’s basketball also both had remarkable showings last year. The place is excellent. You’re a part of that now. We look so much to you to shape this institution as we go forward.

You are one of the most talented first-year classes in 91±¬ÁĎ history. Sitting among you are students from right here in Maine, including individuals who served as leaders of their high school classes, competed in math meets and mock trials, invented award-winning apps and were top athletes in numerous sports.

You come from small towns in Maine and from big cities across the nation and the world. You need to make the most of who you all are as a community together in these coming years.

As Albert Einstein said, the important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. We ask that you develop your curiosity and your questions because here, you can intentionally explore where those will take you. If you do, by the time you graduate, you will have your own list of accomplishments.

I would venture to say that for most of you, they’ll be different from the accomplishments you imagine right now. You will be ready for whatever’s next, graduate school, professional school, a great job in Maine, and to live a rich and happy life and make a difference for others and be ready to tackle the challenges that come all of our way.

As you start to explore, go online and find the list of the 50 things to do before you graduate from the 91±¬ÁĎ online here. It’s interesting. It includes items like taking a photo with the Paul Bunyan statue in Bangor, a testament to our state’s heritage in forestry, which, by the way, is one of 91±¬ÁĎ’s strongest research and development areas.

Or drive by alum Stephen King’s house with its spooky wrought iron gate. Maybe you will even spot him. As President, I’m going to add a couple of items of my own to that list, items about how to push yourselves as curious learners.

Here it is. Number one, take a class just because you are curious. I know you have a lot going on. You’re working on your major, maybe a minor, your job, your social life, but this might be the only period in your life that you’ll really have the opportunity to learn about something simply because it intrigues you. Sign up for astronomy, anthropology, or agriculture.

No matter what you are here to study, you should make time to learn new things. For me, as an undergraduate at UNH, it was a course in sociology that opened my eyes to the social sciences and to the fact that people actually studied, in a formal way, human interactions and groups. This class turned out to be a grounding for my later work in education and policy.

I began college assuming, as maybe some of you do, that you just continued in the same areas you studied in high school. My first semester, I took calculus, chemistry, English, and French, but then I realized there were more areas than that to study at the university.

Number two, visit one of our laboratories or research centers. The labs are not only for students in the sciences and engineering. They are hubs of innovation and discovery. Check out the robotics at the newly opened Advanced Manufacturing Center BOT Loft and learn how businesses, entrepreneurs, and researchers are working together on this very campus.

Visit Witter Farm, where cows milk themselves with a new on-demand milking machine. That’s extremely cool. If there are ways to get out there and visit, you should do that. Or go to the Downeast Institute, where 91±¬ÁĎ Machias students are learning how clams are adapting to increasingly acidic ocean water.

Number three, study in the Fogler Library. Find a quiet spot in Fogler and spend maybe an hour a week there, doing your homework, reflecting, or writing, maybe without your cell phone. The library is more than a building with books and events. It’s a laboratory for thinking and practice being silent and alone with your own thoughts sometimes.

Fourth, in contrast, talk to other students as well as faculty and staff about your classes. How does what you’re doing in your classes relate to what they’re doing? What are they thinking about? Where are they having debates?

What are your friends’ favorite books? What makes them excited about college? Why do your professors do research in certain areas? Maybe even ask me, a mathematics educator, why I love helping people understand about numbers.

To that end, Class of 2029, there’s something maybe significant. Have you been thinking about whether 2029 is a prime number? No? Oh, come on. At least one person here must have thought about that. All right. Well, I’ll keep trying.

Finally, fifth topic, do a research project. Look for a lab or a faculty member whose work interests you and ask them if you can help. Maybe you’d like to work on a project about robotics or in the visual arts or in AI. Doing research will build your skills, hone your ideas, and make you ready for the future.

To recap my five points, take a class that you never plan to take, visit places where inquiry is going on, take advantage of the beautiful Fogler Library, talk to other people, and do research. Everything about this class, in its own way, is special and unique. We’re thrilled to have you here.

One thing that will define your time is the ubiquity of AI tools. Speaking of them, what’s the thinking on 2029? Anybody willing to say whether they think that’s prime or not or, actually, no? Really going to have to work on the math.

Everywhere you go, in your time, of course, the ubiquity of AI will be central. It will be the subject of course discussions, of conversations with your faculty and it will be everywhere you look. I asked ChatGPT to develop a message to you on the occasion of this convocation, with my own prompt.

Here is the “lyrical, inspirational version.” I guess they also might have had a dull and boring short version, but whatever. Here it is. Quoting ChatGPT-5, “I am your companion in this new world of ideas, a spark to ignite your curiosity and the lantern to light some of the paths you’ll walk.”

“I can give you knowledge in an instant, but wisdom will only come from the choices you make, the risks you take, and the questions you refuse to stop asking. Trust me to broaden your horizons, but do not surrender your voice or your responsibility. In the end, it is your mind, tested, sharpened, and alive, that will carry you forward.”

With that, I want to emphasize that this university is a place of incredible opportunity. It’s up to you to both shape it and to seize it. I can’t wait to get to know you and to see all that you will achieve. Thank you very much and welcome to 91±¬ÁĎ.

Transcript:

Joan Ferrini‑Mundy: with SRE before we go into a fairly detailed budget discussion. This was a slide that I used in the budget presentation with the board because I wanted to be clear that the way to really develop budgets, of course, is to have a strategic vision that guides that work. It’s hard to do that in challenging budget times.

It seems that the 91±¬ÁĎ always has challenging budget times, but nonetheless, because we have SRE, because so many people have come together to try to give shape to our vision, we have been able to say with more certainty really that the strategic vision for the university must drive our budget planning, but there are some other factors.

We still need to reduce our long-standing structural gap and we are chipping away at that in good ways and in productive ways, but through the very hard work that everyone has been undertaking in the last year. We have a BOT plan and Kelly will speak to that.

The way you solve a budget problem is that really has only two pieces. You can reduce and become more efficient and you can bring in revenue. And what we are focusing on are defensible revenue generation ideas.

That is to say, not just pie in the sky ideas, which are easy to offer and very hard sometimes to execute, but through SRE, ideas that will actually enable us to generate revenue in a pretty concrete way.

We are working daily to anticipate the ongoing impact of changes at the federal level, and I’ll tell you more about that later. It is time to replenish our E&G reserves, and we are starting a plan for doing so.

I really wanted to end with this one. All of this is guided by retaining the core of what we are as a university, who we are, what we value, and what we do, and not letting that slip, but recognizing the way that we do that will need to change for all of the reasons that we’re talking about today, for what SRE is doing with us, for us, for the budget challenges and for the federal context.

We started with the question, almost a year ago now, “What would humane look like if we were designing it today?” We talked about things that are still relevant even today, although they’re different in terms of the content, but the higher education landscape is indeed changing, has been forever, really, but more recently with lots of different kinds of factors influencing that.

The workforce and the needs of the workforce and also what constitutes a college experience for students are changing. In fact, who the students are is a changing factor as well.

SRE is acknowledging that this kind of transformational change is what we must do. We launched that, again, almost about a year ago now. There’s a lot going on with that. We’ve talked about that in other settings.

There’s the web page that you can review, but I wanted to just remind you of some guiding principles that were part of SRE from the start and have remained central for us.

I’ll pick out a couple of these to mention, premier land grant and first‑rate R1 public research university where students are the focus. We’re getting to be able to say that really well, this learner‑focused R1, but where we need to go next is to enact that more broadly.

We have examples all across this university of extraordinary instruction going on in classrooms where inquiry and new creation and creative endeavors are at the core even the very beginning of undergraduate instruction, but we don’t have that in a widespread way, nor are we really able to support and celebrate it when we do have it in ways that we should going forward.

That becomes, I think, a major focus of SRE and much of what will come of it. It’s tied, of course, to the integration of teaching and research, especially, frankly, in a time where we need to diversify our research funding.

We need to be looking at agencies, perhaps, that we’ve not looked at before. We need to look at private funders and foundations and philanthropy and figure out a way that the kinds of things that we care about doing at this university can get supported going forward.

Then finally, I want to emphasize the need to remain a supportive, inclusive community that prioritizes the mental, physical, and emotional well‑being of our faculty, staff, and students. That’s the responsibility of all of us. I would say that what I have written there is absolutely the case.

I will also say that, that right now, particularly this time of year, as we come close to graduation and all that goes with that, keeping our students at the center, focusing on them is especially important right now and we need to be financially sustainable.

There are four SRE implementation groups that have been working over the last several weeks, and here are their titles and their focal areas and their leaders. They have just in the last week or so provided their final sets of recommendations.

Nothing is really final with SRE. It’s all iterative, but this last round has come in. We’ve been reviewing them and we’ll say a little bit more about some of that later.

Now we’ll go more specifically to the budget presentation. Again, this is what we would normally do this time of year. This has already been posted for the board’s FFT, the finance facilities and technology committee.

We will be, walking through pieces of what we did in that presentation. If you would like to see the entire presentation, feel free, of course, to take a look at it on the 91±¬ÁĎ System website. With that, I will introduce, Kelly Sparks. You’ve got your own? OK.

Kelly Sparks: Good morning. Fix that up. Little tall person, woe is here. I’m going to move this forward.

First of all, understand how did we start by building our budget. We started with if we do all of the same things we are today, a pre‑SRE lens. If we continue on with our current enrollment trajectory, our consistent retention that we have, our state appropriations remain relatively flat.

Our expense base. All the people who are here today continue to be here in the same way. We’re continuing to hire at the same rate, and we looked and said, “OK, that’s our baseline.” Then we said, “What upside potential is there in the overall budget?”

We were very fortunate that with the great success of our deans, Scott Marzilli, the provost office, at large to see pretty incredible success around retention in collaboration with the student affairs team. We built a two percent increase. That was the weighted average of the last three years change in enrollment. We built that. We layered in some additional enrollment into it.

The incredible success of our financial aid and enrollment management team and helping us build out our enrollment strategy. We’re seeing greater successes, a turnaround story, if you will.

While we have some larger graduating classes, we have some larger classes coming in to offset that. That helped out with the enrollment the top‑line numbers.

We also have had incredible success in our residence halls. We’ve seen a hundred percent occupancy in the fall. Of course, that always dips a little bit as a part of the standard process. We’ve seen high occupancy rates, which also drives meal pan rates in our auxiliaries. Lots of success.

We’ve seen lots of success in the research side as well. We’ve seen increased research productivity grants contracts, congressionally directed spending, which result not only in that research productivity and the opportunities it provides for our faculty graduate students, students at large.

It also has the F&A, or the facilities and administration overhead that comes into our E&G budget. That has grown in the millions over the last couple of years.

Now I want to say our little caveat here is that while we’ve seen strong research, there is federal uncertainty. We still are planning to have strong research activity happening at the university, and we still have those in a budget.

We just need to watch that carefully, which is the why we have it highlighted here in in in yellow. We just need to be aware, watch, looking at the trends, understanding, and working very closely with Jake and Kody, and understanding how that might impact our budget going into next year.

However, we’ve also had a couple of other trends that are some headwinds, if you will. We are seeing declining out‑of‑state enrollments. We saw some peaks, and it’s coming down a little bit. Our students are taking fewer student credit hours per student. That’s all built into the budget.

We have rising compensation. We want to acknowledge and value our incredible faculty and staff, and we have bargained rates, so we are building those into the budgets. They are growing a little bit faster than our overall baseline, so we’ve just got to manage to that.

We have the changing federal landscape, so that will have an impact potentially on our F&A. That may have a potential impact on capacity grants, MAFIS, MEIA, and cooperative extension. We’re probably pretty nimble and ready to respond to that if changes do happen at this point.

Then we have ongoing deferred maintenance. We need to figure out how we fund that to make sure that we’re adequately supporting our facilities operations as a part of our overall operating budget and starting to make some improvements where possible.

With that said, what are the numbers look like? We presented to the board of trustees in FY24. We said, “Give us three years, and we will provide you a balanced budget. We won’t ask for system reserves.

We will strategically use our unrestricted E&G Reserves in order to buy us a little bit of time to work our way through strategically and re envisioning to think strategically as an organization of what a balanced budget would look like. By FY27, the out year will present to you a balanced budget.”

What we also committed to is if you look at that strategic reserves across the bottom line, we committed that we would use no more than $14.5 million total over the course of three years.

Very, very proud to say that in collaboration with our cabinet, with our deans, with our research centers and institutes with our other administrative offices across campus, we are presenting a budget and we presented a budget to the finance facilities technology committee of the board of trustees last week.

A budget that is in line and underneath that are the picture of me with my finger pointing at it is 2.1 million use of strategic reserves. [laughs] Verify that number for me. I can see it here on my little piece of paper, so I validate that that’s what’s on the screen. Very excited about that budget.

Now does the tuition line identical to what we presented three years ago? No, because we’ve seen some successes that we didn’t anticipate, so we’ve grown that line. We also have seen some successes in hockey that show right up here in this line in the other revenue line with increased sales and service activity.

Lots of good things happening across campus. I’m going to flip and talk a little bit about how we got to all of this. Again, I said that we started with this baseline budget. That baseline budget was business as usual.

Then we made a number of changes, tuition and fees. We’re able to add $3 million to the top line with those changes. Additional state appropriation. We initially planned for a certain amount of state appropriations. We were able to increase.

Now again, that’s a little bit of a question right now. Any of you who are tracking the state budget, we are lots of good work happening at the system office in support of continuing to advocate for that. We’re holding true to that in our budget right now, but we’ll be watching closely what happens with the state’s budget.

F&A cost return. Right now, that number, just so you know, is equivalent to where we think we’re going to end FY24, that increase in next year’s budget. There is potential risk there. I want to acknowledge that. I don’t know how much that risk is because we don’t have any specific, we’ve already embedded anything that we know to be certain for next year. There’s lots of unknowns.

What we’re trying to do is put that range of unknowns together and track it and be ready to respond if it does happen, but we don’t want to overreact by inappropriately reducing our overall revenue budget.

Sales service. That’s a combination of things in athletics and other areas as well that we feel very confident will come to fruition next year. Again, defensible revenue increases.

On the other side, how are we looking at reducing our overall expenses? I know the hiring pause has been difficult on a lot of areas. Through that good work, it’s allowing us to go through the strategic reinvesting the implementation working group recommendation piece, but we have saved dollars in terms of ongoing attrition savings due to the hiring pause.

Reduction in campus‑shared services. This is the allocation that we received from the system office. What they did is they absorbed one hundred percent of their compensation increases as well as a hundred percent of the change in the benefits rate. There was a pretty significant change in the benefits rate.

They presented to us a flat budget this year, and that is a million‑dollar savings for us that we had anticipated that our budget would grow by that amount.

I want to just acknowledge that that has been hard work. They have essentially taken budget reductions at the system office, and they have transferred those budget reductions through to the 91±¬ÁĎ, 91±¬ÁĎ at Machias.

We also are looking at the UMEC project or the steam plant replacement project. This right now, it’s a delay in when we would start the debt service of that so we can do a little bit more due diligence to determine if we have the right funding source or if we could use a third‑party funding source as a potential for that project.

It’s really just a timing delay right now. It may change the numbers further. Hutchison Center closure, when we close that, we are still covering operating costs associated with that. I love snow plowing for an unoccupied facility, and making sure that the oil stays filled so we can keep the temperature on. Can’t wait to transition that one off of our books.

Then increased net transfer. That F&A cost return, we also transfer dollars out to units as a part of the F&A revenue sharing that we do. It’s just a net to that $2.4 million. We also would transfer additional dollars out to units if those dollars came to fruition.

Part of how we’re getting there are tuition and fee changes. We are going to increase our in‑state and out‑of‑state by three percent, as well as all of our graduate tuition with the exception of the MBA. The MBA went through some market changes last year in terms of the overall rate structure, so we’re going to go ahead and hold that flat.

In addition to that, we’ll also be increasing the graduate differential, but not the undergraduate differential for this coming year. Students through their shared governance process have voted to increase the student activity fee by $22 a semester.

They’re a 501(c)(3). For those of you aren’t aware, we will flow those dollars directly into their student activities budget, and they manage that through their processes.

Same thing for Machias. The only thing I’ll call out here is that their students have not made a recommended increase in their overall activities fees, so that will remain flat for the 91±¬ÁĎ at Machias.

Auxiliaries. Really excited to share a budget that not only is breakeven, but will also now start to contribute a little bit back to the auxiliary reserves so that we can maintain those facilities. Great work in terms of housing occupancy. This also includes 40 additional beds that we’ll be leasing off‑site at Orchard Trails in order to accommodate the increased demand.

Then it includes good work and in collaboration with Sodexo around really getting to a balanced budget with our dining enterprise.

For those of you who haven’t been up to Hilltop, some improvements into the physical space, I encourage you to take a look. Pretty fun to see the improvements that are happening across campus. Then later this spring, we’ll see the outdoor space outside of Wells come to fruition as well.

We talked at the very beginning about strategic use of reserve reserves. When I am talking about reserves in this case, there’s this little blue bar there. A couple of years ago, we started at $39 million, and it’s now down to $5.2 million.

There’s a number of things that we’re doing. We have a planned use or a budgeted use. If the board of trustees is to approve that here in May of $2.1 million of the $5.2 million.

We are doing a strategic review of everything that’s in that orange bar, the $57.5 million. Some of those things are untouchable. I’ll say funds functioning as endowments. That’s essentially the endowment, and we have a payover off of that.

It also includes projects that we have decided to fund over time. We are looking at some of those in that designated bucket. What might be usable instead of the $2.1 million of our unrestricted, how might we use some of those other funds as an offset that to retain as much in our unrestricted reserves?

Regardless of all of this, having healthy reserves is not only required by the system through APL or administrative practice letter. It’s also really important for the ratios that we have.

If we think about our composite ratio externally, that will drive our ability and the cost of capital for us to borrow to do some of those important projects like UMEC or other projects.

We really want to be mindful of these ratios or of our reserves because they drive the ratios and our ability to do the things on campus that we want to do to improve the both the physical footprint, and other things that we may want to do strategically.

I think I am passing it back to my colleague, Gabe, to talk a little bit about our enrollment picture.

Gabe Paquette: Good morning, everyone. Hope everyone’s doing well. I’m going to speak to some of our admissions and enrollment‑related slides, but I do want to give credit where credit’s due. Vice President Coughlin, his team are in the audience. Definitely, I’m here reporting good news.

The main thing that I want to say is that our aging, which is the time between receipt of an application and an admissions decision, has increased pretty significantly over the years. Over the last couple of years. Now it’s down to 1.6 days over 3.6 days before, and we expect that that will decrease even more to hopefully zero, Kevin, is that right, by next year.

We also should say that our admissions our applications are up slightly, but not all that significantly over last year. I believe Megan is online?

Megan Walsh: I am online. Can you hear me?

Kelly: Yes.

Megan: Yes?

Gabe: Yes. Sorry.

Megan. That’s OK. Sorry. Our applications are also up at 91±¬ÁĎ at Machias, and we have quite a bit of overlap with 91±¬ÁĎ. Thanks, Gabe.

Gabe: Thanks, Megan. I’m really delighted to share this next slide, which is good news. Some of you might be familiar with this already. Hopefully, you are, which is that our first to second year retention has increased quite dramatically.

For a long time, over a decade or just about a decade, we were steady about 75 percent from first to second year. This past year, we’ve now gone up to 83 percent.

The question is what are some of the drivers? I’d say there are at least two. The first is that the major reinvestments that have been or the major investments that have been made in through the Alfond gift, particularly research learning experiences, pathways to career, etc. have now started to show their benefits. That’s very exciting.

Another thing that has to be pointed to are the various process improvements that have been made. Many of these are led by my colleague, Associate Provost Scott Marzilli, including Black Bear early alerts.

This is where, in Scott’s words, we make the faculty into the eyes and ears on the ground, and we’re able to identify students who are having difficulty early on in a given semester, and then bring out all of our resources, all the wrap‑around services relate to student success, advisors, and others in order to ensure that those students have the best chance of succeeding.

I think we are now seeing the benefits quite significantly. Undergraduate student credit hours have, of course, over the last ten years declined quite significantly overall. There are a couple of different drivers that have resulted in this. The first is, of course, competition from other regional flagships.

The second, however, is the free community college program that also has had a significant impact. Fortunately, it appears that our credit hours at the undergraduate level are leveling out, and that’s a very exciting development. I believe Megan now I’m speaking into the mic. Megan, I think you’re also to share some ULM updates.

Megan: Thank you, Gabe. I just wanted to say that our credit hours are up this year. We are currently this semester up 23 percent in credit hours over spring 2024, and most of that is in our online undergraduate sections of introductory level courses. Thank you.

Gabe: Thanks, Megan. Got it right that time. Now I believe we’re going to go to graduate student credit hours. I believe Kody’s out there in cyberspace.

Kody Varahramyan: Yes. I’m here. Good morning, everyone. The next slide, if we can get to it.

Gabe: Oops. Sorry.

Kody: Thank you. This also shows the graduate credit hour over the past ten years. As you can see, the trend overall has been growth in the credit hours, and we can also say that in recent years things have become more or less constant.

However, having said that, if you look at the out‑of‑state portion of of the credit hour, that has been growing steadily and almost by about close to 50 percent over the past ten years. At the same time, we are doing the best we can with respect to the in state credit hours for with respect to growth. Thank you.

Gabe: Thank you, Kody. This slide shows that our credit hours are going to be flat going into next year. We are graduating a very large class which is exciting, which is good news. We expect that our incoming class will be slightly greater than this past year.

We do expect to continue to our gains related to retention, in particular, especially from first to second year. This is all, I think, good news, even though our credit hours will remain flat going into next year. I can now turn things over to Kody again. Thank you.

Kody: Thank you. With respect to being a learner center, our one university also, we have been already doing quite a bit of good work and advancement thanks to the entire university community and the research enterprise.

In fiscal year 24, with respect to R&D expenditures generated it was around $249.3 million. R&D expenditures consist of internal funds that were invested in research as well as external funds that were invested in research.

Out of $249.3 million., the external funds portion was $171.4 million. Which means that the internal funds invested by about $77 million.

If you divide the two numbers, then for every internal dollar that was spent in support of the research enterprise, essentially, $2.2 were generated and were brought in from the outside world to support our research with respect to supporting faculty, staff, students, laboratory enhancements, and all of that comes with it.

