 I'm Harold Pacius, we're on the air again with another edition of Pacius on the News. We started 15 or 16 years ago and came up with a name, probably took us about a minute to come up with that name, because it started with me reading the newspaper and expressing outrage about certain things in the newspaper. So we called it Pacius on the News. But then we started having guests, and we've had a string of very, very interesting guests. A lot of politicians from outside of Maine, members of Congress, senators, governors from Maine. Tonight, we're doing something slightly different. We have a fellow who was governor of Connecticut for two terms, Dan Malloy, governor Dan Malloy, who is now the head, the chancellor of the University of Maine System, all of the campuses. I call you chancellor or governor. Dan is fine. We have a governor in Maine, and so I defer to the good governor of Maine. But I answered a mayor, governor, chancellor, Dan, you know, hey, you, my mother used to run through all of the boys' names before she got to mine when she was yelling at me. Well, Dan, welcome. We're glad you're in Maine. We're glad you agreed to come on this show and talk about the University of Maine System and higher education in Maine. Let me ask you this. This is kind of unusual. I think folks ask themselves, a lot of people read about you being the new chancellor. A lot of people know that you were the governor of Connecticut before you came here to be the chancellor of our higher education system. Isn't it unusual? I mean, a guy who is a politician and a lawyer, a politician, says, yeah, I'll do that. Well, yeah, I suppose it's an unusual story. It's not a unique story. There are a number of folks who have political backgrounds. I think what's unique about this story is that I'm not the chancellor or president of the University of Connecticut. I'm heading a system in another state. But there is some history to that. I was always involved in educational issues. I grew up with very serious learning and physical disabilities that took, you know, forever. Actually, you never overcome some of the processing disorders I suffer from. And so I was always committed to education, particularly public education. I attended most of my time was in public education. My dad was in the insurance business and he did get the contract on a local Catholic school. So I had to leave public school after fourth grade and go to fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth. Because it was good for business. Yeah, it was good for my dad's business. So he was an insurance agent. So I... So you went to Catholic... So I went to St. Purchitt's school through fifth through eighth grade. Then I went back to public education. But the point is that I wouldn't be who I am and have accomplished what I...if I've accomplished anything, would not have accomplished anything but for public education and the teachers who took time to bring me along. And I've repaid that by being involved in educational issues all my life, served on a board of education, have championed educational reform issues, taught at the University of Connecticut for a number, actually 12 or 13 years as an adjunct professor while I was also doing other things just because I wanted to stay in touch with how younger people were processing information, younger people than I were processing information and treating information. And made a decision that as my political career was coming to an end that the field that I wanted to be active and again for what I call my fifth career would be higher education. And I don't think anyone's more surprised than I am that some other state hired some other state's governor to had a system. But I'm very grateful for it and I think that what we've been able to accomplish in a relatively short period of time, at least the trustees who hired me should feel good about what we've done. Well, you know, I got some other questions to ask you about your background because you said five careers. Yeah. And before I ask you take up on what you said, which is, you know, you think you've accomplished some things as a chance to the University of Maine. I want to insert in there, what are the five careers? So I, you know, I graduated from Boston College Law School and I immediately went down and was an assistant district attorney. Excuse me, one second. There's a lot of eagles around here in Maine. You're a double eagle. I'm a double eagle. Yeah, I got my undergraduate degree and went directly to law school and graduated from law school in 1980. So that kind of gives you an idea how old I am. And upon graduation, before graduation, I was given a job as an assistant district attorney, Kings County, New York, which is Brooklyn. Interestingly enough, part of my family from Ireland came through Brooklyn, so I was returning in some senses. Did that for about three and a half years, tried 23 felony cases, had convictions in 22 of those cases, ended up in the homicide bureau. So you tried murder cases. I tried, yeah, I tried murder cases. Four murders I prosecuted and had convictions in each of them and actually did some defense work subsequently to that, including a homicide case. So then I was in private practice of law, very different than being a prosecutor or assistant district attorney. Then I was mayor of Stanford for 14 years. And as I told you in a prior conversation, no one has ever did that for more than eight years or has done it for more than eight years other than myself a year later. This is a strong mayor, strong mayor form of government. And it's not not a part time job, not a part time job. And it's a partisan elections and a 40 member city council and the board of finance and a board of education. I served also on the board of education, as I mentioned, served on the board of finance for 11 years, was mayor for 14 years. A year after I was mayor, she gave me one second. And in that job, it's mayor of Stanford, Connecticut. You had to have political skills, right? Actually, being the youngest of eight children, you had to have political skills. So it starts well before that. Yeah, no, it's a different. It's different