University of Maine System Colleagues –
Every time I’ve written to you about unified accreditation, I stress transparency. That’s because I mean it.
You’ll remember that our Board of Trustees asked me to make an accreditation recommendation that would help our universities work together to offer more programs and services to Maine’s learners no matter where they are. At the September Board meeting, I recommended that our universities unify their separate institutional accreditations into one state-wide University of Maine System accreditation to give us a new tool to offer more programs and share more resources among our universities, help students access them wherever they are, and ensure that all of our universities can survive and thrive right where they are.
You can read my report and recommendation and see nearly five years of correspondence with NECHE about unifying our accreditations on our Unified Accreditation website.
Over the last few weeks, my team and I have been traveling around Maine to hear your questions and concerns about unified accreditation. Your faculty representatives to the Board of Trustees also compiled their own list of comments, concerns, and questions, which they shared with me late last week and discussed with the Board’s Academic and Student Affairs Committee just yesterday. All University of Maine System community members deserve to know both what their questions and concerns are and how we have answered them. For that reason, and to honor my commitment to transparency to you, I’m posting both the faculty questions and concerns and our “FAQ” answers to them here.
I’ve now had numerous meetings at all of our universities — I’ll be at the University of Maine at Augusta with my team today and at the University of Southern Maine this Friday — and I’ve had a chance to talk with dozens of faculty and staff and several of their assemblies and senates. We’ve also collected more than 50 responses so far to an online survey posted on our unified accreditation website. We’ll be incorporating all of this feedback in our November report to the Board, which I expect to publish with the Board’s agenda materials by the end of the day on Friday, November 8. With these FAQs, I wanted you to see these materials now already, and I’m grateful to all of our University of Maine System community members — faculty, staff, students, university leaders, Board of Visitor members, and alumni — who’ve shared their input with us so far.
You have a right to know what we’re doing. And I’m listening to your questions and concerns. We’ll have a better report for the Board because you’ve spoken up.
Thanks,
Dan Malloy, Chancellor