Overall, our university as the flagship university of the state of Maine has been doing 89 percent of all university research in the state of Maine, and about over 16 percent of our undergraduate students have been directly involved in research experiential learning.

This number does not include those students who go through RLEs and through the courses that they get exposed to the research experiential learning.

Also, of course, there has been very much focus on in R&D areas that are relevant in and how or impactful and meet the needs of the state of Maine. As part of that, we have also been diversifying and expanding our funding sources.

Finally, with respect to doctoral degree programs, we have 31 degree programs, and roughly on average, in recent years, over 70 doctoral students have been graduating. As part of that, also, some innovations have been taking place in doctoral education. Thank you.

Jake Ward: Hi. I’m Jake Ward, vice president for strategic partnerships and innovation at 91±¬ÁĎ. I want to dive in a little bit on our industry commercialization and economic improvement activities. I feel like I’m looking in the wrong direction, so sorry.

In particular, our industry and commercialization projects. I mean, anything I talk about here is really the work of the institution. Many of you are involved in those faculty, staff, centers, departments, colleges, etc.

Over the last few years, we’ve really tried to accelerate some of the work in commercialization and entrepreneurship innovation. Over the last five years, about 750 projects specifically in that space.

It’s really about translating the work, the results of our work, but also making our facilities and expertise available to companies and communities in Maine who are looking to solve problems extends from the smallest companies in Maine to some of the largest companies in the world.

We have such a broad activity in that space. A lot of that is stimulated by the Maine economic improvement fund. The Maine economic improvement fund is a state appropriation dedicated to doing applied research and development in the seven targeted sectors.

We get about $16 million a year from the state for that. It’s distributed across the institution and in so many different places. We’ve seen over the last few years a continued growth in the leverage of that. Using those funds to invest in faculty, staff, facilities, technicians, equipment.

The last year, FY24, we saw a $6.45 for every dollar invested in that space. Over the last few years we’ve been expanding that more into the, the workforce development, the R1 activities including a lot of more internships, undergrad and graduate level are being more and more incorporated into the use of those resources. Now I’m passing it back to whoever. Kelly.

Kelly: Feel like I should say, “Tag. You’re it.” A little bit about our housing. I definitely want to call out Dick Young and the team. They have done extraordinary work this last year as we found that we had exceeded, thanks to Kevin, our growth in enrollment. We had more students to house on campus than we thought.

There was a lot of gymnastics that happened coming into the summer months to try and accommodate those students, leasing space off‑site, triples, lounges creative solutions to accommodate students. This year, we’ve been able to get out ahead of that with an intentional leasing plan in advance.

What this number doesn’t show is we have 3500 beds on campus. We will also be leasing 40 beds off‑site in order to accommodate our students. By the end of the year, we anticipate being at 90 percent occupancy, but that means we’ll start at a a hundred percent and work our way down. A lot of good work to support both undergraduate and graduate students with on campus housing.

A similar story of growth in Machias, and I’m going to turn over to my colleague, Megan, to talk a little bit about what’s happening down there.

Megan: Thank you, Kelly. We are seeing the numbers go in the right direction. Although, of course, we’d like to see Dorward Hall full. You see that sign there is green, but it is shortly to be blue. We are doing a number of upgrades to that building as well including bathrooms and lounge areas. I did also want to shout out to Dick Young for all of his help, and also to Sodexo.

I’m pleased to say I don’t know if this is the time, Kelly, but I’m quite pleased to say that 91±¬ÁĎ Machias ranks in the top five for students at student and customer satisfaction of all Sodexo serving institutions in the Northeast.

Kelly: That is an incredible turnaround story that may not have been how students felt about Sodexo when we first launched down there. Great, great collaboration for Sodexo.

Over the last year, we’ve also been studying how we can consider making some improvements to our housing for students and really focusing on developmentally appropriate safe housing adding in some privacy into spaces, bathroom privacy, kitchens. How can we can start considering improvements to our facilities over time?

One of those is to start to increase our rates just a little bit so that we can start to build a reserve so that we can do some major improvements or major renovations. This is the first year that we’ll make that increase. We’re planning to increase our room rates by approximately 4.25 percent here in Orono in order to start that.

We’ll start to see some renovations happening in the following years as the outcome of that change. Similarly, we’ll be working to increase our rates in Machias. In Machias, we have been running at a deficit. This year, we’re really working to restructure those rates so that that program breaks even down there.

We understand and acknowledge that it’s a little bit higher of an increase and a potential burden on students, but necessary in order to make that program really come to breakeven. Do you want to add anything to that, Megan?

Megan: No. I don’t. Well, I guess I would say that we do have an exemption for students who live 35 miles from campus. Otherwise first year students are required to live on campus. Similar, but not exact to there. That’s it. Thank you.

Kelly: Thank you, Megan. Then as of board rates or what, we are charging for meal plans, this will bring our meal program with Sodexo to fully break even. Lots of exciting improvements, as I mentioned earlier, happening across campus to expand offerings for students as well as physical locations or places for students to gather outside of the traditional dining hall.

I’m going to turn it over here back to my colleague, Gabe.

Gabe: Hello again, everyone. This slide shows our discount rate. Our discount rate has remained steady over the last few years. We do discount more than other New England land grants, but we do that very strategically.

First, scholarships make it much more likely that students will actually come to the 91±¬ÁĎ. Also, we are trying to recognize our students’ outstanding academic accomplishments. Those are two of the chief reasons why we discount.

The other thing to say is that our undergraduate tuition rate remains really the lowest among New England land grants by some measure, about $4,000 less, whereas our out‑of‑state tuition is really just on par with the University of Rhode Island, but significantly lower than all the other New England land grants.

Then finally, this slide shows tuition relative to median household income. While we are more or less at the same level as the state of Massachusetts, of course, our median income is significantly lower. That deserves to be pointed out. Now, turn back to my colleagues related to the federal landscape. President Ferrini‑Mundy.

Joan: This is our last section, and then we can turn to conversation and questions. The federal landscape changing by the day. A couple of things to say first, extraordinary uncertainties right now relative to budget.

You’ve seen that worked in a little bit to the budget presentation, not fully because it’s actually very difficult to project. We’re doing a lot of work with scenario planning to try to get a sense of what this could mean for us. As I say, it changes daily.

Then the actual specifics of research funding and grants. Grants that we already have, grants that we have been sure we would get, and grants for which we are applying. That’s a very dynamic landscape right now. Many of the folks in the room, and I’m assuming on the call, are very engaged in that work. I’ll say a bit more about how we’re trying to address it right now.

Then, the federal actions and guidance may be, of course, overarching for all of this, and that may be some of the most difficult and challenging activity that we face at the moment. I was struck by the headlines in the “Bangor Daily News” in the Saturday paper, I guess. There were two, and I meant to bring it and rushed out without it.

One spoke about a grant that had actually been paused that had to do with STEM engagement of, I believe, young women, as a part of the work.

The other spoke about worries about scientists in the INBRE project, which is a statewide funding activity funded by NIH about what was happening. I was thinking how differently those two articles conveyed what was happening. They’re both fine articles. They were accurate.

The INBRE was all about a worry as I read it. Like, what if the F&A cap is created? What could that mean? The other was a grant that we are actually working right now with the funder to try to understand what the issues may be. One caution that I would give to everybody is it’s really easy to be extremely worried with every one of these headlines. I appreciate that.

I am and you are and and we we know that. At the same time, I’m trying to stay focused on what has actually happened to us? Like, what do we actually need to do to resolve this grant, to resolve the Sea Grant situation, to resolve the USDA threat on unfunding of what we had?

There’s a lot happening and it changes daily. I’ll tell you a little bit about what we are doing here in this rapidly changing environment. We can concentrate on what we can control. That is our own programs, our own research, the well‑being of our students. Those are the things to focus on, I think, in this moment.

Know that the responses are going to vary, frankly, almost daily depending on what happens. Here are some of the groups that we have working just to be sure that people are aware that this is all happening. If people have questions, we can figure out how to help plug you in.

There’s a grant review team. That group meets every day. Well, not weekends, maybe weekends. I don’t know. No, not yet. The grant review team meeting every day to take up specific questions coming in from our grantees, whatever their question might be.

“Should I stop work on this piece of the grant? Should I continue going ahead with this submission? What about the language? What’s your advice on what I might do relative to DEI language or climate language or any number of other topics? How does it look for whether this funding will continue?”

Then very specific queries that come in because an agency representative has written to the grantee. They’re a little bit different. There might be worries and concerns and what ifs. Then there is, “Oh my goodness. I just got this letter today. What do I do now?”

The grant review team looks at whatever has come in since the day before and tries to address that queue. Curious, just sorry to put people on the spot, about how many have we looked at so far now in the grant review team?

Jake: [indecipherable] .

Jake: 90‑95 coming in. What Jake just said was if you also look at HR‑related and purchasing‑related, because if there’s some threat that your grant may stop, the HR issues are very obvious. Whether or not to buy the new piece of equipment is another question. Whether to continue with the subcontract is another question. All of that has to be looked at pretty closely.

Then we have the Federal Actions Stakeholder Team, FAST. We are meeting three times a week. That’s a group of people from across the cabinet. The GRT is much more, that team is about grant specialists. That’s about people who deal with grants every day and understand those implications as well as talking to our government relations teams and so forth.

FAST is a sample of folks from across the cabinet and other leadership roles. What we do is look at whatever has come up in the two days before the last meeting. What are the new issues? What’s in the news? What have we noticed? Very important to that group are our system general counsel attorneys.

They sit in those meetings and they help us talk about what we may need to do. If we took this action, what might the consequences be? If we fail to take action, what could we consider? A lot of risk assessment at, I think, a more general level there.

Kody is convening an alternative funding team, and that will continue to be an expanded conversation, not only among the small set of researchers that he has assembled already to start to look at where there might be additional resources, but that will grow into a bigger discussion in the coming weeks for the entire university.

There are a couple of different contingency planning efforts. Kelly and team are working regularly on their scenarios, on risk assessments, on trying to refine exactly what this situation could mean for us fiscally.

That one is very fiscally focused, and Kevin is helping us to shape a plan for a wider, longer term, wider range. What would happen if our university had to be reshaped in this way or that way or another way? Both of those getting going.

Michelle Rogers chairs an ad hoc communications team that is simply looking at all the different frameworks for communication that we need to be worrying about and paying attention to. I would say that this meeting is one example of our next wave of trying to be as communicative as we can be in this very changing world.

The chancellor holds an executive orders check‑in twice a week with different groups of people where we talk system wide about the implications. As you may guess, the news about the US Department of Education is prompting discussion that goes way beyond the research funding or the very specific DEI discussions or the immigration discussions that we are all engaged in or the tariff discussions.

It goes all the way to student financial aid and what could that mean and what might the implications be. Other programs funded by the US Department of Ed that are not research programs, but trio and others that might be student support. That’s getting discussed at the chancellor’s level.

Then several of us are very active and in leadership roles and organizations like NECHE, which is our accreditor, APLU, the Association of Public, and Land Grant Universities, and other organizations at the professional society level where I know that deans and faculty members have leadership roles.

There’s a lot of calibrating going on, at least from where I sit with peers across the nation. Like, what are you doing about this? How are you reacting to that? What do you think about this? Can you share that? That’s going on rather constantly because there isn’t a well‑defined pathway through this and major universities are being affected as well.

That’s a useful thing I’m finding. The version of it that I described here on campus is useful because it puts together people who care about this university, who care about our students, faculty, and staff to really come up with what is a sensible way to balance everything that has to get balanced as we try to move ahead.

The congressional delegation, particularly Senator Collins, has just been amazing. They are there. There are conversations with their staff. I’m in regular conversation with the four members of the delegation and their teams. They are, of course, watching all of this really closely, as well as our governor and her administration.

There’s a lot of new communicating going on and new messaging really for the 91±¬ÁĎ. “Here’s what we care about. Here’s what we must protect. Here is what we also feel is critical for the state of Maine,” and so forth. It’s pretty comprehensive.

If there are people who are interested in knowing more about some of that, I’m always happy to answer your questions. I’d offer special thanks to a few people: Chancellor Malloy, Paul Chan, who serves now as special counsel to the chancellor, Eamonn Purrington, who is acting general counsel, Lisa Landry, who is associate general counsel.

We really are, and this isn’t meant to be anything other than acknowledgment. We are really on daily speed dial with these folks because of things that come across our desks where maybe a decision by 91±¬ÁĎ could impact the whole system or a decision by the system could impact 91±¬ÁĎ and so forth.

Samantha Warren, who is the 91±¬ÁĎ System Director of Government and Community Relations, is our lead for the system on communication. Jake Ward, whom you’ve met, VP for Spire, is the lead coordinator for FAST and for all of the incoming everything, trying to keep an eye on all of that and keep track of it.

Michelle Rogers has been amazing on all fronts, particularly in keeping things moving forward. The members of FAST. A special shout out to Chris Boynton, who is Director of the Office of Research Administration and the 91±¬ÁĎ’s authorized institutional representative, meaning he signs things.

He’s especially attentive to everything that is going on and knows, now reading what terms and conditions are included in grants and whether those are changing. Very, very technical and important work for us.

There’s a lot happening. It is not easy. We will do our best to keep people informed of decisions as we make them. I will announce a few specifics today. As I was looking at my list, I was thinking some of these are budget‑related. Some of them are coming out of the current financial uncertainty at the federal level, and some are SRE.

That’s a pretty good mix. We said the talk was about all three areas. They come together really for us. A few points that we’ll get into writing some of this that’s unfamiliar as soon as we can. We are continuing the strategic hiring pause that was initiated last December, but we’re expanding the critical hiring review process.

How many of you know about that process? I’m seeing deans and PIs and people raising their hands. Yes, we have a pause, but we also have a mechanism for people to put forward what’s considered a critical hire. That’s why you’re seeing some positions are still being posted.

There is an argument to be made for the criticality of the hire, a timing matter, budget‑related issues. The critical hiring review process will now expand to include all hiring on external funds. With quick turnarounds, we’re trying to do those in the same day.

For now, we need to take a very careful step back to look at risk across our portfolio, and this is the most straightforward way to do it. The lead for that is our Vice President for Human Resources, Nicole Lawrence. We will be pausing new financial offers to incoming graduate students, while we at the same time continue to accept students.

This one, we’ve not announced the details of this. However, this pause has already happened in some colleges. We will use the pause period, which we hope will be fairly short. This is very similar to what other universities are doing, so there’s nothing particularly radical about this.

We’ll use that pause period to get as close an analysis as we can of risk areas and then come back with next steps after a fairly short period of time. We’ll give more details about that. It’s a big team working on that, but the leads are Provost Volin and VPR DGS, Kody Varahramyan.

The third thing I wanted to mention, and this is coming out of SRE, and we’ve been talking about this for a long time, is that we’ll launch very shortly, an academic portfolio review process. This is a recommendation that’s come from multiple groups in SRE.

This will assess possibilities for program closure, mergers, consolidations, redesign, meta majors, new directions and this will be led by Associate Provost Gabe Paquette. We are looking at a couple of, I guess the language we’ve been using is semi‑centralized or semi‑decentralized reorganizations.

The first of these that we’ll dive into in a deeper way will be within marketing and communications functions university‑wide to be led by John Diamond, who is our Chief Marketing and Communications Officer. He’s been working for several weeks now with Marcom leaders across the campus and more to come on that.

Then several of the recommendations coming from the SRE groups include new organizations for various kinds of units, a center to be combined within a couple of colleges, for example, or two centers to merge in some sense and so forth.

I’d like to establish a task force, a new task force, to look at all of those recommendations that have come in the last couple of weeks and to pick the ones that we should start on now, keeping things in mind that are crucial to us. What’s our working charter about a healthy planet, about being fiscally sustainable, serving the state of Maine, being inclusive, building inclusive communities?

We’ll look at every one of those potential reorgs from those perspectives, but we will also get started on deciding how quickly and how we actually would move into them.

Then finally, and I’m a little leery to introduce this because I haven’t fully worked it all out. This is accurate. I’m going to look at Dean Haddad to check me. I’ve had a first conversation with most of the deans collectively to discuss what we would do to…

Being R1 is clear. We know what that means. It’s very clear criteria. It signifies a certain level of excellence in research and so forth. There isn’t really a comparable teaching or learning designator.

We can make the case for ourselves at this university that we are an extraordinary university for teaching and learning, that we have innovation, that we support and will perhaps find ways to grow our support for that heart of our mission in modern ways.

I’ve approached with the deans the idea, watching Emily and Diane, the idea that we put together a prospectus for how we would make that a major focal piece of our work going forward. That’s beginning. I think we will soon have more to say about what that even looks like.

This is an extraordinary university for its instructional portfolio. We have innovation going on. We have strong focus on student learning. We’ve already heard today about student success and retention in general kinds of ways.

Within particular subject matter areas and disciplinary foci and interdisciplinary areas, we can boast about strengths here, and we need to be able to categorize that more fully and describe it more intentionally and then grow it. That will be coming as well.

Just to conclude, a reminder: we are still Maine’s R1 D1 Land, Sea, and Space Grant Flagship University. We are a community that, as Robert Dana used to say, is kind, caring, and compassionate. We have to continue, I believe, to figure out how to do that.

We will have differences. People will remain worried and concerned, and we collectively need to do our best to help folks address those worries and concerns and to keep moving forward.

I am so appreciative that this community is here and all the people online as well being a part of figuring out how we ensure that Maine has another 160 good years going forward at a time that is admittedly very challenging, very difficult, but I see some optimism too.

Thank you for that, and I’m sure we now have some questions. We’ll turn to Amanda to help us with that. I’ll turn to Amanda to help us with questions. This time, I’m not monitoring the questions in real‑time, so it’s probably better.

Amanda: Thank you, everyone. Can we put the slide back up that had the QR link for the questions? It’s at the very beginning. [laughs]

There we go. We’ve already been receiving some questions online, and we’ll try to go back and forth between questions in the room and questions online. I do have a bunch online, but if anyone has any questions in the room, we could start there. There’s also a microphone up there.

I’ll start with one online. The first question is, how can we support our students while they’re expressing their own fears about the job market, student loans, and other things?

Joan: This is a question that I think actually warrants a little bit of a discussion, because people in this room will have ideas. The question says, how can we support them while they are expressing their own fears about the job market, about student loans, and other things? I think those have slightly different questions, really, behind them.

Questions and fears about the job market. I am interested in responses from the audience about what you are doing to help your students explore their possibilities and prospects. What we are seeing, if anyone has any data, about the changes in the job market in Maine.

Again, as much as we can be factual with people, I think it’s helpful. I don’t have that information handy. I don’t know if anyone here does. Yes, and please introduce yourself. We’re going to give you a mic, Crisanne.

Crisanne Blackie: Hi. I’m Crisanne Blackie. I’m the Director of the Career Center here on campus. We service our students here on at Orono as well as Machias and I would encourage any students who are concerned about their next steps to please come visit us.

We are in the Union on the third floor. We’re happy to meet with students in person or online. We have many events that are upcoming to help them. In fact, tomorrow is the Class of ’25 Day in the Union that we will be there. We also have alumni helping us to prepare students for interviews. We continue on.

Our website has lots of events, and we are happy to meet with any student who has concerns and help them develop their job search or graduate school plans.

Joan: I would add and then go to Kevin. I would add our alums and donors are extraordinarily interested in how they can help us right now. When we think just about alums, and I saw Jason Harkins before someplace, does a fantastic job with the Maine Business School of helping seniors learn to network and bringing them to events where there are large groups of alums and so forth.

Certainly, we have that as a tool and I think good ideas for how to bridge the connections really between our alumni base and our current graduating students who are job hunting is something we can do more broadly. There are many other good examples of that in the university.

The Pulp and Paper Foundation is extraordinary in helping its participants network together and seek positions, and there may be other good examples. How do we do more of that if that’s of help to students? Kevin was going to comment too.

Kevin: Oh, yes. You hit some of it, the way that we want to provide students with information concerning the diversity and archetypes of support. I also wanted to focus on our co‑curricular participation, especially with student workers.

When we get a student worker, we want them to understand not only they are one of the frontline service people gaining experience that other people spend years post‑graduation developing that experience.

They are also gaining experiences from some of the largest technical platforms people encounter just in profession. Oracle, PeopleSoft Oracle with two CRMs, and they get to see the ambiguity of a tough deployment of CRMs and of things like perceptive content or document imaging and even optical character recognition.

We want students to understand how they put that into a resume or portfolio, and then we want to make sure that we’re continuously evolving so that not only do we harness better technology that our student workers can experience that is lucrative.

Joan: I’ll just add and then go to Kevin. I would add that some of the recommendations coming in from the SRE implementation groups include a stepping up of the numbers of credentials and certificates and special, essentially, stackable credentials that our students may have access to.

That, I believe, is some place where we can actually do something quite concrete. We could take what Kevin just said and turn that into a three‑credit something, perhaps, and look for ways to help our students be able to put a well‑defined credential onto their resume. Of course, there are many national models for how to do this.

There’s quite a lot of interest coming out of the SRE in increasing what we offer in those categories.

Amanda: Angela, did you have something to say regarding that question?

Angela Fileccia: Hi, everyone. I’m Angela Fileccia, the Director of the Counseling Center. That was a really fantastic question. I like that we started with that question in terms of what we can do to support our students. I also appreciate President Ferrini‑Mundy led with a focus on facts.

There’s a lot of information going out. The best model for helping students and, frankly, all of us when we’re dealing with crises is around facts. Focus on facts and then action. What can we do to help our students?

As much as we can focus on facts, helping our students, that’s going to go a long way for their emotional, mental, physical well‑being. Also, anytime I can plug the Counseling Center, please send students who are in distress or even just worried. Send them our way. We have no wait list. We have openings. We have crisis appointments.

Amanda: Thank you, Angela. Any questions from the room?

Oren Teal: Throughout this presentation, you were talking about how it’s sorry…I’m really far away from this. Throughout the presentation, you were talking about how…

Amanda: Sorry. Would you mind introducing yourself?

Oren: Do I have to?

Amanda: Sure.

Oren: I’m an undergraduate student here. My name is Oren Teal. You were talking about how it’s important to maintain support of all of our students, faculty, and staff, especially with everything that’s been going on with the federal government and with funding for 91±¬ÁĎ.