than the job is known in Maine. I would I would suggest to you. OK, so then I've met and have made friends of a number of people who have been, for instance, the mayor of Portland, but it's a very different form of government. Yeah, chief executive. And then, OK, and then did you go directly to the election for governor from mayor? Yeah, I had I had run for mayor. I had run for governor once before and won the convention, but lost a primary. And that was in 2006. In 2010, I came back and ran. I was I was primaried and won that primary. Actually, the current governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, was the person who ran against me for the nomination and I defeated him. Then I was elected governor and then reelected governor and then moved on to. Actually, I spent a period of time as the Rappaport distinguished visiting professor at Boston College Law School and then subsequently had an opportunity to join the academic world in a different capacity, had several opportunities to do that and decided to come to Maine to take on the challenge of a system as opposed to an individual university. First thing that occurs to me when I hear your story and your background is that you told me in the beginning that when you were in school, you had to overcome some learning disabilities and physical disabilities and physical disabilities and and I never overcame the learning disabilities. I still suffer from from some processing disorders. And and but, you know, you learn how to work around it. Well, and there are people watching who themselves or in their family, children have learning disabilities. And so this is a very interesting discussion we're having because you can have learning disabilities and do all that you have done. Yeah, you know, you can if everything lines up. My mother, actually, so I was the youngest of eight children. Several of my siblings also had learning disabilities. My mother became a self taught expert in the area. She was a registered nurse and because my some of my older siblings had suffered far less of a disability than I did. She she knew what to do and and and how to protect me and how to encourage me and and and the like. But I was thought to be I have records. I was thought to be mentally retarded as late as the fourth grade and couldn't button a shirt or tie a shoe until fifth grade, which is significant because fifth grade is when my dad got the contract on the Catholic school and I had to tie shoes and button shirts for the first time in my life. And but I didn't have hand to eye coordination. And written language is to this day a very difficult process for me. If you if you use your phone or you use a typewriter, every time I look at that, I'm in essence seeing it for the first time. There's no pattern that that comes easily to to me. And so if you were asked me to write a sentence, I would have to concentrate on each word to to accomplish that word. And that's still a disability I wrestle with on a daily basis. So what's the secret to doing what you have done in your life, not withstanding these disabilities? Is it I don't want to be trite, but is it just hard work? I you know, I think it's I listen, I my mother I can remember the and I've told this story publicly before, you know, when I was a very young child, my mother purchased a radio in those days. You know, because I'm 66 years old, the radio was a big thing. And she put it on the table next to my bed and she set it to talk radio so that she so that I would develop a speaking style and a vocabulary that would would be ahead of other people. My mother thought that I had natural leadership abilities and she encouraged me to exercise those abilities. My mother thought that I should be a compassionate person. I can remember my mother at a young age, you know, driving me to a nursing home and telling me to get out of the car and go in there and brighten somebody's day. And so as a series of experiences of some teachers who cared, some who didn't, a mother who and father, but primarily my mother was the lead and quite frankly, the experience of some of my older siblings. So I didn't come to talk about that. I know I've had a very interesting life. I didn't ask you to, but now I'm asking you. So you've got to respond to my questions. That's the rule here. Yeah, I got it. Yeah, that's that's the way we do it. But it's the last thing on this subject. So your mother was obviously a strong woman. Yes. Irish. Yeah. Irish. Her family was Irish. My family. I'm all Irish. So my mother was all Irish. My father was all Irish, but her mother came from Ireland. Catherine Fagan. Yeah. OK. All right. So now let's go back to the University of Maine system of higher education. Yeah. So the trustees hired you to come here. Governor points you, right? No, I don't I think the governor probably didn't, you know, she has to OK. I don't know. I don't think that that's part of the process. I think I think she may have been consulted and and and didn't object. But but the trustees were, you know, it's a it's a big process to be a select that as a president or or or a chancellor of a system. So lots of people touch it. So they they they were brave, by the way. I mean, you know, I give I why they say they were brave. Well, you know, I I never I actually didn't apply for the position initially, because I just didn't think, you know, some other state public. I could see a private university of another state hiring somebody from, you know, it was governor of a state nearby. But I just it didn't make I didn't think that a public system would do that. And so the firm that was doing the search contacted me a couple of times and I finally said, OK, I'll put my application in. I was active in other applications, was being interviewed, had some other opportunities I could have taken, and they took me. And so I took them. And and today in that process, when you were being hired, did they indicate to you what they as a board of trustees really thought needed to be done? Well, you know, the board had published a series of documents over a number of years about the challenges that the system needed to confront and the