University of Maine System Community Members,
Over the last eight weeks, I’ve criss-crossed the state several times with members of my team to be with you on your campuses in 35 different listening sessions. The topic for all of our meetings, of course, has been our unified accreditation recommendation.
I’ve heard from faculty individually and in their senates and assemblies, from staff and their assemblies, from your university leaders, and from every one of our seven Boards of Visitors. Our meetings have been small and large, in dining halls, lecture halls, and classrooms. I’ve heard all of your questions, and answered them as honestly as I could. When our faculty submitted a list of questions and concerns in writing, we answered them in writing and posted them on our unified accreditation website the next day.
I keep talking about transparency. That’s because I mean it.
I’ve taken all of our campus visits very seriously. In mid-September, after I made my unified accreditation recommendation (PDF) to our Trustees, the Board asked me not only to visit your campuses and answer your questions, but more importantly, to get your thoughts about what kind of process and plan we should follow if we seek unified accreditation. The Board asked me to use your feedback to prepare a report for the Trustees’ upcoming November 17-18 meeting in Farmington about these issues.
I want to be very clear: our Board has not yet authorized any change to our universities’ individual accreditations. My September recommendation to pursue unified accreditation remains just that — a recommendation. But we also need to be prepared, because the Board will vote at its January 2020 meeting on whether to pursue unified accreditation. It has therefore been critically important for me to hear from you over these last eight weeks. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and questions. Our dialogue has been respectful and honest, at times challenging, and always constructive. We’ve learned a lot that we have been able to use in our report, and it will be a foundation for our plans going forward.
So that brings us to today. Honoring my ongoing commitment to transparency to you, I want you to be among the first to see our next report, which we’re publishing today for the Board’s public agenda materials. You can see the report now posted here (PDF) at the unified accreditation website. I also want you to see my last weekly update to our Trustees that previewed the report. I would normally post this message to the Chancellor’s webpage after four weeks. But because this message focuses so directly on our next unified accreditation report, I thought you should see it now, without delay.
If our Board votes in January to continue the journey to a unified accreditation, our challenges will not suddenly melt away. We’re already planning, and we’ll have much more work to do together, first and foremost with our faculty and university leaders to develop a successful substantive change request to NECHE, our accreditor. Our new report describes additional work we’ll have to do together to be successful. But if we continue down this path, I believe we’ll have a powerful new tool to work more closely together to expand higher education opportunity and attainment across our vast state. I can think of no better way to meet our public mission, through all of our universities right where they are.
As I said on my first day as Chancellor, thank you for the work you do for Maine’s public universities.
Regards,
Dan Malloy, Chancellor