However, recently the USDA released a statement saying that you guys are complying with the federal mandate to exclude trans kids from sports here. What are your actual plans to protect people here at 91±¬ÁĎ, like all of our students, faculty and staff with the increasing attacks on marginalized groups? Like, where do you draw the line in compliance with those demands?

Joan: There’s a bit more background that might be of interest to you and we’ll make sure that you can find that online. One site I would refer everyone to is the 91±¬ÁĎ system. What is it called? Federal Actions Site, Federal Updates. It’s updating pretty much daily.

What you’re referring to has to do with the inquiry that was conducted by the USDA through their Office of Civil Rights around Title IX compliance in NCAA sports, which we follow the NCAA regulations on that matter, and our Athletic Director can tell us more about what those are.

That’s then reported out in the piece that you mentioned where USDA essentially reports that we are compliant with NCAA. Now, the question you ask about support for students, that’s different. This is about following NCAA rules to remain a NCAA institution.

Our support for students, in my view, and I’m looking for Andrea. There she is, and I may ask her to chime in as well. We haven’t wavered on that.

The groups that we have may be having some, we’ve had one name change and we’re aware of that, but the services that we offer, the opportunities that we offer, the time and support that comes from Student Life has not changed, and if anything perhaps has increased. I think it’s important for our faculty and staff to hear that as well. Andrea, would you like to add?

Andrea: Yes. I would say we definitely in Student Life have stepped up to some of the offerings that we’re having. Particularly, I’ll give a shout out if anybody is here to our Residents Life team who are there in the trenches every day with our 3,400 students that live on campus and supporting them.

We did have a name change. You’re all very aware of that. My door is open for discussion of anything, any opinions, any questions you have about that.

There will be some added services to those three lounges that you are probably familiar with, including some mentoring, professional mentoring that will be happening, some academic supports that will happen in those areas to really highlight the work that those lounges have been doing, will continue to do, and provide support for a much broader student population.

Oren: Can I have a follow‑up?

Man 1: [indecipherable]

Man 1: in charge of questions. I would say yes.

Oren: Is that all right? Is it all right if I follow up? OK. Alongside that, I was wondering there’s been a lot of talk about grants being canceled due to language and vocabulary and stuff like that, especially with things about climate or, honestly, just science in general.

How are you planning on dealing with that in the future, and are you going to be supporting undergraduate research in climate?

Joan: You have excellent questions. I’m going to start, and I’m going to turn to Jake to help me with that.

[laughter]

Joan: It’s always good when you get to phone a friend here. Anyway, excellent question. Again, multiple pieces to the question. I lost you. Oh, there you are. OK. Having undergraduates involved in research, in inquiry, in creative endeavors, that is a part of the 91±¬ÁĎ.

It has been for quite a long time, and we’ve stepped that up not just this past couple of years with our RLE’s, but in general over the years with CUGR, with the student symposium, with work that goes on in every college to engage students in the work of inquiry. It’s what distinguishes us.

From what I understand in all my conversations with deans, with faculty, with research center directors, no backing away from that. How we do that, with what names? That’s a little less clear.

There would be some areas where I think we can just zero in where we know it will be clear that that work will continue. We’re watching not only the executive orders and the guidance coming from the federal government, but I’m getting quite interested now in the federal fiscal year ’26 budget.

That’s going to be really key on the research front because when we see what the president’s request looks like, we will be able to tell which agencies and therefore which emphases are going to be most important.

That happens with every change in federal administration. It may be more dramatic with some than with others, but sometimes it’s a full shift where things that were popular in one administration are no longer popular or funded in a new one, and I expect we will see a lot of examples like that with this one.

We’ve got researchers already well ahead of the game and watching and looking and talking to their colleagues. Relative to climate, I think that one is really quite complicated. I’m going to look to Jake. I think there will be ways there have to be ways to continue work that has been critical and is important here at the 91±¬ÁĎ.

It may need to speak about its kinds of outcomes and with new language. A little soon to tell. We’ll hear what Jake thinks. Then, of course, with DEI, that has been a very major focus with the federal government.

You’re seeing, you read the press every single day, you see what they are asking of Columbia, you see what their complaints are with the University of Pennsylvania, you see all kinds of examples.

At this point, we are staying very focused on doing the very best work that we can, caring about what we care about, and using different language when we think we have to. Jake, do you have anything to add?

Jake: Yeah. I’d just say that, from my perspective, and I want to share again that we have a grant review team which has members form ORA, Office of Research Administration, Office of Research Development, Spire team, federal relations as well as legal.

I think everybody who actually gets funding understands you write the proposal to get the funding. You respond to the RFP. Many of the existing grants we have, people responded to the RFPs over the last several years. That definitely had language requirements or deliverable requirements that were objectives of the previous administration.

This transition is, to some extent, new administration, new ideas of things that are important. That doesn’t necessarily mean stop doing the work. A lot of it has to do with making sure it aligns with those priorities if you want that federal funding.

What I think we’re going to start seeing is the next generation of RFPs coming out that are not going to ask for that same kind of language. They’re going to ask for different things. Too much reliance on buzzwords and press is really where it starts to get gray relevant to the science you’re proposing and you being very specific.

If you’re talking about the increases in temperature that increase the viability of tick population, then you just say that. You don’t say it’s because of something else. The more and more you can be very specific about your science, that’s what we’re seeing in the feedback we’re getting.

When a grant is paused, they offered a chance to rewrite some of it. It’s not saying change the scope of work per se. It’s not saying that. It is trying to get to what are you specifically doing, and how is that valuable to what the state, the country, nation needs. I think that’s the best way we can approach it from the mechanics of grant funding.

The overall philosophy of the background of science that connects all these pieces really gets much deeper and beyond what a program manager in an institute or an agency is giving guidance on how to select.

Joan: You know what? That’s a great comment, Jake. I would just add to that as has happened again in previous administrations, there will be new areas of science that are heavily emphasized that are important.

If we’re going to be successful in getting grants, which we have been a lot in the last decade, we will need to also engage in that new science, new engineering, in those new emphases. Particularly for earlier career faculty keeping an eye on all of that. Those signals are already coming. I mean, we’re already hearing what the major areas may be.

We will need, for example, to help folks consider slight shifts in their own research programs and plans to enlarge or expand or move in a slightly different direction and what professional development and support can we offer to folks as they need to do that.

At least that would be relevant in areas that require external funding. Much of our research does require it. If you want to get it, it’s true. You need to write to those RFPs.

Amanda: There are a couple groups of questions online that I think talk to some of the new announcements that were made today. There are some around graduate students, and there’s a theme around how we’re supporting our current students, including efficient communication to them.

Then also a question about the funding graduate student pause for new students and if there’s going to be an exception process and how that’s going to work.

Joan: Thank you and appreciate hearing the questions, of course. Communications with our current graduate students in general, communications in general. I am understanding the importance of stepping up what we do there.

We’re using today as a first attempt at not just doing a straight budget presentation, which we could have also filled a lot of time with, but trying to open up a conversation with folks and to explain some of the issues that are current.

One thing that I have been doing and encouraging members of the cabinet and the deans and others to do is to actually meet with groups of people, with groups who bring specific kinds of topics and issues, and that has been fruitful, both to find out how we can improve our communication and how we can hear people’s issues and concerns.

Relative to the pause in offers that I mentioned today, the details and the execution of that will be forthcoming we hope today. We are an R1 institution. The work that we do at the doctoral level is crucial. The work that our graduate workers do to support that, of course, also crucial. We understand all of that.

What we’re doing with this pause is assessing the risk in a general way and then applying it to where we might be headed in the future. More to come and always happy to speak with students as we learn more and can understand what this looks like.

Again, I appoint you to other major universities who are not only pausing offers, they are pausing admissions. We don’t want to need to go to that step yet, but we need to understand where we are. We need to have a sense for grant‑related funding for students, how that might look in the next five years. That’s like trying to predict the future.

Jake spoke to it a little bit in what he just said when it has to do with what will these RFPs look like? Will we be successful in getting grants from them? There’s a pretty big scenario here, but obviously trying to handle this with sensitivity and appreciation of all of the anxiety that this brings with it.

Continue to ask the questions and continue to comment as our communications come out. If you feel they’re not sufficient, then you need to let us know. Thanks.

Amanda: Any questions in the room? There is a question about the timeline for the upcoming academic portfolio review and plans for sharing information during that process. I think I saw something about how open that process is going to be in terms of sharing the information with all of campus.

Gabe: Thanks, everyone. I guess that the first thing to say is that there has been a lot of work in this area already. The first three phases of SRE were an effort to try to, first, collect information and, second, to analyze it.

I don’t know the exact number of people who were involved in SRE at this point, but many hundreds have been involved in talking about academic programs and other aspects of campus life.

The process that the president announced is going to build on the SRE work that’s already underway. With regard to timeline, there are a number of different factors. One is the availability of essentially of the data we have and the ability to analyze it properly and to make recommendations that are sensible.

Of course, all of this takes place in the context of shared governance. We are governed by APLs. There are several different union contracts, including AFUM contract. There are norms of working together with faculty through defined mechanisms.

It’s difficult to say that to give a precise date when will this work be completed or when will it even be launched beyond the SRE process and the implementation groups that the president referred to. I assure you that all that work will take place not only in concert with the deans, but with the various organs of faculty governance, especially the senate. Thanks very much.

Amanda: I think I’m not overstepping with saying that you’ll hear more information about that as it develops. Any questions in the room while I read these online questions? It’s very quiet.

[pause]

Amanda: There’s a question again about graduate students. It says, “Graduate student admissions are plummeting this year in disciplines where most students are grant supported. I’m also concerned about how the impacts of the federal actions on admissions could further be compounded by potential wage increases associated with the graduate student collective bargaining.

I’m wondering whether or how the university is planning to address the impacts that is likely to have on our teaching capacity such a since TAs have such a vital role to our instruction.” It’s a very complicated question. [laughs]

Joan: It’s a great question. It’s not a question that we have an answer to, really. I don’t have the data about by discipline. That will be helpful to see soon. The data about what the enrollment pressure looks like by discipline. I suspect what the person asking the question said is accurate, that that may be down a bit depending on areas of scholarly interests.

That’s the first step is to understand that, to look at it, to look at all of our resources, to try to think about the ways in which research continues, the ways in which teaching continues, the ways in which our students are adequately supported.

There are many, many factors here, and then if you think about different scenarios, they will play out differently by scenario. If the first scenario is really just what has already happened to us, what can we know for sure, what are the what is known about what our funding will look like next year based on things that have already happened this year, that’s one set of numbers, essentially.

If we look a little bit further out to what looks pretty likely, and that’s where it becomes extremely subjective. We’re looking at other universities, then it gets more serious. Then, of course, absolute worst‑case scenarios, including major shifts and F&A caps and so forth, that’s yet a whole different matter.

We’re trying to stay disciplined to looking at those nearer scenarios and doing all that we can to preserve what we have. It’s very uncertain right now, and that’s my honest answer. Having the data about enrollment pressure would be actually helpful to this. We’ll make sure we have that. Thank you.

Amanda: There are a few questions online about Sodexo. [laughs]

They have to do with the fact that things like catering prices have increase dramatically and that means that a lot of units are now spending their dollars at outside the organizations instead of Sodexo, and wouldn’t it be better if Sodexo changed their prices so then we spend the money there opposed to going to and spending our money outside?

Kelly: I think the first thing to remember with Sodexo is that the cost of Sodexo is not just the cost of a box of food. It’s also the cost of the really high‑quality staff and the catering team that are bringing to set that up to decorate the room to deliver it and have it ready for an event to happen on campus.

We’re often doing, we’ve done pretty consistent price comparisons for all of our whether it’s pizza delivery off‑campus, other activities off‑campus. If you compare the food to the food, that’s one thing.

If you’re comparing the food against the food plus the service that you’re asking for with catering, the price is very is different. We are paying the folks to set them up to do it.

If you’re doing it in your unit, you’re paying your own staff the time equivalent for that. It may not feel like an incremental expense, but that’s activity that they could be doing elsewhere on‑site. We’ve done price comparisons. They are very competitive with the local market.

If you have specific questions around specific events or activities our Sodexo team, Ted Stone, along with Dick Young are always happy to dive in and say what is it exactly that you’re trying to do and to come up with a plan for your specific unit to unpack that to make it affordable in house? I caution us to not compare food against food plus service.

Amanda: There’s one last very specific question that I think a lot of people are wondering about, and then maybe we could go to anything you want to say to close. It is about undergraduate student workers and whether they’re affected by either the hiring pauses and reviews or the graduate student exceptions.

Joan: Another good question that affects a lot of people. Undergraduates are employed in a wide variety of capacities here at the university, and so I don’t think there’s a one‑size‑fits‑all answer to this.

For those who are employed on research grants, then the answer is yes. Of course, in all of this analysis, we need to look at whether grants are likely to be canceled. We also need to look at which grants and check them off are likely to continue because there are a lot of those.

We are also getting new grants, by the way, coming in and as the federal agencies have the staffing, we’re even seeing those start to have money flowing. I think that is a bit unknown, but that’s one portion of our undergraduate student worker situation.

Then beyond that, that’s going to vary pretty widely. Of course, undergraduate workers are a key part of this university as well, and those are key experiences. What Kevin described earlier are also educational experiences.

Certainly, we are committed to trying to keep our focus there and keep that as broadened and supported as we are able to. Again, quite an uncertain time.

With that, I would like to say thank you for being here. I really appreciate everybody’s attention. I don’t know if the online crew stayed with us the whole time, but it doesn’t matter. [laughs] Some of them did, I’m sure.

Know that I’m very interested in hearing from you directly with your ideas, with your solutions, with your ongoing concerns, with things that you would like more fully explained, and we’ll do our best.

I do appreciate this community, as I said at the earlier moment, and what you do, and I know that our students do, and that’s really what’s at the center. Thank you all for being here. Have a good day, and don’t forget to keep an eye on the weather. Thank you.

   

Full transcript of event

George Kinghorn: Good afternoon. We ask that everybody be seated now. Thank you.

I’m George Kinghorn, senior executive director of cultural engagement and director and curator of the Zillman Art Museum. I’d like to welcome you and present the 91±¬ÁĎ Land Acknowledgment.

The 91±¬ÁĎ recognizes that it is located on Marsh Island in the homeland of the Penobscot Nation, where issues of water and territorial rights and encroachment upon sacred sites are ongoing. Penobscot homeland is connected with other Wabanaki tribal nations, the Passadumkeag, Maliseet, Mi’kmaq through kinship, alliances and diplomacy.

The university also recognizes that the Penobscot Nation and other Wabanaki tribal nations are distinct sovereign, legal and political entities with their own powers of self‑governance and self‑determination. Thank you.

Amanda Klemmer: Hello everyone. I’m Amanda Klemmer, faculty in the School of Biology and Ecology, and the Faculty Senate president. It’s now my honor to introduce our president, Dr. Joan Ferrini‑Mundy, the 21st president of the 91±¬ÁĎ and its regional campus, the 91±¬ÁĎ at Machias.

Since 2021, she has been Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation for the 91±¬ÁĎ system. Leading efforts to make the 91±¬ÁĎ’s research infrastructure accessible to and supportive of all universities and faculty in the system.

Dr. Ferrini‑Mundy became the 21st president of the 91±¬ÁĎ in July 2018, and since then, has introduced changes in efforts to enhance the university’s impact on the local and global community. During her six years as president, Dr. Ferrini‑Mundy has spearheaded university initiatives as dedicated advocate for academic excellence, student success, and workforce development.

Most recently, she has launched a strategic re‑envisioning initiative, an institution‑wide effort to ensure that 91±¬ÁĎ remains a leader in teaching, research, and public engagement to meet the changing needs of the state and beyond.

This nine‑month initiative is establishing transformational change for Maine’s public land grant, R1‑DI flagship university. Under Ferrini‑Mundy’s leadership, 91±¬ÁĎ’s research development and innovation pursuits continue to flourish.

In early 2022, 91±¬ÁĎ has designated an R1 Carnegie Classification Research University. She is also co-PI on transformative and historic 320 million UMS grant from the Harold Alfond Foundation to improve student experiences and educational opportunities of the people of Maine and beyond.

Prior to joining the university, President Ferrini‑Mundy was the Chief Operating Officer at the National Science Foundation. Her career spans the fields of mathematics education, STEM education, and policy, teacher education, and research administration.

Ferrini‑Mundy continues her leadership in mathematics education as chair of the Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences and member of the Transforming Post Secondary Education and Mathematics Board. She has numerous awards and recognitions and currently chairs and participates in several groups at the national and state levels.

In October 2024, Ferrini‑Mundy was appointed to the National Science Board after previously serving on the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science. She is the chair of the APLU Board of Directors. In Maine, she chairs the Maine Innovation Economy Advisory Board and serves on the boards of Maine Co. and Maine Public. Please join me in welcoming President Ferrini‑Mundy.

Joan Ferrini‑Mundy: Hi everybody. Friendliness is good. We need it right now. I am delighted to see you all. Thank you for being here. There are a few seats around here and there for folks in the back who might wish to have a seat. Thank you so much Amanda. Where’d Amanda go?

Thanks Amanda. Thanks to everybody here for taking time from your busy schedules to attend this year’s State of the University address. I’m delighted to see so many of you here on what I hope is a day that brings to us just a hint of spring. I was optimistic, it’s just really wet but it’s warmer. I wasn’t sure about the dandelions, but it’s OK.

Try to look to the days ahead, the promise of brighter days ahead. I especially want to welcome all of the students who are present today and who are watching. Students who represent 50 states, more than 500 international graduate students representing over 80 countries. A particular welcome to you.

I want to acknowledge our representatives on behalf of the Graduate Workers Union who are here with us today. I would like to ask some of the dedicated leaders of the university who shape this university every day to wave or stand.

First, I invite the members of the Cabinet who are here present today to make themselves known. You’re here, you’re scattered around. Thank you. This is a group of exceptional individuals.

Leaders who work tirelessly behind the scenes helping to make decisions, solve problems, spending quite a lot of time debating the options that we have, and trying their best to ensure that our university remains strong, forward thinking, and committed to putting our students first. Let’s give them a round of applause.

I’m also pleased to recommend…to recognize — it’s going to be long if I start stumbling this early on the words — i’m pleased to recognize our student government leaders who are here with us today. Undergraduate student government president, Keegan Tripp, and vice president, Memphis Peterson, are here somewhere.

Are there other student government leaders? Please raise your hands. I’d like to thank you for the great dedication you have to the interests of the student body here and to representing them. Also would like to recognize graduate student government president, Laura Curioli, and vice president, Nolan Merz. I think they’re here. Over here, OK.

Lots of folks here who are working along with all of you very, very hard to keep our university steering in the right direction. I would also like to welcome any members of the faculty Senate who are here, including President Amanda Klemmer. Others who might be here? Good to see you. Thank you for being here or for watching.

Thank you all for your leadership, for your advocacy, for your willingness to bring multiple perspectives to the table on very hard issues. Hard issues that we’ve not had experience before, certainly in my time here, in trying to discuss and for building such a great collaboration in particular across the different groups with all of us that are aimed at the success and future of the university.

In past years, Chancellor Dan Malloy, 91±¬ÁĎ System, Dan Malloy, has joined us. He’s unable to be with us here in person today, but as you know, he is an extremely strong supporter of this university. He has prepared a short video message, which I confess I have not watched. He told me what it said, and it was a poem that was a little weird.

I hope that’s not it. Let’s look at Chancellor Malloy’s message, please. Thank you.

Dan Malloy: Good afternoon. I’m Dan Malloy, the Chancellor of the 91±¬ÁĎ System. Under normal circumstances, I would be with you today. However, I’m in Washington, D.C., for a conference. A conference that’s talking about some of the very serious challenges that the academic world is facing in our nation at this time.

I know that Joan is about to speak to you and deliver what will be her usual good words about the success of this university and the dedication of the students, the faculty, the staff in making sure that those students are in fact successful in getting their degrees and going forth to make our nation and our world a better place.

For each of you who play a role in that, in this audience today, I want to thank you. Thank you for the work that you do day in and day out. Thank you for making this university a great university. Thank you for understanding the challenges that people are facing today and you are responding to.

These are important times. This is, as I’ve said, a great university getting better every single day. I want to say to Joan, my good friend, you are providing the kinds of leadership that this university has needed for a long period of time, and I am privileged to be able to work with you. Go get ’em, give a great speech, remind everyone of what we’re doing together. Have a great day.

Joan Ferrini‑Mundy: Thank you.

What he told me he was going to say was, roses are red, violets are blue, Joan is great, and so are you.

Thank you. I want to express my gratitude to the chancellor and his leadership team for their continued and enthusiastic support of this university. I can take them any problem, any challenge that we have, get sound advice, a good conversation, but in the end support for wherever we decide to go as a university. That’s a fantastic thing to have.

They recognize our unique role as a flagship, and they work hard, not just for us, but for all of the institutions in the 91±¬ÁĎ System.

As we gather here today, I want to begin by acknowledging the sense of uncertainty and stress that many in our 91±¬ÁĎ and 91±¬ÁĎ Machias communities are experiencing right now. We’re living in a time of global unrest, shifting political landscapes, economic anxieties, and consequential debates about individual rights.

I want to be absolutely clear about something. The 91±¬ÁĎ stands firm in its values. We remain unwavering in our commitment to freedom of speech and academic and personal freedoms, to opportunity, inclusion, and nondiscrimination in all that we do, and to respecting and supporting our community regardless of their background, identity or beliefs.

We hold true to the belief that individuals at this university should live their lives authentically, and pursue their education in an environment that fosters acceptance and respect. We believe that a university must prize inclusion and respect for all. We are not deviating or retreating from those values.

At the same time, we realize that navigating this moment requires thoughtfulness, dialogue, and action. That there are wide ranging views and reactions from our community. We’re actively working with university leaders, state officials, national higher education organizations, and others to ensure that our responses to the current federal climate are measured, strategic, aligned with our mission, very mindful of risks and the future, and compliant with law.

I’ll say to you, the questions that we face right now, and you all face them as well, and in most cases, they’re hard. There aren’t always clear answers to the questions of, should I change the title of my course? Should I pause my grant activity? Can we begin hiring for a project that isn’t quite funded, but that we hope will be funded? Is there a risk to our Pell funds if we do or don’t do something?

I know that you’re grappling with those questions and I just want to say so are the leaders of the institution. We’re doing our best with this. It’s a very dynamic situation changing not just by the day, but by the hour. I gave my husband my cell phone to hold and he said when should I show it to you? I said and it could be anything.

