USM Proposal Renews School and College Organization
March 19, 2010
An updated University of Southern Maine proposal continues to call for USM’s eight schools and colleges to be remodeled into five colleges.
A “Design Team” of administrators and faculty submitted the proposal to USM President Selma Botman earlier today, Friday, March 19. It is based on a draft proposal that the team submitted on March 1.
“This model maintains a focus on our goal of enhancing the educational experience for USM students and reducing administrative overhead,” said James B. Shaffer, USM’s chief operating officer and chair of “Design Team.”
Botman will now take community input before preparing the latest proposal for deliberation by the USM Faculty Senate. She then plans to submit the proposal to the University of Maine System Board of Trustees for approval at their meeting of May 23-24.
The complete proposal is available at http://usm.maine.edu/pres/reorganization/
Botman asked the team to develop a proposal to remodel USM’s schools and colleges to better serve the needs of students and the state, and help make USM fiscally sustainable by reducing administrative costs.
“This university has grown over many, many years,” said Shaffer, “ but the structure of our schools and colleges has never been looked at in a comprehensive way. What we have proposed is a new academic foundation which will save resources for reinvestments and create opportunities for some exciting collaborations among academic disciplines.”
Under the proposal, programs in six of USM’s eight schools and colleges — the School of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology; the College of Arts and Sciences; the School of Business; the College of Education and Human Development; the Muskie School of Public Service; the College of Nursing and Health Professions — would become part of three colleges. Those three newly proposed colleges would house engineering, nursing, the sciences, mathematics and related disciplines in one college; communication, culture and the arts in another college; and public service, business, graduate education and social work in a third college.
USM’s Lewiston-Auburn College and the University of Maine School of Law, an administrative unit of USM, are not affected by this draft proposal.
Changes from the draft of March 1 include consolidation of graduate education programs, including Human Resource Development, Professional Education and ETEP (graduate teacher education), within one college and grouping of the social sciences with the arts and humanities.
The proposal also calls for an undergraduate teacher education program that would ground students in the subjects they want to teach, and qualify them for the necessary teaching certification upon graduation.
A separate report included in the appendices of the proposal notes that three dean’s offices would be eliminated and that during implementation there would be a move toward fewer, larger academic departments within the new colleges. Together, these changes are estimated to save a minimum of $1.2 million a year in administrative overhead.