Right now I just am so grateful that we are a community, that we are not necessarily a community that sees everything the same way, but we respect each other, and we come together, and we have these hard discussions.

I value these ongoing conversations and analyses in which so many of you are engaged. As we work together collaboratively in the tradition of — as our friend Robert Dana used to say — being a kind, caring, and compassionate community. That we are coming to decisions as best we can together.

I’ll have more to say about the recent federal directives and their impact on 91±¬ÁĎ later in my remarks. For now, I want to share my thoughts on our past, our present, and our future. This year marks 160 years since the founding of the 91±¬ÁĎ. Our story began in 1865 when the Maine State Legislature established this institution as part of a larger national movement to democratize higher education.

At the heart of that movement was the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which President Abraham Lincoln signed into law. The idea was revolutionary for its time. The idea was that higher education should not just be for the elite, it should be for everyone.

These new land grant universities, including the 91±¬ÁĎ, were built with a mission that had three parts. To serve the public good, to expand access to education, and to connect academic knowledge with real-world applications.

Historian Louis Bernard Schmitt once described the Land Grant College Act as, “One of the most profound acts of democratization in American education.” It was about lifting communities, strengthening industries, and at the time a focus on agriculture, of course, and creating new opportunities for people who never had access to higher education before.

This university, Maine’s land grant university, was born with that purpose in mind, to serve the people of Maine and beyond by providing opportunity, education, and economic mobility to those who sought it. Now, 160 years later, our mission remains consistent with the early view.

The differences are that our approach to fulfilling that mission is much different, because the stakes are much higher, our stakeholders are much greater and varied in their numbers, needs, and interests, and so it remains a constant reminder that we need to pay attention to the original mission.

Over the holidays, my husband Rick and I had the opportunity to see “A Christmas Carol” at the Penobscot Theatre. Anybody else see it in the room? It was a wonderful performance made even more special by the fact that a child of one of our faculty members played the role of Tiny Tim and did so with incredible talent and heart.

As many of you know, “A Christmas Carol” is a story about transformation, about looking back at the past, understanding the present, and imagining a better future. It’s a story about the power of change, about recognizing where we’ve been and making choices that shape what is yet to come. Now I don’t want to overstretch this analogy.

There’s nobody here that I think is really playing the part of Ebenezer Scrooge in this speech. I do think that the framing of past, present and future is particularly relevant to this moment in 91±¬ÁĎ’s history. Revisiting the past gives us perspective and helps us realize that this university has met significant challenges over its 160 years.

We’ve worked through them. Our predecessors have worked through them. Examining and assessing the present in the moment provides a reminder, always, that what we do now shapes what’s yet to come. Each year as I prepare for this address, I do spend some time reflecting on the university’s history.

I go back to various foundational documents or images, to the words of the leaders who built the institution from the ground up. This year I revisited President M. C. Fernald’s 1916 History of the 91±¬ÁĎ, which describes the early years of the institution and the vision behind its creation.

The goal was to bridge theory and practice, to create a learning environment where students could develop both intellectual skills and hands-on expertise. As I told folks at an athletics department event recently, there wasn’t so much certainty about the role of athletics in those days.

It was feared that perhaps athletics might draw away from actual academic focus, and that’s been disproven by our teams and athletes here. In any case, as President Fernald wrote in 1916, 91±¬ÁĎ’s mission was to “Create a closer correlation between the brain and the hand, between theory and practice, expanding education to serve the practical enterprises and affairs of life.”

Today, one such example of exactly that mission is our Research Learning Experiences programs, better known on campus as the RLEs. Since its pilot year in 2021, there are now 152 RLE course sections being offered for nearly 2,000 students across the 91±¬ÁĎ system. I want to be clear that piloting began here at the 91±¬ÁĎ and 91±¬ÁĎ Machias.

These courses feature some very intriguing titles, especially to someone like me, who wishes I could have taken advantage of opportunities like these when I was an undergraduate at that place, that university that we don’t really talk about here too much, but at UNH.

I would 100% have signed up for “Explore the Mysteries of Prime Numbers,” which is to be offered in the fall by Assistant Professor of Mathematics & Statistics Gilbert Moss. I want to thank Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost John Volin for his steadfast commitment to student success, and for the numerous initiatives he has launched to support those efforts.

I also want to express my gratitude to the dozens of administrators, faculty, and staff who’ve worked tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure our students’ success. That’s what we are about, and we need to keep that in mind. It is the success of our students, and the students are indeed succeeding.

For five years leading up to 2023, our fall‑to‑fall retention rate, which is the percentage of first‑year students who returned for their second year, averaged 77%. Think about what that number represents. Those students who didn’t return had invested their time, their effort, their hopes, and yet, for many reasons, their college journey ended too soon. We knew that we had to do better.

As Associate Vice Provost Scott Marzilli put it, “We needed to tap into faculty’s eyes and ears in the classroom to proactively recognize when students were struggling and to step in before it was too late. We took action. We established student success teams, groups of faculty and staff who worked closely with students to provide guidance and encouragement.

We implemented early alert systems identifying students in need of extra support. We became student advocates, making sure that those who needed help had someone in their corner, and it worked. In fall ’23 and Spring ’24, our faculty and staff supported 742 first‑year students with direct involvement from 81 faculty and staff members.

As a result, we increased our retention rate from 77% to 83.4 %.” That deserves applause. That’s great work.

That increase represents real students, many of them who stayed persisted and continued their education instead of needing to walk away. The credit for that success belongs to the students who took advantage of the resources to the faculty who reached out and to the advisors and staff who guided them.

This effort wasn’t just about advising or RLEs, it was about addressing the whole student experience. We made meaningful investments in mental health and wellness support, expanding support through the counseling center.

We strengthened Student Life programming aimed at creating a more connected and engaged campus community. We enhanced the Residence Life curriculum, helping students to feel a sense of belonging both in and out of the classroom. We increased first‑year engagement with the Career Center, helping students see their future beyond 91±¬ÁĎ from day one.

All of those efforts together are changing the trajectory of student success at 91±¬ÁĎ, although there is always more we can do. Most meaningful measure of student success is, well, student success. At 91±¬ÁĎ, we conduct something called the First Destination Survey, which gathers information from recent graduates within six months of their graduation to assess their career progress.

Our results show that our Black Bear graduates are well‑prepared and ready to take on the world. Among the 2023–24 graduates for whom we have data, 94% are either employed, pursuing further education, or volunteering.

Of those employed, 70% are working in fields such as engineering, health care, and education. 24 % are continuing their education mostly in areas related to their majors. Additionally, and this is really important to the state of Maine, 80% of Maine graduates have remained in the state for employment. Twenty-seven percent of out‑of‑state graduates have chosen to start their careers here in Maine. As a state‑funded institution, these are important statistics for us to have.

More than 80% of respondents reported feeling well‑prepared in such areas as critical thinking, problem solving, and adaptability. By fostering student success, we not only prepare our graduates for professional achievement here, or for professional achievement, but also for fulfilling lives and careers long after they leave 91±¬ÁĎ.

I had the good fortune to be with several different student groups in the past weeks. Members of student government at a hockey game. The Mitchell Scholars at the annual President’s Reception. The leaders of multicultural student groups and student employees of the three support centers in Student Life as we discuss the reimagining of ODI, graduate students from different groups, the students at the Scholar‑Athlete Recognition Awards Ceremony, and the Senior Skulls, and more.

A lot of these discussions are emotional and difficult, but in all cases, I heard directly from the students one thing about their experience in 91±¬ÁĎ that was common.

That was consistent messaging that said the following — “We appreciate the mentorship, the guidance, the support, the advice, and the sense of community that we have here. Don’t mess it up. It is special and unique,” and we keep hearing that.

I want to be sure that those of you who are faculty and staff and community members understand that our students appreciate what gets done in this community for them. Opportunities to engage with one another on critical topics are vital to a sense of community.

I want to recognize Dean of Libraries Daisy Singh for the wonderful salon series that she has brought to the campus. It’s worth watching those videos to see what those great conversations are like. Just as in “A Christmas Carol,” and I’m not sure this is working that well, but anyway, where Scrooge is given a glimpse into what could be, we too must look to the future.

Not with fear, but with boldness and determination, and with a sense of a community bringing us the strength and judgment that we’re going to need for that future. We must and have been asking ourselves an essential question. What would the 91±¬ÁĎ look like if we were designing it today?

That’s what it looked like before. If we were designing the place from the ground up today, what would it look like? Of course, our thinking on that question changes by the day because of context around us and changes in the world around us.

It’s an ongoing exercise and I think we’ll be in it for a while. The question at the heart of our strategic re-envisioning initiative, the SRE initiative, is meant to catalyze bold, forward-looking thinking and ideas to ensure that 91±¬ÁĎ remains a leader in education, research, and public service for decades and decades to come.

The SRE process began nearly a year ago when I challenged our university community to think big, to think differently, and to imagine a 91±¬ÁĎ that is not bound by past structures, but shaped by future opportunities. A 91±¬ÁĎ that would be financially sustainable at the same time.

The groups that have been working on this have come up with a working charter that we’re still using as a working charter. I want you to take a look at it because I do think it represents a lot of what we’re trying to be.

91±¬ÁĎ is a learner-centered R1 university, committed to sustaining the health of our planet, and growing inclusive communities, where Maine’s land, sea, and space grant university dedicated to defining tomorrow. That’s there as a source of discussion and conversation.

In the past 10 months we’ve engaged in one of the biggest and most inclusive planning efforts in 91±¬ÁĎ’s history, and that continues into the current months and going forward. More than 180 faculty, staff and students have contributed ideas.

We have formed 14 working groups, each tasked with exploring a critical area of university structure, academic programming, research priorities, and operations. We’ve held open forums, town hall meetings, and strategic discussions to ensure that this process is not just administrative, but that it is collaborative and community driven.

The goal of SRE is not just to improve what already exists, it exists. It is to fundamentally rethink how we deliver education. How we support students, all students, how we conduct research and what our areas of strength can be, how we derive the greatest value from the university’s diverse brainpower, talents, and resources, and how we serve the state of Maine and beyond.

The process is already delivering real results. With the first wave of implementation underway, under the guidance of the SRE implementation groups. Each of these groups has been meeting over the past month or so, and in addition to longer term strategic activities, they are progressing well.

One of the most significant outcomes of SRE is a focus on breaking down silos between academic programs and research centers and institutes. The academic portfolio review and research portfolio review groups are identifying opportunities for more efficient and effective collaboration between colleges and research centers and institutes.

Including, for instance, discussions among the Maine College of Engineering and Computing, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Frontier Institute for Research in Sensor Technologies about new ways of considering collaboration.

The Materials, Manufacturing and Workforce Accelerator Group has proposed the development of graduate and undergraduate certificates in such high demand areas as smart manufacturing to capitalize on industry demand, attract working professionals looking to upskill, increase enrollment and tuition revenue, and create strong partnerships with businesses and government agencies.

These efforts would align with an interest in growing 91±¬ÁĎ’s certificate and microcredential offerings, identified by the Academic Portfolio Group. By aligning academic programs with real world workforce need, we can ensure that 91±¬ÁĎ remains a leader in preparing graduates for high‑impact careers. SRE is also driving the consideration of important structural changes in how the university operates.

The Administrative Business Services Working Group is developing ideas about a hub‑and‑spoke model for finance and accounting functions which would be intended to improve efficiencies, reduce redundancies, and free up resources for strategic investments in student services, faculty support, and other priorities.

One project that stems from SRE is the Marketing and Communication division’s cross‑campus effort to create a more strategic, collaborative, and integrated approach to advancing the university’s communications and marketing needs and initiatives.

The plan fits the SRE goals of adding value and focus to university‑wide efforts while, at the same time, making them more cost‑effective and will be looking at next steps for all of these initiatives.

There’s more to come on the SRE initiative in future town halls and campus communications this semester. I’d like to offer special thanks to Sabrina DeTurk of the Honors College for continuing to lead this critically important effort. Is Sabrina here or watching perhaps? Thank you, Sabrina.

Now let me move on to a related topic, which is the condition and future of our 91±¬ÁĎ and 91±¬ÁĎ Machias campuses. Creating a welcoming and supportive community, one that fosters learners’ success, innovation, inclusion, sense of belonging, and strong partnerships requires careful stewardship of our campus infrastructure.

Today we face a significant challenge. We have nearly — more than, I think — $1 billion in deferred maintenance here, with more than 60% of our academic and research buildings and 79% of our residential buildings being more than 50 years old. These are significant challenges to this university.

We’re working hard to address these conditions using E&G funds and project‑specific donor funds but to do so as prudently as possible. On many parts of our campuses, we are making transformative investments to ensure a modern, thriving campus for generations to come.

With the very generous $170 million grant from the Harold Alfond Foundation and other donors to athletics, we are renovating the Alfond Arena and expanding the Shawn Walsh Center.

The Harold Alfond Foundation and other donors are also supporting facility improvements that include the New Balance track and field and soccer complex and Morse Arena, which is 91±¬ÁĎ’s new basketball and athletics facility.

Like to give some multiple shoutouts to all of our student‑athletes and teams because I know we have a lot of you here and would like to take note of some important recent accomplishments for them that we all can celebrate.

Last month, Myla Schneider was named the America East Women’s Soccer Scholar‑Athlete of the Year. Myla is a biology major with a neuroscience minor and pre‑med concentration. Her GPA is a remarkable 3.975. I don’t know if Myla is here. In any case, congratulations to her.

Thank you. It’s a big deal.

Black Bear student-athletes continued their streak of achieving a cumulative GPA above 3.0, once again. Congratulations. Amy Vachon recently became the winningest women’s basketball coach in 91±¬ÁĎ history, with 168 wins. Her team plays NJIT, New Jersey Institute of Technology, tonight in an American East playoff game here at home in The Pit, which is now Skip Chappelle Court.

Men’s basketball coach Chris Markwood and his team finished the regular season in third place and will be hosting a conference playoff game for the first time for men’s basketball in 30 years. Men’s hockey is having another incredible season, ranked in the top five in the nation. They will host a Hockey East quarterfinal on March 15th.

Given the notable accomplishments here, let’s have another round of applause to support our Black Bear student‑athletes.

Getting back to campus facilities, other projects in the works are the renovations of Boardman Hall and Witter Farm here on the Orono Campus and the Reynolds Center at our 91±¬ÁĎ Machias campus. I am especially intrigued by the robotic milking facility that’s coming in in Witter, which I’m sure President M.C. Fernald could not have imagined.

We are currently in one of the largest periods of new construction for this university in our history, building the facilities and infrastructure that will shape a bright future for students and researchers to come. In 2024, we celebrated the opening of Hotel Ursa, which includes the beautifully restored Coburn Hall and Holmes Hall.

A story on this, briefly. I’m running into alums who are either staying there or visiting or watching that new hotel. I’ve had at least three people that are quite distinguished alums say to me, “I might have accidentally snuck into Coburn Hall one time when it was actually closed. I wasn’t supposed to be in there. We had a party.”

Had no idea that anything like that could have happened here. They are just gorgeous now. A few months ago, we broke ground on the Green Engineering and Materials Building, a 50,000‑square‑foot facility that will house the factory of the future, a hub for cutting‑edge digital manufacturing, materials science and advanced learning spaces.

The GEM Building, as it’s being called, will exemplify our commitment to being a learner‑centered R1 university. It will offer immersive, adaptive learning experiences for students at 91±¬ÁĎ and across the 91±¬ÁĎ system. This is all about preparing for both the present and the future.

We could not be moving in this direction without the continued financial support of the 91±¬ÁĎ system and the 91±¬ÁĎ Foundation’s many generous donors. The Harold Alfond Foundation, Maine’s Governor, the state legislature and taxpayers, our congressional delegation, and other federal policymakers and most certainly the financial generosity of hundreds of faculty members, staff, and campus leaders.

While we are improving the physical plant, we’re also building new academic opportunities for the future. This year, we’ve launched three brand‑new degree programs, a B.S. in criminal justice, a B.S. in computer science and business, and an online engineering doctorate in engineering technology.

These programs join our eight graduate certificate programs and 41 master’s programs. We’ve already welcomed 18 doctoral students. We’ve also added new concentrations in our animal and veterinary sciences program. We now offer a pre‑veterinary bioscience medical microbiology concentration. In special education, we’ve introduced a new Ph.D. concentration.

Our online offerings have grown too. We now have new graduate certificates in advanced library and media specialist, athletic administration, and teacher leadership, as well as additional certificates in classroom‑based, comprehensive literacy practices, comprehensive literacy coaching, and materials sciences and engineering.

On top of that, we’ve approved several exciting new minors, including game and design development, sports communications, sports technology and tourism, and hospitality and outdoor recreation.

I just want for everybody to pause. We don’t get to do a list like that unless our faculty, our department chairs, our heads of schools, our deans, our senate are all doing enormously important work to put this together for us, for our students.

These degrees and concentrations and minors are meant to produce relevant learning opportunities as we continue to be a university that’s focused on fostering learner success. I think we should do a round of applause to all who were involved in building these.

You heard the announcement, but I’m proud to announce that both the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have reaffirmed 91±¬ÁĎ’s status as an R1 university just again this spring. We’re not just an R1 university, we are a learner‑centered R1 where our students have opportunities to be engaged every day in research and scholarship.

Congratulations to all on maintaining this status which turns out to be very important for many reasons. The work we’re doing now…Yeah, we should applaud that.

The work we’re doing now through strategic re‑envisioning, major infrastructure investments, new academic and workforce development programs, rethinking of general education, which I didn’t mention but which is another major project of our senate, is about ensuring that the 91±¬ÁĎ not only endures but thrives through the end of this century and beyond.

That’s our commitment and our responsibility. That’s why we must continue forward together, shaping the 91±¬ÁĎ for tomorrow. Now, so that you get a short break from me, we have another quick video to show.

Daniel Tanaka: I would say Maine is cold but warm. Cold for the temperature, but nice, warm people.

Jamie Fogg: I think that Maine’s special for that. I feel like, really, anyone can find their place here.

We hope to see you around. 

Joan Ferrini-Mundy: Isn’t that great? Let’s applaud that.

It’s part of a series. I urge you to check it out. Congratulations to Marketing & Communications for their extraordinarily good work. They are amazing. Now, having shared our updates and being where we are, I will now return to the topic with which I open these remarks. The unprecedented events of the past seven weeks occurring primarily in Washington DC but affecting all of us.

Since January 20th, there have been significant shifts in federal policies impacting higher education funding, research grants and federal contracts, as well as directives affecting both domestic and international students and faculty.

As I said earlier, we are trying to navigate the situation with carefulness and practicality as best we can here at the 91±¬ÁĎ. We are working with those in the best position to help address our concerns and help us consider the situation. Maine’s elected representatives at the federal and state level, the National Higher Education Organization…

…everyone is working together daily to take a look at what’s happening around us and to help us make wise decisions. Internally, we’ve established several working groups to assess, analyze, and respond to the volume and rapid release of executive orders, policy, directives, and communications from the federal administration.

The working groups include the Federal Action Stakeholder Team. We struggled with that, but it turns out to be FAST. FAST is one of the groups we have formed, which meets three times a week to review new federal actions, assess their impact and debate and coordinate our responses and actions.

The second team is called the Grants Review Team. It meets daily to analyze communications from federal funding agencies and assess potential implications for the specific research grants and principal investigators on our campus.

There’s also a special ad hoc communications team, which has been formed to plan and manage clear and timely updates for the university community and our external constituencies. We’re working to be sure that we step up the communication appropriately.

Additionally, cabinet members are meeting regularly with their respective teams to evaluate and shape the university’s responses.

This includes reviewing and updating our websites to reflect changing federal guidelines as appropriate, assessing risks associated with terminated or adjusted federal awards and the executive orders that are around them, and analyzing the potential long‑term implications and potential risks for our university as these policies shift.

This is difficult work. There are no clear answers. People are coming to solutions of different types and, at the best that we can, we’re trying to be sure that everybody’s perspectives are heard.

Beyond 91±¬ÁĎ, leaders across the campus, many of whom are in this audience are very actively engaged with their specific disciplinary professional societies to also stay informed and to work together. Faculty and administrators are connecting with counterparts at peer institutions across the country, ensuring that we learn from and align with the best and generally widespread practices.

Those of you who read Inside Higher Education or the Chronicle of Higher Education, which are just packed not only with a lot of factual information, but with commentary from multiple perspectives, what you will find, I believe, is that where 91±¬ÁĎ is in our responses lines up pretty well with where generally, other universities like us are.

I think that’s important to know. This is a moment where we are needing to calibrate constantly, needing to hear from people, and needing to then, in uncertainty, make good decisions or decisions that we hope are good. I’ve met recently with the public land grant university presidents in the northeast to compare strategies.

Our congressional delegation and the governor’s office have been invaluable partners as we advocate for 91±¬ÁĎ and Maine’s best interests at the federal level. I’m particularly grateful to Senator Collins and her staff for persuading the US Department of Commerce and NOAA to work toward a mutually agreeable plan that would restore the Main Sea Grant funding, if all goes well.

Folks, we’re trying really hard to make decisions thoughtfully and deliberately. To hear people and to hear the range of positions that they hold on our decisions, to try to understand the potential consequences of our decisions and do things that are measured, strategic, and well communicated.

We’ll continue hosting meetings with stakeholder groups across the campus. Several have already taken place. For example, early on we met with some of our most heavily funded researchers. I remain always open to requests for additional discussions. I broached this idea earlier today, where’d Michelle go, oh she’s back there helping.

We have the group FAST that is meeting three times a week. I was thinking maybe we do something like have a place in the union where every, sometime, Friday from 1:00 to 2:00, there is a member or two of FAST just there, having coffee, available to chat as needed.

I’m not sure if we can pull that off, but open to ideas like that because sometimes this information is moving very quickly, and sometimes it’s being communicated in more particular areas. I really appreciate all that everyone is doing to help us navigate at this moment.

We encourage everybody to stay informed through the 91±¬ÁĎ System Federal Transition Updates website. This is really quite good. It shows pretty much everything that’s happening every day. There’s a link to our 91±¬ÁĎ site as well.

I want to thank two individuals from the System office, in case they’re watching, whose expertise and dedication continue to guide us daily, multiple times daily, through these complex and uncertain times. Amon Purinton from the Office of General Counsel, and Samantha Warren, the Systems Director of Government and Community Relations.

Even if they’re not here, which I don’t think they are, we should give them a round of applause. They are amazing.

An additional special thank you to Jake Ward, our Vice President of SPIRE, for his extraordinary leadership, proactive coordination, and real time problem solving during this period. His ability to synthesize information, anticipate challenges, and develop strategic responses has really been invaluable. I think I’d like to be sure we thank Jake as well.

Now a few brief words about tomorrow, or at least the near term tomorrow, like not actually tomorrow. Main Impact Week is coming up April 7th through 11th. I urge you to check out the new Gratitude Project that has been announced as part of that.

I don’t know how many of you have seen it, but it’s a lovely idea coming from the Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School’s offices to signal our gratitude to one another. I can announce today that our undergraduate commencement speaker will be the recently retired Vice President for Student Life and Inclusive Excellence and Dean of Students, Robert Q. Dana. That’s good news.

We will present the Presidential Teaching Excellence Awards to Melissa Maginnis, Associate Professor of Microbiology at the 91±¬ÁĎ, and to Gayle Krause, Professor of Marine Ecology at the 91±¬ÁĎ Machias campus. Applause for that.

We will present the Presidential Public Engagement Achievement Award to Ryder Scott, who is statewide director for 4‑H, also at that same ceremony. That’s good.

Is Ryder here? There he is. Now, you may be thinking, “Well, there are other awards, and why aren’t those announced?” Well, committees are still working. Stay tuned. There’s no problem here. I just knew we had these already, so we could announce them. More to come.

Our extraordinarily distinguished and very humble researcher, Dr. George Denton, will receive an honorary degree at commencement. More to come around commencement. I’d like to give special thanks to Michelle Rogers, to John Diamond, and all of the MarCom team, and to everybody else who helped with this talk.

There was a lot of time spent trying to decide what to say, and what not to say, and how to get there. I just really want to appreciate that publicly for all of you, and so let’s give a thanks to everybody who’s been a part of putting this together.

In closing, I’ll just say this. I’ve covered a lot today. I’ve offered some reflections on our 160‑year history and reaffirmed our core values and mission. I’ve explored the ways that we are innovating, expanding, and modernizing.

I’ve tried to acknowledge our challenges but also to keep an eye on the opportunities before us. All through it, one truth remains clear, the state of the 91±¬ÁĎ in 2025 is strong.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for your patience, your engagement, your commitment to ensuring that we remain strong, adaptive, resilient, and kind, caring, and compassionate in the present and well‑prepared for the future. We never end these well, so I’m just going to say that’s the end. Thank you for being here, I’m happy to find time to chat.

I’ll tell you my email. It’s joan.ferrinimundy@maine.edu because we won’t be doing a Q&A session here, but we will be finding opportunities to talk even further with people as you are interested. Send questions, send comments, and at the same time, continue to do the great work that you do and to care about one another. Thank you.

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Transcript

Yeah, go ahead. 

Excellent! 

Everyone hear me?

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the SRE Town Hall. I’m Amanda Klemmer, the Faculty Senate President, and I’m going to start us off with our Land Acknowledgment. 

We recognize that the 91±¬ÁĎ is located on Marsh Island, in the homeland of the Penobscot Nation and the 91±¬ÁĎ at Machias is sited in the homeland of the Passamaquoddy Nation. Both of our universities recognize that these homelands, issues of water and territorial rights and encroachment upon sacred sites are ongoing. Penobscot and Passamaquoddy homelands are connected to the other Wabanaki tribal nations, the Maliseet Mi’kmaq, through kinship, alliances and diplomacy. 91±¬ÁĎ and its regional campus also recognize that the Penobscot, Pasamaquoddy, and other tribal Wabanaki tribal nations, are distinct sovereign legal and political entities with their own powers of self-governance and self-determination. 

So welcome everyone.

We’re going to have a bunch of the folks from the SRE team up here to give a short presentation. And then there’s going to be plenty of time at the end for feedback from the in-person group and the online group. So if you’ll notice on the slides, there’s a QR code, and if you attended our Town Hall a few months ago, it’s very similar. You can scan that QR code to submit anonymous feedback, which I will be monitoring if you’re on Zoom. You could also submit feedback and questions via the Zoom chat, and then we’ll be going back and forth with questions from the audience in person. 

So first up we have President Ferrini-Mundy. 

Morning, everybody. A little more liveliness. You were just fine when you came in. So that’s good. Listen. Thanks to everyone for coming. And I’m assuming we have a group online, too, about how many to check? So 200. Okay, so a lot of interest, a lot of interest today. And that’s fantastic. And I’m so pleased that we’re able to to come together and talk about an extraordinary amount of work and quality of work that’s gone on in the last eight months.

And so I’m going to start with that before I go anyplace else with a thank you to the names that you see on this slide, to Amanda Klemmer, to John Mullen, Kelly Sparks, Sabrina DeTurk and James BeauprĂ©, and dozens of other people, the folks who have been serving as the provost fellows. If you could raise your hands if you’re in the room or on Zoom. I guess there’s a way to do that, too. Thank you. And let’s just applaud this group of people who have been doing, excuse me, incredible work over the last several months.

Just to also add a couple of other reminders. We set out a process in May of 2024. We are now in December. We have essentially done the process that we laid out, even though we admitted all along that there would need to be mid-course corrections, and that we would need to see how it went and adjust. We have gotten to the place where now, what you’re going to hear today will be the results. Some of the results, the high level results of the great work that has gone on, not only with the people we’ve just recognized, but with hundreds across the campus, as well as with tens of ideas that have been coming into this process through a variety of avenues. So this is our university, taking our future into its own hands by saying, we’re going to figure this out as we go ahead.

The goals for today are fairly straightforward. We’re going to review the work that’s been done at a high level. These are opportunities for strategic restructuring, for reinvestment and new investment that will strengthen our position as 91±¬ÁĎ’s flagship learning-centered research university while addressing our budget challenges which are significant. This is not a budget meeting per se, but we’re not going to shy away from the fact that our budget challenges are structural gaps. 

All of those continue for us, and we’re making great progress. But there’s much more to be done. So welcome to this. This is what our focus is for today.

Just very quickly a reminder of the question that has been driving the work all the way from the beginning. What would the 91±¬ÁĎ look like if we were designing it today? What would we change? What would we focus on? How do we ensure a sustainable, inclusive, and dynamic future for this university? For a university that is this state’s land grant university needs to be emphasized regularly. A majority of our funding does come from the State of Maine, and so our our obligations to our State need to be foremost as well. But I remind you that we embarked on the process for a lot of reasons. I’ve written about those and spoken about those, and you can see that in other places the world around us is changing rapidly. We’re approaching our 160th anniversary as a university. We need to watch what the world is doing around us. And maybe most importantly, think about what the students of today and tomorrow want and need from this university and from universities like this one. Because that’s our focus, always is, what we are doing for the learners of today and tomorrow.

In a world where the technology changes have had some stepwise changes in recent years with AI and all of everything else. We discussed repeatedly, world changing around us, higher ed facing enormous challenges. And we can see those headlines every single day. But I’m so proud that we together as a community are doing this work, this hard work together.

I want to acknowledge the anxiety that this work is causing. I’m well aware, and I hear from folks, and I see people, and I know that this is unsettling because it’s changed. It could be big change for some of us it could be change that will be smaller for others. It’s all going to be. Now in what happens with all these ideas that have been generated and where we go next. So I want to thank people for tolerating this kind of difficult tension, and at the same time for really checking those anxieties largely at the door. In these discussions people have been able to set aside their own territorial inclinations, and I have had to work at that, and I know that others have, too, and we all find ourselves saying, well, no, we can’t do that. And then saying, no, it’s an idea it’s going to get its look. We’re going to try to think about what’s best and how we do that. So thank you all for  that.

But in eight months we’ve accomplished a lot. We already have a number of activities and discussions well underway, and I will point to the work of the Space Committee, the Budget Committee in particular, doing very good work as we start to prepare for Fiscal ’26. Clearly it would be ideal if we could kind of have all this work tidily wrapped up and then say, okay, now we’ll start our ’26 budget, or even continue the execution of our ’25 budget. The world is never like that. So as we go into ’26, and there will be town halls coming to look at the ’26 work we will need to do the best we can to keep the basic tenets and whatever we are moving on for SRE at the beginning in light, as we think about the ’26 budget. 

So as a part of this work, we’ve come to what we’re calling a working version of a charter, and that means there’s still plenty of room and space. It hasn’t been been officially locked into anything, but it draws on your conversations over the last many months, as well as some of our starting places. So a learner-centered research one university that is, that phrase by itself has been given much more definition through the work that you’ve been doing in the last several months, committed to sustaining the health of our planet, very broad and very clear about a set of goals, a set of areas that are critical for us, growing inclusive communities. 

We are Maine’s Land, Sea and Space Grant University. And we’re dedicated to defining tomorrow. So there’s a lot there. No short statement can get all the words we’d like to have in it. And so we need to continue to work with this, interpret it and grow it. I’ll just take you back a little bit to where we started different words, but words that are still reflected, and the meaning still reflected, including the guiding principles that we have there on the right, that have guided the discussions very, very consistently, I believe, across this work. 

One more reminder that budgets in ideal settings follow strategy. You have an idea of where you’re headed. You have an idea of what you prioritize, and to the extent possible. Budgets are built with those priorities in mind. So that’s always a principle that is good to strive for. And I think we’re in a great position to continue to move in that direction. With that, I will turn this over to the Provost. And remember, questions and comments can be coming in at any time. 

And that’s why maybe that number includes some people in the room. Is that right? Possibly, anyways, John? 

Good morning, everyone. Great that so many are here in the room and online. This this slide that you see behind me is you’ve all seen it before, and we’ve been talking, you know, in the beginning of the funnel, and how we’re moving down. Well, we have gone through since May, as you know, we started with our Phase 1 over the summer. We hired 13 provost fellows, and then, as work and feedback was coming throughout the summer from the whole campus community, we added a Theme 14 that really looked deeply at administrative roles as well, and they built off the Administrative Barriers Task Force Report.

That was so well done last year that came out, and Kelly will be talking about that shortly.

And so, and the Provost all worked throughout the summer, and, as everyone knows, really in prep for that big campus engagement. As everyone came back to start the fall semester around the beginning of November, we went into this Phase 3, where we’re really starting to distill all those different topics that have come through. And and if we go to the next slide. And so we’re really, this is really finishing Phase 3. And as we move into the next semester, etc, implementation and other aspects will start to come. These are some of the concepts that came through.

And, for instance, this first one, the President has talked throughout this process because a lot of feedback that we’ve had from the not only from the Task Force, but you know, from online comments, etc. There are a lot of SRE adjacent projects, if you will. And one of those was focus on the learner-centered R1, and we’ll get a little bit more specific to that in a little bit. But even that generated its own committee from the innovation, research, academic sides of the house coming together and looking at student success and research learning group was developed. And this really builds off. If you think about. We are. I say this all the time. We’re amazingly unique as an institution where any student in their 1st year can actually get into an authentic research experience. And that’s research with large right creative activities, you know, performing arts, etc. And right now, we have 40% of our incoming class, if we include this coming semester will be participating in a Research Learning Experience, and that continues to grow throughout. But that’s not all we do. I mean, we have capstone projects. We have internships that get really into research and development, etc. And so we’re really looking at, how can we make pathways for students across the 4 years, and then they can plug in at any time. 

So if they didn’t have a chance to do it in the first year or the second year. How can they do it? Moving on? And so out of this group, this task, this committee will be getting a final report, I think, in the next week or so. And part of that work that came through. This is the Vice President for Research, and I, Kody and I will be working. We’re working with the President, and we will be announcing an RFP that is expanding research and learning experiences across the undergraduate curriculum. And it’s taking all those things I just talked about and seeing how we can work together and really advance research learning experiences. 

Really, in the first two years, we’re going to expand those across the four, and we’ll have this RFP. That’ll go out to faculty and appropriate staff that you know. Also do teaching, and that will come. And like, I said shortly and hopefully, by the end of January we’ll have a deadline on those expansion of advancing research learning experiences.

You can see many more examples that came out, you can see, like the provost fellow. Well, not from Athletics. Actually, I mean, originally affiliate with Athletics. But it’s actually the Maine Business School, but the Maine Business School, DLL, others. So Dean Hannah Carter, Dean, executive dean, Jason Harkins, etc, are all working together on collaboratively expanding our summer camp proposal in in collaboration with athletics and others and Maine Bound, and others throughout University. This, you know, the post fell from meta major theme continues to convene this working group considered a climate change. Meta Major, that’s an example. 

I will say. You know, if you haven’t had a chance recently at all to look at the various themes that were, you know, the results of the 14 working groups I highly encourage you to. And so for the Meta Majors. That’s Theme 3. Wonderful, wonderful ideas. I think you should own this. The faculty owns the curriculum you should be diving into that, and you should be connecting with colleagues across the university to actually think about proposing potential Meta majors. There’s a lot of benchmarking data in there. There are a lot of things that could be unique to the 91±¬ÁĎ. So I really encourage all of you to really dive in and own that. 

And I think I’m gonna turn this over. Is that right? Yes, I’m gonna turn it over to you, Kelly. Next slide. Please give me this. 

So, as John mentioned, we had 14 working groups. We have 13 working groups that all launched at the same time, and we had a 14th working group based on the good feedback that came through the process for an administrative efficiencies to oversimplify what the title of that was working group. They’ve recently submitted their report. We will get that information published shortly on the SRE website, but they established really four big themes from the group. 

The group was led by Corey Watson. It was faculty and staff integrated into a team to make some recommendations. So to, I don’t want to oversimplify, we have a lot of things to get through today, so we will publish this, but some really good working concepts that came out of it.

The first was creating a university-wide knowledge management system for administrative and operational functions. The next was creating a robust internal communication function within the Division of Marketing and Communications. So really thinking about how we can maximize the resources. We have to tell our messages externally and internally, was a part of that was a part of that concept as well. Restructuring finance, accounting, purchasing travel. How can we think about some shared services, pools of resources? So that we’re maximizing the people that are doing this? We’re training people. We’re providing them the opportunities to learn. We’re providing access to the information. So how can we look at that across the institution, restructuring, admin-related into pools? 

So I think we all know that we have over the years have fewer administrative support roles across the institution, and they are dispersed across the university, maybe disproportionately, to where we feel some of the workload is happening. So how can we share and leverage those really important resources in potentially different ways? 

And the last is creating a Learner Success Hub. I think this really plays onto what John was talking about with the the learner-centered R1 research. So really, some support or some administrative concepts that may align with the work that he’s doing with the other. Again, we’ll publish this. We’ll get more information out there. I’m not going to go into a lot of the other details today if we can go to the next slide, please. 

So we are in a really big change process here. So this is more. This is kind of your footnote, before we get into the rest of the materials today. I just want to acknowledge that what we’re going to talk about today is going to make all of us a little bit uncomfortable. Not everyone in this room and everyone online is going to hear something today in these presentations that’s going to make us a little bit uncomfortable. It’s going to be changed, maybe to us personally, it could be perceived that way, or to an area that we’re working closely with. So as we go through here, you’re going to see concepts not approved, plans not agreed upon, not finalized. They’re concepts that have been generated again through that funnel. There’s still a decision making process that needs to happen. And you’ll see in some cases there’s two distinctly different concepts around the same area that could have very, very different outcomes. So as we as we receive this information, we want to be, our goal has always been to be very transparent, and bring all of those ideas forth to you. So as we go through it, I just want to acknowledge the unease that we’re going to feel as we go through the information today. 

It’s all potential reminding us. It’s all potential change. We can go to the next slide. So just a quick tying it back to, as the President said, strategy leads, budget follows strategy. So as we start to think through how we could implement some of these ideas. You all know that we have implemented a hiring pause. That’s also uncomfortable. There’s a lot of really important roles that are currently either being recruited for have recently been vacated, that we would like to fill the reason for the hiring pauses. It’s giving us a moment. It truly is a pause, but it gives us a moment, so I’ll just play off of what they said in Theme 14. Perhaps we should have a centralized admin. I’ll speak to finance, because that’s something I can talk to most comfortably. Perhaps we should have some shared support pools for for finance. We have about 15 roles currently posted that are in finance operational functions. Perhaps those are the most important 15 roles that we have in finance across the organization. But if we fill those roles and we decide we need to do some sort of consolidation or restructuring. That’s 15 more roles that we’re talking about changing with. So if we pause, we decide what that long term structure is. We can then build that long term structure without those 15 roles being being filled, and then decide what that long term structure looks like for the institution. What’s the staffing plan that each of our colleges, each of our centers, each of our administrative units need to have. So it really is a pause between now and March to continue the really important work, to build the implementation plan for some of these ideas. So that that’s just just a little, my little caveat. We will try and lift that pause in March, and that’s the time when we really will start doing preliminary budget approvals for FY 26. So that’s how we’re going to link strategy to the budget process for the next year. 

Alright, I am going to turn this over to James now.

Thank you. 

Morning, everybody. Want to quickly note that we’ve had a very busy month in the world of SRE, as we’ve been taking in all the information that have been generated coming out of the Phase 2 working groups. As we began evaluating that work, some of you may have heard there’s been additional sessions, additional work going on. A quick overview of what those have looked like on the 20th of November, brought together about 30 people, split everybody up in about groups of five, and started looking at four of these themes that were moving around our learning and our research aspects for student experiences around a learner-centered R1 institution. Those groups spend about three hours busting through a lot of information, reading a lot of background information for getting to that room and then seeing where these pieces of information, these pieces of data could move forward. There were data sets that were then further pulled together to help inform that team looking to quantify RI and then a contribution margin around the credit hours that are contributed by every department that is teaching in this space. 

We had really good diversity, for across all units of the institution. Represented in that room, which was, I think, the term of the news is a lot of people exhibited bravery in that space, being able to set aside their hats of their homes and being able to put a 91±¬ÁĎ hat on. To start looking at this information in new lights, we took that data and then moved it further. On the 3rd of December we had a 5 hour workshop. Actually it was between this room and a couple of breakout rooms across species where we had another 30 people come together, some of the same, some new folks bringing in for additional perspectives.  And we broke out into three teams and move the work that had been accomplished around, restructuring, eliminating, and reinvesting across a variety of opportunities that we had to see.

How do we further develop these concepts? How do we further develop these ideas, to put them in a place where you can begin considering again a great diversity from all units across campus into that space? And I want to acknowledge these are your colleagues that took part, and yes, there’s more than 30. There’s overlap, but there’s not full overlap, but these are the colleagues across the institution that showed up. That gave up 8 hours during a very busy time of the year, right before Thanksgiving. Always great time to get folks together a couple weeks before finals, getting folks together after Thanksgiving. But we came together, set our hats aside, and put on a human hat to start looking at the data and the outputs that we’ve had to this point in time to see what a re-envisioned institution could look like. 

And I want to note. The output of that work is what we’re going to be diving into next on the next few slides shared by Sabrina. We’re going to share concepts of restructuring, of investment, of growth, opportunities that were proposed on the workshop that happened the 3rd  And this is the fair warning that Kelly noted. These are ideas, these aren’t decisions, these are concepts. They’re areas for us to explore and understand what it means for us as an institution to re-envision ourselves in this light. There’s going to be QR code. It’s covered by the Zoom screen, which is not helpful.  But there’s a QR code. As you see, these opportunities for comments come up. There’s an idea, a concept that comes across. Please share with us your comments, your ideas, your contributions to make that idea better. The concerns and anxieties you have around that idea. That’s how we’re going to be able to build a pathway, to be able to evaluate and understand what these ideas could mean for the institution. And again, remember, they’re for consideration. Again, they’re not decisions  we’re learning. And we’re moving forward into this space. So with that I’ll hand off to Sabrina to walk us through those outputs. 

Okay, so good morning, everybody. I want to acknowledge again that what you’re seeing here is a consolidation of three sets of recommendations or ideas and concepts that came forward. And there are many slides here. So it’s not all on this first one, and I also take ownership for being the person who consolidated these. So to any folks who are in the groups, and may feel that  something wasn’t represented exactly right. Please feel free during the Q&A period, if you want to elaborate on or bring up points that were talked about in your particular group. So I wanted to start with some of the things that were brought forward in terms of potential opportunities for revenue growth within 91±¬ÁĎ.

So a number of folks in groups talked about the need. Really, as we are now, R1  renegotiate; our indirect cost rate; to think about ensuring that it really is in line with our R1 status; looking at opportunities for public private partnerships. The idea that, you know we’re thinking about our space. And we’re trying to figure out what to do with perhaps consolidating space? Are there opportunities for leasing land, leasing buildings, things that might be revenue generating, but also might help with some of our need to to rethink our space use. 

There was a lot of conversation across different groups around, looking at athletics offerings. Not, I want to be be careful to say the conversation wasn’t, “Oh, what can we get rid of?” It was really about what can we continue to do to maximize the revenue potential of of those offerings, and really to think about things like in-state and out-of-state participants, those sorts of things.  This concept has come up in a number of places throughout the SRE process. The idea of instituting differentiated parking rates in some way, shape or form we recognize there’s some collective bargaining issues there that would have to be negotiated. But it has come up more than once. There’s also been a lot of conversation around a need for investment in ORA in order to then  hopefully see revenue growth from that investment. So that came up in terms of process improvement potentially staff technology. There’s a lot of ways that that might take place or move forward. 

You’ve heard data mentioned already, and you’re going to hear it a couple more times. One of the things that we all recognized, I think, as we went through the SRE process, Is that just trying to get data to be able to inform decision making is a little bit more complicated on this campus than it probably needs to be. And so that, brought forward from some of the groups the idea that we might actually be able to increase efficiencies, find new revenue opportunities if we had a better handle on a kind of centralized data set that we could actually all work with in relation to research, innovation, HR, academics, etc.  And then you again heard this earlier, when the Provost was mentioning the potential for maybe a climate change meta major. But just over and over again, throughout this process there has been such enthusiasm about the idea of creating more interdisciplinary options for our students at both undergraduate and graduate levels. And we really do see that as something that has  potential revenue opportunities. 

We also talked, as James mentioned about potential restructurings. And I want to echo Kelly. This is probably the part where we all start to squirm in our seats a little bit and feel a little bit more uncomfortable. Everything I’m putting out here is a concept, not a  done deal. So in terms of administrative restructuring. Some of the things that came up was the concept of looking at marketing and communication functions across the institution, and seeing whether a more centralized approach to at least some of those might yield efficiencies might make them more strategically oriented and frankly effective in terms of the way we’re handling our marketing and communication.  The idea of, and this may be in some ways links back to the public private partnerships, thinking about our externally usable facilities, and how those are managed, and whether it would make sense to have a single unit that is thinking about things like Wells or the CCA. Or other places where external groups have the option to to, you know, rent and be able to use those units. 

The concept of merging, housing operations and residential life. Again, a place where is there opportunity to both improve services for our students, and again, perhaps gain some efficiencies in looking at those two areas that obviously have tremendous synergy actually combined rather than in their current separated format. Again, the concept of moving the registrar under the VP for Enrollment Management.  Similar issues there around, you know, do we have two things that have a lot of need to work together that are currently not co-located. And same issue around sustainability. Should that be located under facilities as a way again, of really leveraging the synergies there.  Academic and research, restructuring ideas across all groups, there was some level of discussion around. Perhaps this is a longer term goal. But thinking about whether there should be a different organization around the Vice President for Research, Vice President for SPIRE, and as the second or, sorry, third bullet point suggests the Dean of the Graduate School so potential. Again, these are concepts of moving the Dean of the Graduate School separate from the VPR. To report to the provost the middle of those two.

The second bullet point is a little bit of thinking about could there be a way of sort of thinking about internal services, and that oversight being located under a VPR role and external services and oversight being located under the VP of SPIRE. So a lot of conversation around there. 

There was conversation around Arts programming, and whether the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences would be an appropriate home to try to again, better consolidate some of that. Some of that links to that previous concept about whether externally usable facilities should be managed slightly differently. And do we separate programming from use of facilities by outside groups, that kind of thing. 

These last two. Again, we know that there are collective bargaining issues here, but there was really a strong sense that it is time to take a look at faculty time, workloads, overloads, online delivery, adjustments, those sorts of things, and that it is, it is at least worth considering. Whether aligning to a single learning management system would again both serve our students better and perhaps provide some efficiencies there.  This one is  a single slide that is meant to cover a really huge concept that was brought up in so many different ways across this process, which is this idea that we could be stronger if we were able to de-silo the university in all kinds of ways. This has administrative impacts. This has impacts across academics, research and innovation. This is just really, again, concepts ideas. These are not out there. As you know, these, whatever it is, three bullets are the only ways that we could thematically organize or de-silo ourselves. But these are some of the possible  sort of organizational structures that that folks have thought about.

There was also some conversation about better integrating research centers within colleges which would be also another version of this kind of thematic, restructuring de-siloing. And I think this is one that really does need further conversation and and vetting, and so on.  This slide is the one that I feel like, maybe I should have asked our folks in Marcom to put an elephant on it, because it really is the elephant in the room slide right? I know we heard at Faculty Senate that there were, you know, folks who were convinced that we were going to come here today and say, these are the programs that we will be closing, you know. Effective X.  We’re not there. That is not what this presentation is about in any way, shape or form. But I think it would be disingenuous to say that there wasn’t conversation about the need to look at our programs, research academic across the board  and think about how effectively are they performing?  We have to think about what performing means for us. It is not just about enrollment. Necessarily, it’s about things like alignment with mission. It’s about things like, can we really still deliver a curriculum that was maybe designed many years ago, and doesn’t necessarily work in the way that we thought it should or wanted it to when it was initially created.  This is something that obviously has to be undertaken in close collaboration with the Deans, with research center directors.  And we really want to emphasize that again across the board, in all of these conversations the overwhelming desire is to avoid retrenchments and to see faculty, redeployed, if necessary. Again, perhaps in more thematically or organized units, that sort of thing, rather than having to eliminate positions.  We talked about the need to look at growth potential before proposing this came up, particularly in relation to graduate programs, but it would certainly apply to undergraduate as well. And then again, thinking about ROI on research centers and initiatives.  And this is one that really probably could start very soon, really asking each major to think about whether  there are redundancies, do a curriculum audit, you know. Are there things that could be done differently to achieve efficiencies and and use our limited resources more effectively?  Again this came up a bit when the provost was speaking as well. But this is another one that was just universal.

Every single group talked about the need to continue to improve on the good work that is already being done around student support and success. This idea of the one stop shop came up over and over again.  The idea of better supporting professional advising within the colleges is something that seems to have a lot of traction.  The two on the bottom are intentionally paired because they represent rather different visions of how this might happen. So obviously many of us were celebrating Robert Dana last night at his retirement celebration that offers perhaps an opportunity to rethink where that position goes. Whether it remains as a VP. You know, kind of a VP for student belonging is something that was suggested through one of the groups.  Or whether it might more appropriately function as a Dean of Students reporting to the Provost, which is another very common model for institutions of our type.  Again, ideas, not decisions. 

Lots of conversation around online programs. And a recognition, I think that this represents a really still  not fully tapped opportunity for 91±¬ÁĎ, in terms of revenue growth and potential. And so there was a lot of conversation around what ways could we modify the administrative structure of our online programs to better capitalize on that potential for growth and to make the course delivery more efficient and seamless. And so on.

There was an interest in looking at cross-campus offerings. There was an interest  interest in revisiting a proposal that came out a year or two ago about potentially trying to to make 91±¬ÁĎ Online the hub for UMS online offerings.  And then a number of other ideas that are currently under evaluation. Some of these we would would maybe tag a sort of SRE adjacent. I’m going to ask Kelly if you would like to speak to, or you want John to speak to some of these, because I think these are some that have come up in different cabinet level areas. 

Thank you, Sabrina.

And you heard a lot about the student success. One stop shop or student success hub. I do want to acknowledge last year that there was an amazing group that came together, a task force that came out of my office a Student Success Hub, very collaborative with student life, etc, and that this is building off of that work. That didn’t just go in the dumpster somewhere and start over. So it’s building off of that. And I just want to make sure that we acknowledge that these are again building off what Sabrina said.

These are ideas that have come forward and that are, you know, being further evaluated, like the PFAS Center of Excellence. You may or may not know. We’ve received quite a bit of funding, both competitively and through congressionally directed spending that’s come in to the university, and it’s across the university from research to extension to ELH to MCEC. And people are really coming together. And there’s all these, I wouldn’t say they’re disparate groups, but we have lots of different things going on. And now it’s like, and we’re getting nationally recognized for this work. And so now it’s like, well, maybe we need to be a little bit more cohesive in this and develop the center of excellence. And so that’s like one of the things that is going on  a lot of data was done throughout this whole process for many, many people.

And I want to recognize, you see, the market scan for academic programs. This is something that we always do, anyway. And anytime, by the way, we do a new propose a new program. We always use the light cast data right, which used to be called burning glass to see what is the potential need down the road, both at the State level, regional, nationally, whenever we do you know, propose a new program as an example.  The market scan academic analysis here. I want to acknowledge Amanda Klemmer, you know. In fact, president, she did a lot of wonderful works, and the record was also part of that. And it’s just very informative, deep a look at a traditional, I’d say, even goes beyond traditional ways of really looking at your overall academic programs, putting them in context, also with research programs, innovation  and bringing all that work together. And so I just want to acknowledge that that’s that’s the kind of work that has been done, and that will help inform as as we move forward on a lot of this work in the coming semester. 

But I also want to recognize that this is at this town hall. You know, this is finishing SRE, right. We’re finishing. We’ve gone through 1, 2, 3. We’ve kept to the calendar that we that we said so. The provost fellows, you know they were compensated, and the SRE leadership with Spring and James through December, and I know we’ve already thanked them, but I really can’t thank them enough.  The nights, the weekends that they really put into this was extraordinary. So we are beginning also the regular fiscal year 26 Budget Bill. Now, you know those that typically will have, you know, do their budget hearings? They will get information of how to develop their budgets. And and we’ll do budget hearings in late January, like we always do  because we we have to follow the Board of Trustees process in that. So that will be going on at the same time. We’ll also be doing SRE. And so some of the information that we have through SRE will help with fiscal year 26 budget. But there’s a lot of things here that, as we all know, are very long term, and so we’ll continue to work on that. And so so there’s, you know, the fiscal year 26 budget will be informed, but it certainly won’t, you know, that won’t wrap SRE up in the sense of having the long term projects that that will continue to be worked on. So while we’re ending SRE today, essentially, you know, as as we move forward, there will be this vetting, decision-making implementation plan and concepts that have come through SRE and will continue to come. I mean the, you know, the comment section is still open. We still look at that continually, and and as we move forward there will be continued communication. 

I’m sure many of you are are tired of hearing you know how anxiety’s grown. This whole process is, and I fully fully appreciate that. I do want to say, you know, through this, because I still hear people saying, “oh, there’s some secret plan.” There’s already a plan. It’s a fate of complete. It’s well, if it is, I have not seen that plan, and I’m sure the you know the president is the same. The thing is, we could have done what West Virginia did. We could have done what what New Hampshire did right, and you know, and and take take a look, see what they did.  But I would say, what we’re doing is much harder, right? It’s it’s much harder, because, you know, some people are feeling like, oh, this is what’s going to happen. We don’t know what’s going to happen right? We’re working together to develop. We can’t be the same university 10 years from now.  Higher Ed is completely changing, right? And we have to do this together. And so I’m not trying to talk down. And please, please don’t take it that way, I just think.

And but I also want to recognize that because we’re going through this really hard work together that you know. In some ways it’s hard right for for many people.  and but I truly believe at the end of the day we will be much stronger. I was talking to the former President of West Virginia University, a provost. Sorry, former provost she was. What?  What’s that? I thought you were announcing that the President she was on faculty at West Virginia for 31 years. I saw her like 3 weeks ago, and you know she she’s very committed to that university. That was her life.  And she’s really incredibly sad because the culture of the university has changed. Right? So I know we’re going through this hard work. But the culture of the 91±¬ÁĎ is strong and something that we all care about. And so I just want to share that, and I’ll turn the next. I’m not sure who I’m turning over to next.  Let’s see if we can.  There we go.  All right. Everyone.

We now have lots of time for discussion, and we’re going to be going back and forth between discussion in the room, some anonymous questions and comments that were submitted online and any that were submitted in the Zoom.

Joe, could you pull up the slide that had the QR code?  Oh, there might be one. The next slide, I think, also has the. There you go. There we go. People can, so we will start with any questions in the room.  It will. 

Hello! This is Justin. I’m the associate Dean from the College of Education and Development. I want to get back to Slide 17 where we’re talking about the de-siloing and looking at the 3 to 6 thematic areas. I’m just curious. What are the specific mechanisms for cost savings that would present themselves in that scenario?

Got it.  So can I say a general? I’m following a question. So thank you. A general comment is this, you know, these are groups that worked right up until earlier this week. The first versions of some of these ideas coming in have what we were calling fast math. You know, some very quick ideas about what kinds of savings there would be. But that wasn’t the charge we don’t know. So I think this question and many, many of the questions that I’m seeing coming through are exactly about. Well, wouldn’t we need to know more to even figure out whether we would want to do this? And I just acknowledge that the answer to that is, yes, these are not fully vetted is some of the language you’ve been seeing. They’re not fully developed.  These are ideas to get us started. And I think, Justin, I don’t know if this is a part of your intention. So if I’m putting words in your mouth. Just tell me I shouldn’t. But there’s a little bit of  a lot of ideas here.  I think the question overarching question has always got to be at some level? Does this move us toward our charter? And what kinds of budget implications would it have? And we have? We just didn’t charge everybody to have the full amount of time to do that. The questions are also giving me a lot of ideas. By the way, about how this next steps piece will be implemented. But I’ll turn back to Amanda and go to what’s next. 

Okay, I’m gonna go to one of the questions from the Zoom  as this hiring freeze goes into effect.  How have you considered employee retainment in your work? We are operating with increasingly less staff and being burdened?  That is the other question  being burdened with other duties as assigned through the reality of our situation and or the local abuse of HR policies. It is difficult for many of us to put what we want into this community and bind to the SRE. Given this environment. That’s the cool one, though.  Let’s let the promo start. But Nicole may be able to speak.  It’s a long let me trick it.  I was reading glasses as this hiring freeze goes into effect. How have you considered employee retainment in your work.  And this is always a consideration. It’s been a consideration, at least in the 4 1/2 year that I’ve been here. And I would, you know, if you look at a lot, you know., look at the faculty development stuff that that’s been done, you know I will say that we have really, really, really tried, under tight resource constraints, understanding that the market of what other universities may be able to pay their faculty and staff  you know, to be able to, you know. Hold on to our faculty and staff. The reality is you know how right now we have 8.9 million dollars in positions out there? And I think, Kelly, what are the number right now? 90. Some positions that are that are 94 positions that come in the last few weeks, you know, requests right? That’s we’ve had to put a pause on right now because of you know, you understand the budget situation.  So we’re doing everything we can behind the scenes and in front and in front as well to be able to retain faculty and staff as well, and part of that is, is looking creatively. And you saw some of this on the slides here. How we can, you know, look at, look at the resources that we have, and there may be, you know, and you can look at yourself. Look at where, where possible, areas that we can actually consolidate? Where are services that we can actually, you know, make more central in certain areas  and so beyond that. And you know it’s interesting.  If we look at some of the faculty retention elements that are done, take a look at empower over 30% of the faculty that have actually participated in power. If you look at the National Center for Faculty Development Diversity Faculty success program, we’re close to 40 faculty members now that have participated in that our North Star Collective has started. And so there’s a lot of work that’s been done in this space. And  you know. So we on, partner hires. We’ve done over 50 partner hires in the last 4 1/2 years, and just as an example. Last year UNC Chapel Hill, with funding from NSF. Did the 1st ever a partner? Scorecard for the 146 R1 Universities, 91±¬ÁĎ ranked number 2. All right, I mean, I’m proud of it. We are right. After University of Delaware has been incredibly strong in this space for about 15-20 years. So you know, we’re doing, we’re doing what we can in this resource, constrained environment to make sure that we retain all of our faculty and staff. So thanks. 

Okay, let’s go to a question in the room. Any other questions in the room.  Thank you. I think this may. Actually, this is Megan Walsh from UMM. I think this may actually be a question as a follow up to the previous question. And  the Provost.

Yes, I’m really excited about all the things that you just said. Great, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about, or someone could talk a little bit more about staff duties, because I know that affects a lot of people’s units, even though I am myself a faculty member. Thank you. 

Thank you for that question, Megan. So, staff duties, I’m going to say something that’s probably unpopular. But we have to stop thinking about, what can we not do? So when we think about not being able to replace every role that’s out there, as we think about restructuring, we have to think about different processes, process improvement. There were some really great recommendations that came this last year for academic administrative efficiencies.  We need to think about some of those things, and implementing tools and solutions to support underwriting it and underwriting the work in a different way. I know that’s hard to say, and individually, no one of us individually can make those changes. So we need to work across silos and across groups to talk about how we do work differently, how we share information differently, and that’s going to take.  That’s going to take some some months here and some some process improvement that we do together. We, if I mean, if we continue to try and do exactly the same work with fewer resources, it’s a burden on every every staff member across the organization. We can’t do it. We can’t ask our people to do more with less. That’s not going to get us to the future vision. So it means we need to do different work and do with different outcomes.  And so, you know I can, I can talk to the work that I’ve been doing with my team. Happy to to share some of those experiences. But it really is about change. 

Oh, yeah.

So my name is Laurie. I work for student life. I just personally want to say that I do, I am in full agreement that we need to revamp and reorganize and do some things differently here, and grow a few times. My concern is that I we haven’t talked a lot about students in this that just hasn’t been something, and I know that students are on the mind of everyone, and that there is care and concern. But in order for us to have belonging and engagement and retention, our students need to be happy.  And we have growing mental health concerns.  And our students. And I think about, for example, the res life and housing that makes a lot of sense to merge those. A lot of campuses do that. However, the biggest part of that merger that concerns me is that we need to go and check on our campus on our students every day. They’re sometimes not doing. Some of them are thriving and amazing and doing really well. But some are just not  so I know that the care and concern students is being, you know, thought of in this process, but in terms of the staff who go out in the middle of the night and go and check on those students that you know. I think that that just needs to kind of also be in the forefront of our minds.

I absolutely agree. And it’s beyond, I’m just going to expand upon that. It’s beyond the student life that are going. It’s also the our plumbing team. Who’s going in to make sure that the bathrooms are working in the middle of the night. It’s our electrical team that’s going out there and  getting the power back on, so that our residence halls have lights. So there, there are many, many staff and employees across the organization that are making sure that the campus is operating 24 hours day for our students, and I also want to acknowledge that it’s staff and faculty well-being as well. It’s if our, if we’re not in a good  place emotionally to support our students, we can’t be there in the way that they need us to be there. So I think it’s about well-being for all of our employees, which means we got to change and do less work. 

I saw another hand of the room go up the same time as Megan’s.  So we’ll do that. And then I have a theme of online questions, I think can be addressed.

So so I guess one of the things I hear we hear a lot is this concept of ROI? And the question I have is, What is  the return? I guess? What is the quantifiable thing we hear our I often think of money right? But I guess as a university I think we’re not only interested in money, and so the question is, is, what are the other things that are trying to be, I guess, somehow quantified. I guess if you’re going to use this terminology that are the returns they’re looking for as a university. 

Great question. And that was actually the theme of a bunch of the online questions that I’m seeing is talking more about the data, the return on investment in the monetary versus other values that we have as a university.  Yeah. So I just told her. I’m going to call on her because in the very 1st of the various group meetings that we held following the work of the summer, there was a big discussion about how to talk about, not necessarily, ROI, but I think that’s really what it was about in more qualitative ways, which was the 1st way that I was seeing out of this process a very, very important idea that we lose sight of.  Which is, there’s a whole lot more to ROI than are our books balancing? Or are we generating enough student credit hours? Even if we’re are we retaining enough students? Are we admitting enough students? All of those are a part of ROI. But there’s a huge qualitative, and possibly quite subjective component to ROI that has to do with  morale on campus that has to do with interest in coming up with new ideas, ability to conduct one’s research, and one’s teaching with all of the tools that are needed to do that. Well, those things are much harder to quantify. But I would like to turn to Amanda to ask her how there’s been a little bit of an effort to do that, but also to hear more directly from people working in the groups about how important it was to talk about this.

So not probably the clean answer you would like, because this is not all going to be quantifiable.  But I’m certainly persuaded that we better have a way to think about how it works.  I’m sorry I wouldn’t expect it to be quantifiable. I think it’s a very challenging thing to do is to actually sit there and think about it as a university, and how you affect people, how you affect society, and how you affect essentially the future.  I will also just want to underscore. Lori’s comment at the center are our students. And so how we affect them and their futures is pretty central to Amanda. Anything you want to add. 

Yeah, I will just add. So I was in charge of Theme 2, which was the Academic Portfolio Review metrics. And I see a lot of people from that theme in this room.  And so I’ve been a part of the data for a long time, and from the beginning our group always discussed, not only using numbers, but using our core values as a university. But, like you said, it is really hard to quantify. So the way we’ve moved forward so far with the data, and Sydney Record helped me with this over the last month is for both.  I would say, our teaching spaces. So colleges, units, programs, etc. And then also our research and innovation spaces. We have been looking at a whole bunch of metrics altogether, holistically, to really see which units are.  you know which units are  being successful in some of the metrics are in our less successful in other metrics, consistently, and a word that a lot of the group members have been using is directional data. So we’re not trying to call out a particular program saying, you have low enrollment. You’re on the chopping block. It’s more. Let’s look at all these programs holistically, using the data we have and then have that discussion about our ideals and what it means in terms of moving forward with those programs.  So that is the steps that we’ve taken so far. And I think that’s why you don’t see any programs listed on the slides today, even though I think everyone is ready for that. What I’ve heard from being faculty Senate President is, everyone just wants to see the data and wants to know if their program is towards the bottom of that list.  And hopefully, we’ll be able to get that data out soon to those who need it to help make decisions. But really, it’s now using that data to inform how we make those decisions as a campus, including the faculty and department chairs. 

I forgot that I’m moderated. While I look through the online questions, is there another question from the room?  This is a packed room. There are people on the floor.  I know you’re all interested.  Okay.  So a few. I saw a few comments. In the chat, both on the QR code form. And then also in the Zoom about how maintaining R1 status and focusing on Ph.D. production is being thought of in as a part of this SRE and how it’s gonna affect our campus. 

So, in my view, this concept of a learner-focused R1 which has come up through these discussions is maybe one of the most important ideas we’ve got to flesh out and give meaning to. It’s easy to say it right. It sounds good.  but we do not have anywhere close to the depth of conversation yet done here, that it would take to actually make that a reality. I think we have huge progress through the work with RLEs and other related kinds of research experience programs for undergraduates. I’ve been having conversations with the Deans. I’ve been having conversations with the research and center directors, the university level groups.  I do think there’s commitment to the general concept of using the fact that we are a strong research university and the fact that we are a strong teaching university, and we’re the only university in the State that has both of those characteristics in place at the same time that has to be built into mechanisms really, that are for the advantage of our students, because we’re the only place that can offer that? Have we figured out how to do that? Do we have the right number of research centers? Are people’s teaching loads too high? Do we have so many programs that the teaching loads have gotten to a point where we’re not able to to conduct the research and scholarly work across the whole university, that people would like to be doing or coming here to do our facilities. There is a very long list of problems around  research and around teaching, including what would it look like to put them together? So for me if I had to say today what I think is maybe going to need the most work and the most immediate work it would be that idea giving shape to that idea, coming up with ideas to help advance it without continuing to make.

I’m seeing the comments people concerned about heavy workloads, I agree. But if there’s a way to integrate for some people, and this won’t be for everybody.  Integrate one’s research with one’s teaching, and we have a number of faculty on this campus who do that extraordinarily well. If there’s a way to do more of that the hope would be that we can be more effective and more productive in both areas.  I don’t have more to say on it. I’m seeing the questions, too, about well, what about the centers? There hasn’t been much talk about the centers. There’s quite a lot of talk about the centers I know in some of the more extensive notes, and that has to be on the table as a discussion item, too. So I think what I’m asking for is if people are interested in trying to give more shape to this concept of a learner-focused R1. It will be very helpful if you can let us know, because there will need to be just more concrete work on what that takes.  So I have seen a few comments online  about how we have mentioned that we were going to be talking about specifics in this presentation to a few groups, and that they don’t feel like the specifics that they wanted or considered or communicated to the campus.  So I don’t know if anyone wants to comment on that. 

Sure, folks, we’ve been on an incredibly fast train to get to here. And John was, John was pretty direct. Right? He said, SRE is done.  I haven’t thought about that quite that way, but thank you for a concept. You know it is the re-envisioning which, by the way, at least for many of us, is part of our part job all the time looking toward, how are we doing? Where are we going? But this campus-wide, inclusive effort, I think what I would say is this. This particular part of the work  is largely in a place where we’re going to pause with that work and move to a different version. And maybe it’s SRE implementation. Or maybe it’s  SRE continued, evaluation and enactment. To be completely honest with you.  There isn’t a real plan for what that looks like. We’re just seeing, I’m just seeing this material this week in the last couple of days, and needed to get a feel for how deep and how broad and all of the questions. Many of the questions coming in are exactly the next questions like, Well, wait a minute. Would this really save money? Wait a minute. Is this going to be workable? Given everybody’s heavy workload already? How would we even go about doing that? So I’m eager to sift through these questions with my colleagues in the Cabinet, and others who are interested in helping putting in place some kind of an implementation  structure  which will have a coordinator which will have representatives who might be interested in helping to think. And it’s going to involve a lot of different pieces, right? We’ve got standing committees on this campus that can take up some of this work. We don’t need to make a new group to take a look at the many space related suggestions coming in. So some of this will just go right back out to committees that we already have to ask them very specific questions. What could you do in 26.  What do you really think is a long term? What kinds of savings would this give us? Or how is this going to be a real gem in advancing what we claim to be our charter. Those questions will all have to get written down, invented, shipped off to the groups that are ready to take them up. New groups will need to be made if somehow we don’t have in place the correct group to do it. And that’s about as far as I am with this envisioning, I am hearing enough concern about communication. That and the people. Michelle will be nervous with this. I think a quick weekly update from me is something we’re going to have to try  right? And it may not have a lot every week. But I will try to commit to that. So that you’re aware of what’s happening. You know. Cabinet discussed this one this week, or to the extent possible, I think, to keep people aware of where we’re going. I will say that in Senate yesterday we had questions about this sort of academic program, review and consideration. That’s an ongoing process, anyway, that the Provost office leads.  And interest in having the data that we have which is going to be a great directional starting point. I would imagine that there would be conversations among deans and department chairs and heads of schools to start to talk about that, because it’s just coming up from every direction. The trick, I think with that is, how do we do that? And at the same time have an eye on the meta majors and new ideas and new programs that might cut across. And frankly, what we may want to collectively decide. We need to stop doing to make room for something new. But that’s work that is faculty work. So we’ll have to figure out a way to build that into ongoing process, I guess. Issue no, yes, in the room. Sorry.  But  understanding that the directional data will be flowing probably to the Deans, and the directional data will find its way to the department chairs and directors and heads of units.  I

guess I mentioned this at Senate yesterday meeting. I’m still interested in what the consistent process  for that review of looking at that data. So it’s not each unit doing their own independent review of it. But is there a process that will guide us? And I’m not talking about the restructuring process that we know as part of the sentence. I’m talking about the process that leads to that.  And I just I look forward to seeing. Or if there’s a committee kind of developing those guidelines, I think that’s really important. And can I take that question a step further? I think that we need to ensure that there is that process so that it is happening equitably across all units across the university, because, you know, there is the instinct of some people to be guarded and be like, okay. Well, even though my data may not look good, I’m not going to make any changes. And so it needs to be equitable and make sure everyone is actually really going through that process  would be part of that process. So it’s a great question. And the President touched on it. And you did as well. The data that has been gathered is directional data, right? It’s not something that you’re going to put in a peer reviewed manuscript, and you know, etc. People are going to look at the data, and they’re going to quibble at this quibble about that.  Absolutely. It’s directional data, right? And it gives an idea and part of the process of how we, you know, move forward with that is exactly meeting with the Senate, Zack, yesterday, you know, continuing to have these conversations, and you know that will become flushed out more, as you know, in the coming weeks, you know. Maybe some people might not be here for the next few weeks, perhaps after finals. But but you know, in the next month or 2, you know, that process will become more clarified  as we work together. You know there’s again, there’s not a like, this is what we’re doing.  You know, there’s a lot of data there, and many people in this room have looked at it, and many people have worked and analyzed it. And but that’s going to continue to be refined. 

Good afternoon. This is Adam Nagar from the sole force resources and also the ecology environmental sciences program.  I have a question a little bit about. There’s a hiring pause. There’s some other things, or you know, we’re obviously saying, try not to do more with less or whatever, but from a sort of short term strategy, it sounds like we’re still in a wait and see perspective. So as we as administrators in our own units and programs are trying to think about how to keep the lights on. Have staff morale still, you know, as high as it possibly can be.  What should we be thinking in terms of short term strategy. I’ve worked a lot with colleagues across the college on trying to come up with  sort of resourceful ways to, you know, fit slots that now maybe are on pause or come up with different ways, that we could have teaching across units. And all these things that we’re trying to get really creative. But it sounds like we’re in a kind of a still waiting hold.  The economist had me. It says there’s opportunity costs. And all this effort that we’re putting into thinking about stuff that might be creative. But maybe in 4 months might not fall within whatever emerges. So I’m just curious on insight on what we should be thinking about strategically short term, as we’re really just trying to focus on keeping things moving. Thank you.  Sorry. 

So the Provost may want to say more, Adam. But thank you. The list you gave is the 1st list. It’s the right list. I think that’s happening in many, many places, maybe not every place. So that’s the place to begin, I think, to recognize that  that department department chairs, chairs of schools, and so forth, are going to need to be collectively talking, not only within their college, but across colleges, increasingly and to some extent, and with centers as well, and some of that already happens.  I think it might be important to really take up this question of looking at your programs. And that’s not a fix it for tomorrow question, but I could anticipate that. There’s enough interest and momentum in that, that we’re going to see some need to do that and think about what possible savings there may be the other thing. And I’m hesitant to say this when I’m reading all these comments and being mindful of what I’m saying. But  in our own office 1-1 thing that I need us to do, and probably everybody does, is to just look at what we’re doing right now, right now, today, with the staff that we’ve got or the staff that we  used to have, and we don’t now have and say, what can we actually stop? Are there things we can stop doing? I’m not talking about  at this moment, because our schedule is set for courses for the next. But are there things that are just really nice to do that we just can’t do right now? And that’s painful and difficult and hard for so many of us to imagine. I think we want to be mindful of not choosing to stop things that directly benefit and are important for students. But there are some other things we do. And we might have to just collectively agree that that’s  part of what we’re doing.  And that started from the College of Education and Human development.  What you just said? Maybe think about like, what constraints are we bumping up against in this SRE process and in our budget process that is connected to how the system is managed.  And you know, like what? I guess it’s a two great questions like, what what are those constraints and like, how do like? How might we need those constraints a little bit better? And then how might we better advocate for ourselves? In in the in this system. Ecology? I think that’s a great question Esther and there are. There are  friends of that through much of the material that I’ve been looking at in the last few weeks. I think we need to, and some of it, by the way, I think, is in the administrative barriers report as well. I think we need to do exactly what you said. We’ve got to name what that is, and be very concrete about how, whatever that it is, is affecting us  always with an eye on students. I think that piece is most critical. But then, and I’m perfectly positioned to actually and do believe it or not, actually advocate for things that need to be different for the 91±¬ÁĎ, just because of who we are, what we are.  I think we need help in actually putting forward the proposals, the solutions, as everybody knows, it doesn’t work well to go to your higher ups and say, here’s here’s a problem. It goes really better when you say I’ve got a solution. It might not be great. But here’s a proposal.  So I’m very ready and interested in that. And I’ve said that to Cabinet, and we can make that a wider conversation as possible to identify the areas where we just need. We need help. We also can go back. And this is never entirely satisfying to people. But there have been changes that have been made because we’ve done exactly that. And so we can do more of it. And you know it’s it’s a reality. We are in a system, and we all knew that. But there’s a lot that’s possible  giving this back to Amanda.

So I actually might call Kelly up here.  And I’m sure this is a question. A lot of people in the room. And I’m summarizing again a bunch of questions. We have literally hundreds of comments that are coming online. So I’m trying to summarize some of them into broader themes, so we can address them in front of the room, and I think one of the themes that I’m seeing is.  how are some of the restructurings that we’ve seen today on these slides actually going to affect the budget and save us money.  So I’m going to take that sort of an FY 26, and sort of over the next, the next 3 to 5 years. So I think any the bigger decisions, the big strategic reimagining of the university is likely not going to show up in FY 26. So I just want us to to take a step back and acknowledge that if we decide that I don’t know, I can’t think of a good example.  because there were so many. But we decide that VP of Spire and VP of Research should be consolidated with some sort of restructuring of internal and external support.  It’s not going to happen overnight. That’d be something we would work towards, potentially. It’s working towards changes in the underlying support work that they do, and then moving towards that. That might be something that happens in FY 27 FY 28. So we need to think multiple years in terms of kind of our structure or the structural financial situation. Now, there are ones that I think can happen in FY, so the space, the space recommendations around, can we take buildings offline, use less energy, use less maintenance? Absolutely. There’s more of that. We can build into the FY 26 budget. So we’re looking at some targeting. We’re doing some analysis that  facilities team has done some great work around specific buildings around specific costs for those buildings. And how can we take those out of the overall budget going into FY 26. To free up dollars to be allocated to more important activities.  I think I’ll go back to the hiring pause. I think that is going to enable us to consider some of the staff restructuring potentially, that will enable us to consider some changes in the facilities, auxiliaries, other areas that are already underway. So I think the answer is, some of it will come in FY 26.  Some of it will come in FY 27. As plans begin to be further developed in the implementation and conceptualization stage. And some of these ideas aren’t ever going to make it to a budget because they may get ruled out because we decide they don’t make sense for some of those. There isn’t a financial ROI, or there isn’t a qualitative improvement for the institution that takes us back to our mission.  So the answer is, the budget is a slightly parallel process, and we have a number of ideas that are going to take us to. I want to go back to what we agreed with the Board of Trustees 2 years ago now is that it was a 3 year plan to get us to a balanced budget. So this year we do not plan to balance the budget. We plan to use strategic reserves in the amount of about 4.8 million in FY 25.  Next year, we continue. We will continue to use some of our reserves, and we’re not planning towards balance either. So we’re planning to use 2.1 million in FY 26 of our reserves with a plan to be balanced in FY 27. So we’ve laid this out. The financial plan to support the enabling work to happen for that strategic vision to be put in place before we build it all into the financials.  So I’m happy to answer more specific. If there’s a specific question that you had around that.

But I think that leaves out. Kelly was about how things like interdisciplinary majors and Meta Majors would actually save the university money.  There’s 30 different ways that that could be conceptualized. Right? So I will. Yesterday, with Faculty Senate Executive Committee, I used an example that from my past life. So in a previous institution there was a reconceptualization of the art programs and it was taking a look. There was a BFA in Fine Arts. There was a BA in Arts, and I think it was in painting and drawing. And then there was a graphic design program. The faculty came together, and through a curriculum review said, Gosh, our enrollment’s not super strong. Across these 3 areas they elected to move out of the BA in arts to move out of the graphic design and to move into keeping the BFA in Fine Arts and doing an arts, media and technology total enrollment in the 3 programs when they started was 8.  It had declined significantly over time. The 1st year after implementation they had 24 students enrolled in the arts media technology in the BFA program. So it was a very intentionally looking at what student interest was.  And it was looking at what faculty, what core competencies, what teaching, what facilities they had on the campus and doing that. So that was one where it really was actually around enrollment growth. So it was a growth opportunity, and they did it around the retirement of one faculty and changing the discipline from a painting faculty member into rehiring a faculty member, but who had more of a digital arts background.  So that that’s 1 example.  I’ve also seen it. Where you teach out a program. We decide, you know what we’re going to teach out that program at the time of a series of retirements. So you, laying out that plan in collaboration with faculty through a faculty retirement incentive. So there’s multiple ways. I don’t think there’s any one answer. I think the 1st question is, what’s the right academic portfolio as the Provost the Deans and Academic leaders look at. And  then we talk about how might we get towards an implementation plan that supports the right academic portfolio vision? It can’t start with we’re looking to achieve this dollar amount, and we’re going to force force it to that. It’s what’s the portfolio we want to offer to drive, to meet our student demand to meet the needs for employment in the State of Maine, to prepare our students to go on to graduate school. Whatever  future opportunity is. But it needs to start with that portfolio question and not with what’s what’s the financial answer?  Thank you, Kelly.

Any questions in the room  I was counting in my head.  So another theme that’s come up in a few questions. Online is including other groups other than faculty in these decisions and implementation. And so there were quite a few comments about students and student groups which we also had one in the room. And then there were also comments about Staff and the staff unions being involved. So I don’t know if someone wants to address this.  I also want to go back just a little bit to that last question.  And this is a time to be thinking about. You know the siloing right? We need to be thinking about, Kelly addressed the academic side. But we have to be looking at the research, innovation, academics all coming together instead of looking at just our unit.  I encourage everyone to look beyond your unit. And so, Adam, I don’t know where you are if you’re somewhere, there’s Adam. Yeah, I mean, that’s exactly right. But things that you talked about are spot on of how you have to address that. There’s universities. When I was the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the early nineties, they went on a hiring freeze for a number of years.  They didn’t stop being an amazing university, right? And so. But they’re doing a little bit what you kind of referred to Adam. Really kind of thinking outside the box, I’ve had someone say to me, I can’t think outside the box. Well, this is the time, you know, to think about it beyond, you know, the silos. So I really encourage you to do that. What was the last question? Now that  that you just asked it was about students and staff, and how they will be involved in the process from here for yeah, I think we were admittedly a little slow on getting the students involved. Students are involved now, and they have been involved. Staff have been with faculty the whole time, you know, since these themes began working.  and this has open process as possible, because not only do you have the 14 themes, and then the two big groups that you just saw lately, you know, in phase 3. But there’s all these adjacent groups, and so faculty and Staff will, you know, have been very much engaged throughout this process  just on on themes themselves. There was over 175 and staff that were, you know, you know, directly involved in those and many many more sense.  We will continue that kind of work. It’s not going to go into this little cloister and figure this out. No, we’ll continue to try to get as involved as possible. And for the most part, when that list of names that you saw up there that included students that James put up earlier, only one person didn’t accept that invitation, and that was a student who had classes  and couldn’t make it so. All I can say is, we are going to continue to commit to this being an open process and trying to involve, and it’ll grow. Now, I mean the Board of Visitors have been brought in. Certainly the board of trustees know what’s going on, and other external stakeholders. Advisory groups have been discussed throughout this process at college level and larger levels.  etc. And so that that is something that will continue to be part of the whole process.

Can I just add one thing, yeah, please.  So I want to acknowledge Amanda’s comment around the bargaining units as well. I want to give just a quick example, so I’ll use campus beautification. That was one of the themes that came out. There were some really great concepts. So yesterday we had the opportunity to meet with the Teensters and have a very early started off on one topic, but ended off on the beautification concept  and part of it may be changing some of our position descriptions so that we can do different types of work as it relates to grounds and the labor associated with that to be more effective in the allocation of that. And that’s starting to change some of the position descriptions in collaboration with the teamsters. So we talked about a number of different new positions that might be specific to allow us for  a facilities restructuring to do different types of work around electrical high voltage. We talked about grounds, Cdl drivers and  and laborers for summer related landscaping work. So I think that’s a really good example of the type of work. Absolutely. Our bargaining units are essential. Our employees and all of our labor unions are essential to the operations of the university. So as we start to get through and start to think through some of the specific examples, we need to work in collaboration with our labor relations, teams, human resources.  and our bargaining teams to help us. You’re a part of the solution in coming up with how we improve or implement these. So a lot more will be coming in the in the coming months related to that. 

Coming back to the room, we have approximately 2 min left.  Okay?  So I just got a few questions towards the very end. And I think it’s a great way to wrap up this town hall.  So. And I really like this one question. So I’m gonna read it specifically. But then the others are kind of around the same theme says, the SRE is over. But this presentation makes it clear. The need for diverse and creative ideas is still urgent. How can we continue to provide these bottom up ideas?  And then there were a few other comments about how we remain. Keep this open process going forward is the SRE over? Is it ongoing? So basically, what are the next steps. And how can we continue to provide those good ideas?  So first, I want to say, I’m appreciative of the questions, particularly that last set, because I take it as a signal of continued interest  in some level of engagement, and so we will keep that open. I think what I’d like to do, based on this event, which has been extraordinarily helpful in not only generating questions, but demonstrating clearly where there are concerns, and with a number of suggestions, so all of that will get evaluated and looked at by me personally as well as anybody else who wants to help. I think what we need to have is some sort of maybe.  really, I am making this up on the spot. So if you have a better plan, tell me what it is. I don’t like to be in the position of making things up on the spot, but maybe a sort of SRE implementation or next steps council small group it feels to me like one piece will be keeping the idea generation part going.  But maybe expanding that a little to say, Okay, here’s your idea. Generation place. You can go do that and keep bringing ideas, because there are probably a dozen ideas today that I think we need to pay serious attention to that aren’t exactly on the table yet. So we have to go back and look at those. Keep the ideas coming. But maybe that gets expanded out, and I’m looking to  James a little bit and others to be a website on progress. Okay, so here are some ideas that we’re actually really grappling with right now, to the extent we can talk about that in that kind of a public forum.  What do you think? Here are some more questions that we have. Do you have more questions some way to keep people engaged if they wish to be, and we have to balance how much of that is done by a group, and how much of that is open to the world. And I’m eager for your input on that question, which is.  how can we? Your ideas about how we can keep it open. But I’m inclined to say we need a group, and I think it needs to be small with something like a strategic re-envisioning coordinator, together with a couple of representatives from each of the many, many areas that are critical to this students, staff  faculty administrators, some external supporters and constituents. Possibly system people I don’t know to be figured out, but I think a group like that will need to meet right around the beginning of the semester  to say, Okay, here’s where we are. Here’s what’s been processed between today and then. And here’s how we would advise going forward. So if we are able to name a group like that fairly soon. Perhaps, if you have interest in being considered to be in such a group, it feels to me like. That’s the next level of group. And that might be a group that largely is  working mainly in their meetings. I don’t know that there’s going to be a lot of in between work for that group, because I do envision us being able to say in a budget committee, this goes to use Senate. This idea goes to you. It’s more like an orchestration of that. That’s the best I’ve got folks for right now, open to your ideas, open to more suggestion. But I would like to conclude by thanking you, as always, appreciate everybody’s directness  and everybody’s good ideas, and this is a work in progress, so it will continue. Thank you very much.

TRANSCRIPT

Moderator:

We’re going to go ahead and move to President Ferrini‑Mundy’s talk, and then we’ll take a break.

Joan Ferrini‑Mundy became president of the 91±¬ÁĎ and its regional campus, the 91±¬ÁĎ at Machias, in July 2018. In 2021, she was also appointed as vice chancellor for research and innovation for the entire 91±¬ÁĎ system, which includes seven campuses across the state of Maine.

In this role, she leads a formalized effort to make 91±¬ÁĎ’s research infrastructure accessible to and supportive of all universities and faculty in the entire system.

Prior to joining the 91±¬ÁĎ and the 91±¬ÁĎ at Machias communities on July 2018, she was also chief operating officer of the National Science Foundation, leading essentially research and development for the United States at the level that she’s bringing here to the state of Maine.

Her distinguished career spans the fields of mathematics education, STEM education and policy, teacher education, and research administration. She has more than 100 publications and has mentored 10 doctoral students.

She’s very passionate about bringing research and education together and very passionate about building new industries based on renewable energy. You’ll hear what she’s trying to do here at the 91±¬ÁĎ.

Her numerous awards and recognitions include the US Senior Executive Service Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive, MSU’s University Distinguished Professorship, election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Mathematical Society, and the Seaman Knapp Award in recognition of her leadership and contributions to food and agricultural sciences.

She also this last year was selected as the Business Leader of the Year for the state of Maine. Please help me welcome President Joan Ferrini‑Mundy.

President Joan Ferrini‑Mundy:

Morning everybody. You can be more enthusiastic. Still early in the day. How are you enjoying Maine and Portland? Great place for a conference. I’m hoping you’re getting to see the city and the state a little bit while you’re here, for those who are not from Maine.

I’m delighted to be able to speak with you for a few minutes this morning.

Talk isn’t queued up.

I need to ask for some help, probably. While we’re doing that, I’m going to tell you what I’d like to talk when we get slides. I can talk about it even if the slides don’t come up, which is this.

We have this remarkable entity within the 91±¬ÁĎ, the Advanced Structures and Composites Center, which is home to the offshore floating wind program that you’re talking about offshore wind, and a variety of other related topics, as you’ll hear today.

There we go. Thank you.

All of that sits within a land, sea, and space grant university. I’m curious. How many of you are based in universities and higher education?

It’s a portion this audience, but certainly not the majority. I hope that, for those of you who are not, this will help broaden your understanding of what a land, sea, and space grant university is, and why an entity like the Advanced Structures and Composites Center, and specifically, the work in floating offshore wind, has been kind of a microcosm.

The 91±¬ÁĎ, by now you may know, we’re located north of here. We were founded in 1865, so coming up on our 160th anniversary. For a university that is this old, there’s a constant challenge in staying modern, staying relevant, staying in a way that can be focused on the future.

I want to talk today a little bit about how having an example like the offshore wind work that goes on at the 91±¬ÁĎ is actually propelling this university forward.

How it is, in some ways, a case study for both how an entity like ASCC can grow and become more diverse, and how a university can grow and take on more of what’s required in a land‑grant mission.

We have many facilities across the state. Here you get a look.

We have a coastal facility. We have the Wind/Wave research lab in ASCC on the campus. We have Witter Farm where we have our agriculture mission that extends and continues for the university. We have site here in Portland that we share across the 91±¬ÁĎ system.

We have forests and farms across the state. We study fisheries. We have a lot of the traditional heritage industry focus. Within that, of course, we have ASCC.

We are a land grant. Told you that remains only our one university, which for those outside of academia, that’s a wonderful rating for us in the Carnegie Classification of universities that signals our intensity and success in research.

We are the state’s only DI athletics program. If you’re hockey fans, keep watching this season. We’re very, very hopeful. We have about 11,000 students, both undergraduates and graduates. We span 81 countries.

Our research expenditures continue to increase and so our herd rankings keep decreasing, which is good. You want to be a lower herd number. That gives you a sense of our diversity.

A very interesting phenomenon, of course, is when you have an entity as big and growing as quickly as ASCC within a university, that requires that we pay a lot of attention to how our land grant mission continues to evolve and how an entity like the ASCC and the Offshore Wind Program can grow it.

We are a land grant, meaning that we are part of the Morrill Act consequences from 1862. This focus on the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts does continue in the modern versions of those domains here at the 91±¬ÁĎ.

In particular, land grants were formed for the democratization of education to enable a wider range of people, particularly the people within a given state who are working to continue to advance the economic growth of that state, even back in 1865, so that they would have a chance to be educated in areas that were important to the university and to the state.

Now we jump to 1996 with the founding with four people of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center to a few facts from today. You’ve probably heard some about this. Again, I’m using this ASCC and the Offshore Wind Work as an example of exemplary growth and modeling within a research university that is a land grant.

You see here some basic facts. This is a big operation, much bigger than anything else within the university. It exceeds the size of some of our academic units in terms of numbers of employees and numbers of students that are engaged. This is a big piece of our university.

You can look to the history of ASCC, which I’m not going to take up in detail. People in the room know that far better than I do. Habib Dagher, Jeff Thaler, Jake Ward are here. They can tell you more.

The focus on offshore wind, to me, is a perfect example of doing what land grants are supposed to do, which is to say, “What are some problems that this state has? How can this university, which has the mission of serving the state, how can this university try to make a difference?”

You see data. Thank you to Habib and team for these slides, but a notion that even in 2006, there was a vision about how important it would be to work on reducing the energy expenses within the state.

A solution emerged through the work of people in ASCC and elsewhere that was going to tap Maine’s offshore wind, the largest untapped energy resource available, and on an alternative route to imported fuels to focus on local production of energy, to create local economic growth, and then to help with all kinds of environmental causes.

The choice of the problem…I come from mathematics, and every now and then…anybody in math person in here? You all have some math. I know that. I can remember colleagues when I was at Michigan State University, we’d be reviewing promotion and tenure cases, and someone would say, “He has good taste in problems.”

That’s actually a thing. That actually matters for academics, particularly in a land grant. The problems that get chosen that can be well supported by the university and by the resources that surround it matter. For a land grant choosing to work on finding solutions to energy crises was a great, great choice.

For those of you affiliated with universities, talking with your administrators, it’s always important to argue that the problem you’re picking fits within the context in which you sit. Oops, didn’t mean to do that.

The history is long. This is detailed, and we can make these slides available if you’d like to see them. The history is important because it shows how a unit within a university can span all of the dimensions that a land grant university needs to span.

A couple of points that I would make here, this development, the Odyssey four offshore wind work at 91±¬ÁĎ spans, I believe, three different governors, many presidents at the university, a variety of faculty, staff, and students because we’re dynamic and people come in and move through, and yet there was a focus and a plan, or at least a plan evolved over time as the context called for it.

That’s important too. I take a lot of lessons from that as a university president for how we make progress in introducing new areas of work within the university. The timeline continues, again, if you care to see more detail. You see alongside on the right, a lot of legislative activity within the state that mattered for this project to work.

Which brings me to the main point of my remarks, which is this, we have 91±¬ÁĎ floating offshore wind activity. In the clouds around the edges here, you see all of the dimensions that that work brings for our university. I can’t tell you how much the university learns from having this entity as a central part of what we do.

In the clouds, you see major commitments that any research university has to have and a few others that we are trying to make distinctive for the 91±¬ÁĎ. Certainly, on the left, research and experimental development that’s what universities are supposed to do, particularly land grants.

When you’re a land grant, if you can be doing that around a topic that’s vitally important for the state, that’s especially important. Interdisciplinarity becomes the coin of the realm today. The very best thinking and ideas we are finding come when we cut across disciplines, cut across areas, and there’s so much of that that happens here in this program.

Statewide outreach is a part of what the university needs to do. Informing policymakers is a major part of what all universities try to do, but R1s and public universities have a big role in that, both at the state and federal level.

Creating corporate partnerships is also who we are as a land grant, devising professional education opportunities for our state so that the economic development of our state can grow.

Then, research‑based learning, which I’ll say more about in the context of offshore floating wind, but more specifically for the university or more generally for the university, this is an area we are working to grow where we can distinguish ourselves by saying all students beginning the day they walk into the university, can participate in some an authentic research‑based learning experience.

By this, we don’t mean that they’re cleaning test tubes. By this, we mean that they are in the field or in a lab or working on designing a new idea and creating a patent as happens in our offshore wind work or engaging in a creative experience in the arts or the humanities, a wide range of opportunities.

I hope you’ll start to hear more about 91±¬ÁĎ being a leader in this. Again, much to learn from what goes on in the offshore wind history here. All of these parts of a university come together as I began to think about this, Habib, around the work of this particular lab.

They come together in other labs and entities at our university too, but this provides quite an extraordinary example. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here because the technical experts in the room will be dismayed at how little technical knowledge I have on this.

Suffice it to say that it’s really important that we have both rather basic work going on as well as experimental development, and that there’s a feedback loop there. On the basic side, we continue, I’m told, in ASCC to work on the use and development of greener concretes.

We’re studying the use of nanocellulose to improve concrete properties. That’s rather basic work, and that has to go on very close to the experimental development that you are hearing more about probably at this meeting where we are testing products and deploying models and scale models and revising as we go.

That cycle is vital in a research university, and 91±¬ÁĎ has that modeled very, very well in this area. The research‑based learning that I mentioned, here is a little bit of a picture of the future for this. The green energy and materials factory of the future initiated through the ASCC will be a research facility that’s focused on revolutionizing manufacturing.

As important as that is, as incredibly useful as that is going to be to the nation and to the state, equally important to me is that it’s being designed as a research learning site where students will come in the door and be able to be a part of the design of the products and materials and new inventions that are coming and try their own smaller experiments.

This is a very interesting experiment where we’re looking at how to design a building that will accommodate the concept of student research from the beginning. This group does much more. They do a K12 windstorm challenge to build a pipeline to engage students early on.

Students have been engaged, particularly PhD students, in the floating call development technology all along the way, and more than 70 of the patents involve student inventors. We are, again, looking closely at ASCC as a microcosm for what this entire university is striving to do and to be a professional education.

Again, people who are in these fields and who are looking for continued growth and development as the fields shift are able to take part in concentrations that we offer at the university and offshore wind and micro‑credentials and the like.

Again, it gives us a way to model how other parts of this university can do this same important work. Corporate partnerships, obviously, a part of what a land grant university needs to do and foster.

We need to be serving the state, and therefore, partnering with entities within the state and beyond that can help to solve the kinds of problems that we’re working on.

It’s not only ASCC working in offshore wind, but other partnerships throughout the university that will support and advance a variety of fields that are central to particularly the offshore wind, but others as well, ranging from supply chain work to building and deployment of facilities and so on.

These partnerships are critical to us, and we learn so much about what’s needed. Again, a way that a land grant university is supposed to be working. We are always in the business, not only around offshore wind but across the entire university and all the fields that we span in the business of informing policymakers with our work.

Many, many examples that we could go into in great detail. You are hearing about some of this. I’d like to pull out and cite, in particular, the main offshore wind research consortium that Governor Mills initiated in 2021, a bipartisan group that is looking to understand local and regional impacts of floating offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine.

There are representatives from the university and the science and engineering communities, as well as the commercial and recreational fisheries, Maine wildlife habitat experts, and many, many other organizations across the state of Maine where the work that’s done not just in the ASCC areas, but in related areas across 91±¬ÁĎ and beyond are a part of this.

Again, we’re able to point to this and as we help others try to come along and build their own labs, their own areas of expertise, this becomes a way to see a path for how the 91±¬ÁĎ can establish this contribution in a variety of areas.

We are very involved, as I’ve already, I think, made the point, in state‑wide outreach solving Maine’s problems, part of the governor’s Maine Won’t Wait climate action plan work, this work bears upon that.

It’s a way to help our newer faculty as well as our students to see that you can make a difference with a research career in a variety of places within policy, within education, within R&D, within the corporate sector, and well beyond. That’s important for a research land grant university.

The work is interdisciplinary. That’s another whole talk on its own that I could do, which I won’t do.

Simply to say that these are a couple of recent grants that show us the nature of the work and also the domains of expertise that are involved because it’s really great for a university when you’ve got an anchor activity that then ties you to other fields and allows for advancement in those other fields in conjunction with it.

There would be others that we could name, many, many other university partners, national labs, other kinds of organizations that are broadening the environmental and interdisciplinary perspectives on this commercial perspectives and therefore give us better solutions. Part of what I’m trying to say here is this, all of these areas, to me, are ideal.

I could have made that slide without knowing anything about ASCC, but I made it after I knew a lot about ASCC because this is a university that I think is striving to continue to be the model of a modern land grant university, a modern land, sea, and space grant university.

We are then drawing on and partnering with the great work of many entities across the university, but particularly, for today, the offshore floating wind work that we have learned about in ASCC to push the rest of the university really to say, what are you all doing about research‑based learning? Here’s a way to do it.

What are you doing about creating means of informing policy? Here are some pathways for doing that. I’m very excited about your conference and the fact that we have this kind of national and international opportunities to collaborate with colleagues.

As I watch the titles of the talks and learn more about what you’re doing here today, I just will share that as a university president. The eye that I have on this is the difference that this kind of work can make for the effectiveness of higher education, particularly public higher education, and wanted to be able to share that angle with you.

I’m very appreciative of your time, and happy to take a couple of questions, if you’d like. Otherwise, to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.

Moderator:

How many of you think you need people to do this work?

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

They’re afraid to raise their hand because they think they might have to get a microphone to ask a question, so this is question free. I am interested in this. For how many of you is the development of the workforce a primary concern?

Right. We’re a place that is figuring out how to do that and wants to continue to figure out how to that even better in partnership. Yes, you have a question?

Audience Member:

Thank you for your presentation. One of the concerns I heard of universities taking on the development of floating offshore wind, was being able to partner effectively with a broad range of industry necessary to bring it.

I know that, years ago when the award was first won by [indecipherable] , there was a concern about getting together with a company that could actually build a foundation, and then, those who could do the permitting, all of the things required to pull off a scale demonstration like this.

I’m wondering if you have a perspective on the challenges that that faced? Where it worked and where it didn’t, where you could do better. Is this an example for other universities to follow?

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

Thank you for the question. There will be others in the room who may wish to comment too. What I would say is, I arrived about six years ago, and so, it was well along its way at that time.

I think, for universities to recognize that this is going to take them into territory that isn’t necessarily their mainstream work, we actually have a vice president for strategic partnerships innovation, resources, and the economy. Is that right? No. [laughs] Close enough. Jake Ward.

We’ve grown that unit to be able to provide the support for all of the things you mentioned, the contracting that’s needed, the permitting, all of the legal dimensions that are a part of this.

That’s been a bit new for this university to have that extensive engagement in those domains, but it is the way of the future, at least for our university, not only in this area but beyond. There are lots of lessons to be learned that I’m sure Habib and others could share with you.

We try some things that don’t quite work, and then we have to regroup and learn more, and try another way. Being ready for the challenges of this cross‑sector work is important and needs the support of the university administration. Habib, I don’t know if you wish to add.

Habib Dagher:

Yes, that’s exactly right. We’ve learned a lot over the years. What we learned is we have to bring together a lot of people. We put consortia together that include industry, that includes developers, that includes fabricators, that includes and so on and so forth.

Some of these consortia that called the DeepCwind Consortium that we did 12 years ago, erected the first floater off the US coast at that time. It did work. We learned a lot along the ways. As we speak today, we are building another floater.

That would be, for many years, probably the only floater off the US coast. It’s being fabricated, as I said yesterday. As we speak, they’re pouring concrete today as part of this unit. That will be deployed fairly shortly, we hope before the end of this year, off the coast of Maine.

We’ve learned a lot, but what we learned is how to train the next generation. That’s the beauty of the university doing this work is we have the opportunity to have hands‑on training for the students in all these different areas.

We have a workforce in the future that can do this. When you hire students from here, they’ve done this. How many people can say they’ve done this here in the US, and they’ve built things and put them in the water, and so on and so forth?

That’s the beauty of having these demonstration projects being done at the universities. We’re not only developing a technology but also we’re developing the people that are needed to build this industry.

Moderator:

There’s a few other hands that were up.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

It would be good if I could know who’s asking the question. If you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself, please.

Darren McQuillan:

Can everybody hear me because it wasn’t working yesterday? My name’s Darren McQuillan. I work with Bardex. We were the ones in the event last night. I get told to use it properly. I can’t use it properly. There we go.

Darren McQuillan, Bardex. I’ve got a question. It’s great with the technology and where we’re going and everything else with offshore wind. It’s awesome. What the university is doing is tremendous.

With regards to suggestions for maybe some classroom tuition and things like that is to take it a little bit beyond that. We need to get into like think gig skill beyond pilot, beyond demonstrators, and everything needs to be focused on gig‑scale execution. What does that mean? The devil’s in the details on the EPCI. That’s where it all happens.

Any change or fundamental issue that changes in that can cost the developer billions or save the developer billions.

Again, having more people who were taught at college or at school, or at the university by some of the EPCI companies of the world, just to educate them on lean manufacturing. What does that look like? What systems are out there that we can use that can eliminate CO2 footprints and things like that? How can we better support the execution of the concrete floating solution?

At the end of the day, it’s climate change. We need to come together as Habib said. Again, that’s fundamentally missing from some studies. Everything just assumes it happens when you move to an EPCI company.

A lot of these companies are pulling in people from your university and then teaching them how to do it, so getting that as included as part of a course would be fundamental to supporting the university with a big focus on operational safety pleas.

The last thing we want to do, there’s too many touch points on this execution, and nobody will remember the money. They’ll just remember the people that got hurt. Operational safety should be included in all of that. It wasn’t really a question. It was just a suggestion. It’s a pleasure to be here.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

It’s actually a great suggestion. I imagine our group has some thinking going on and some work in that area. What strikes me is that what you’re describing could also be a way to distinguish and use the great resources that we have in this lab as a part of students’ education and to focus on the interdisciplinary part.

I would imagine students in business, students in law, students in a variety of engineering fields, as well as students in the social sciences who are looking for employment that might involve understanding how people engage together in making decisions and getting work done…

All of those fields would be germane in terms of the preparation of students at that level, at that operationalization and implementation big‑scale level. I hope that that’s something that we’re thinking about, but also could imagine programs for doing that. Yes, sir.

Chris Mitchell:

Hi. I’m Chris Mitchell. I’m with WSB, a large engineering firm, WSP, right here in Portland. Just to put the workforce needs in context, as a company, we’ve hired over 10,000 people this year. In Maine, we’ve hired 30 people in the Portland office, where there’s a huge need for development of the workforce and for making them work‑ready. Thank you for what you’re doing.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

We really appreciate that.

We can applaud that. That’s right.

Of course, we’re very grateful for the corporate partners as well as advisors that we have. One extension of this notion of research‑based learning, research learning experience…Habib talks about it as real hands‑on work. Students know how to do the kinds of things that are needed.

One expansion of that can be more development of intentional partnerships with particular companies, so that we have a real way of learning exactly what the needs are and what the future needs look like. Then we can customize programs to serve those, what the needs of the current workforce may be for upskilling, and how we can be a partner there.

That’s a bit of a new frontier for us. We have examples of that, but I would like to see us expand in that way too. Yes.

Grant Provost:

Hi. I’m Grant Provost. I’m the Business Agent for Iron Workers Local 7 in the state of Maine, also the Vice President of the AFL‑CIO. A lot of these skills that we need coming up are things that we already do. We have some of the best training for workforce. We can scale up like no other.

I’m just wondering how the university plans on pairing with registered apprenticeship programs and the building trades in general. We’d like to participate in this. We can get you to the finish line with the workforce.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

Great to know. We have space to grow there, in how to make those partnerships. I’d like to talk further with you and your colleagues about what that looks like. I will say that we have excellent partnerships with the Maine community college system and their technical preparation programs.

We’re looking for ways to expand opportunities for students who begin in those programs and might like to go to the workforce for a while and then come in and complete a degree in engineering at the bachelor’s level. We’ve got the beginnings of those pathways, but very, very open to further discussion about how we can support the great work that you and your colleagues do.

Jason Shedlock:

Thanks for that answer. My name is Jason Shedlock. I’m the President of the Maine State Building and Construction Trades Council, work with Grant and 19 other trade unions. When we talk about the community college system, there’s an obvious role for a lot of folks.

I took a note on something that you said. You’re spot on, on a number of things. One was that it isn’t your mainstream work, with some of these things. It’s ours. The registered apprenticeship program in labor unions across the country is the second largest training program in the country, second to the US military.

When these large projects, whether they start small and get large, as it comes to a demonstration project, a research array that we have agreement on that will be high‑road labor, construction work…If you’re pouring concrete today, it’s not an engineer that’s pouring a concrete. That’s a laborer and an iron worker.

Oftentimes, we think about things being built and some of the upskilling or whatever. These are folks that will pour concrete on your hole today and finish the job and then go build your local hospital too.

There are certain nuances in skills, but at the end of the day, this is workforce in Maine that has built Maine for years bringing in registered apprenticeship in construction, which is the largest registered apprenticeship industry in the state of Maine. I would just encourage folks, certainly at the 91±¬ÁĎ as well as you that are doing projects in your own jurisdictions…

I would assume that you’re working with the building trades because we’ve built these around the country and the large projects fall under project labor agreements, which we heard about yesterday. Happy to chat offline. Grant is here, as well as the President of the Iron Workers. Thanks for your participation.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

Thank you for that. I’d need more information from inside the university about what we’re already doing, but I’d be very open to a small meeting where we might really sit down together and talk about what some possibilities could look like. If your folks, if you are willing to help me organize that, we’d work together. Let’s follow up.

Adrian Granda:

My name’s Adrian Granda. I’m from the Port of Long Beach. I’m really grateful for the conversation that just happened because that was going to be the second part of my two‑part question.

The Port of Long Beach is the second largest containerized port in the country. We do eight million TEUs every single year. We’re focused on decarbonization. We have a 400‑acre proposed plan for staging and integration at our port. We’re very invested in seeing the West Coast and California convert and create this green grid.

In addition to the collaboration with organized labor, I was also interested in how you engage at the younger level. We hear a lot about community benefits industrialization. How do you educate the public, young people in particular? We’re thinking everything from K to 12. How does that bleed into the university programs?

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

I did very briefly mention the Windstorm Challenge, which is a large competition sponsored here at 91±¬ÁĎ by the Advanced Structures & Composites Center, which essentially requires students, under certain constraints, to build their own model floating wind turbine.

Then those get tested on the campus. There are scholarships and prizes. It’s an amazing event with like a thousand students or something. That’s one model.

Another model could be to, again, thinking in an interdisciplinary way, make sure that our university, with its education of teachers, is actually helping teachers to understand the way in which other aspects of the university are paving the way for the future workforce and make that a part of the education of teachers.

Habib, we haven’t talked about this, but what if we had a credential for K‑12 teachers that would engage them in a deeper understanding?

The understanding of the public is also something that we find ourselves very much engaged in. I don’t know how intentionally we do that necessarily, but we always, of course, have a public‑facing side to this work. Again, an area that I think, with more intentionality, it fits within the role of the public land‑grant, and so we can consider that.

I don’t know if Dean Guidoboni is here. In any case, the dean of the Maine College of Engineering and Computing, Giovanna Guidoboni, has taken an enormous interest in K‑12 engagement. We just recently were able to host a national robotics competition at the university that she brought to us, VEX Robotics.

We have all these opportunities and occasions to work with K12. I think there might be ways to make it even more impactful. Great, great suggestion.

Moderator:

Take one last question here?

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

Yeah.

Sandy Butterfield:

Sandy Butterfield. I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself the first time around.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

That’s OK.

Sandy Butterfield:

I wanted to piggyback a little bit on the whole concept of teaching students to do things. I came from the University of Massachusetts. In 1975, we started a program…We didn’t but Bill Hieronymus started a program that was designed to build a 25 kilowatt turbine. It was tiny by today’s standards, but huge by those standards. We didn’t know that we could do it.

As students, we took the lead of Bill Hieronymus, who said, “Yes, you can.” We went ahead and did it. That program has graduated hundreds of students that are still in the wind industry today. Walt Musial came out of that program, Brian McNiff, and many others that you all know.

I think it’s huge for universities to get involved with things that are actually building stuff. The learning curve for when you’re building something is tremendously different than learning it through books. Nothing to take away from that, but when you’re doing it, you’re learning very fast because you’re making mistakes in a constructive way, which I think is tremendously important.

I also wanted to piggyback on the trades. I think that your comment about partnering with the trades is huge. I was fortunate enough to help get the IEC Renewable Energy certification program going. It’s a certification program at the international level.

We felt like it was very important to train laborers or mechanics, maintenance workers, on how to work with wind turbines. That’s a unique skill and it’s transferable. Many of the skills are transferable from company to company. To be able to train them and give them a certificate that they could bring from company to company as they move, could be very valuable for them as their career grows.

Universities can play a role in that certification, in that training. I think it’s an opportunity for universities, its a good fit for universities, so I would encourage you to think about that, especially for offshore where the skills are tremendously unique and well suited for the community that we find here in Maine. Thank you.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

Thank you for two very helpful observations. I’ll certainly follow up and learn more about the…and people here I’m sure know about the IEC renewable energy. Back to the question about students actually building things, I will put in a plug for our engineering college, whereas with many engineering colleges, there is a capstone experience in most of the majors, whereas seniors, the students actually do build something.

In fact, our latest engineering building on campus includes terrific almost maker space‑like space, with support from the shops that are around the perimeter of that room to do these projects. The point I wanted to be clear to make is that we’d like to partner with the private sector. If a company has something they’d like students to work on, we do have a way that that can happen at the 91±¬ÁĎ, and happy to follow up with individuals if you’re interested.

I am seeing people say that we are about at time and you’re ready for a break. I’m not sure I’m releasing you for the break, so don’t take that too literally. In any case, thank you so much for your time. It’s great to talk with you.