necessity of confronting those challenges. And and and when you go through this process, everybody is given a series of documents to review so that they would be familiar with the challenges of a state higher educational conglomerate, if you will. And so I read all those materials and and I certainly understand that there are great challenges here in Maine. You know, our demographic where the so I was governor of the seventh oldest state in the nation, and that means average age of population. And I came to the oldest state in the nation, and that is the average age of the population. We we're not we're not a particularly wealthy state here in Maine. We have fiscal challenges. You know, we we between demographics and fiscal challenges. There are hard decisions that have to be made and hard decisions, you know, is is a difficult decision. And and, you know, ultimately, they decided to offer me the job. And ultimately, I accepted that that opportunity. And I'm happy for having accepted it. And one of the first challenges was to bring about really a groundbreaking alignment of universities to go from a system where each university was loosely connected but operated under its own. Can I stop you? They're just a couple of we mean each of the seven campuses, seven campuses. And so when you talk about university, you're talking about university at Fort Kent, Fort Kent, Fort Prescott, Farmington, the campus. You you Maine, which is an or no. So now we have the contact by the law school. I don't want to machias. OK, now I'm safe. So so there's the context. And you say that they were loosely well, they're in a system in the sense that the employees were had a system, but they were each individually recognized by the accrediting agency as a freestanding university operating under its own accreditation. We are now a system of universities operating under the systems accreditation, which is is a first in the nation to go from one style of accreditation to a different style of accreditation. And the first case of that happening in New England. And and why? Yeah. Yeah, because of the challenges I was just referencing previously, financial challenges and demographic challenges that that that we have to confront. I hope Maine gets younger. But I also hope I'm part of making Maine older. I want to live a long time, right? And we we are graduating fewer people from our high schools. The current demographic doesn't change for the next 18 years. That's not to say that it won't change. But we know what birth rates are. Before I came here, we would we were estimating on on a 12 year cycle. And I said, well, let's do some research and understand what the relationship of that 12 year cycle is to to birth rates. And they absolutely align. So now we really know what what we're looking at 18 years from now. And those demographics are not changing, although there is some inward migration. The COVID experience in the United States is is lessened the birth rate universally, apparently, across the state, across the nation. So we have these these, you know, and and we derive income by how many students are in our system, as well as what the state allocates. And so that's a great challenge. And there are and we suffer from the same financial pressures of inflation and and cost and equity that that other employers have to to rankle with. So it's having said that we have a different style of of management, which is intended to be to make sure that everyone's consulted, not everyone agrees, but everyone's consulted that tends to take a lot of time to change the direction of the ship. Unfortunately, the captain of the Titanic didn't have much warning, but we do. And and how do we react to the warning that that we currently have? So what is so can you describe how you think that ship has to change over time? I think we have to. Of course, sure. I think that we always have to be looking for ways to be financially effective and use the assets that may be on one campus to help the students who may be on another campus and do that in a cost-effective way. I guess there's one way to say it. I think most people in Maine think of us as one university to begin with a term that I don't use. We are a collection of universities that that the people of Maine have the right to expect we would work together for the good of Maine. So you making it more unitary. That is one campus. You're saying one campus may have certain strengths or be able to offer certain things that another campus doesn't. And so the idea is if you're a student in the university Maine system, you can draw on resources from all of these places. Yeah, I think that that that that is that is a big part of what we should be able to do. Why should someone in our system not be able to access a great professor, a great course, if there's room in that course on another campus, particularly in an environment where people are increasingly desirous of having some of their education experience and in some cases all of their education experience online. So we're adjusting to technology and people's use of that technology at a time that we are facing this great challenge with respect to demographics and how many students will be available to occupy spaces. And how do we how do we have an absolutely great education provided at all of our institutions to anyone who wants to access that, regardless of whether they come from a big city like Portland or surrounding community or one of our smallest communities? And I can name a bunch of my favorites. So how do you do that? You know, I I'm I'm not skeptical, but I'm affected by what I've learned over the years. And I have a perception and you can correct me. The University of Maine faculty some years ago, we had a chancellor who really wanted to push distance learning. The faculty I and I may be summarizing in an inaccurate way, seemed to me were opposed to the more the more you do distance learning, the more students you can serve, the more the bigger the ratio between faculty and students. So if you had distance learning, you might have one faculty member could take care of 50 or 60 or 70 students because they don't all have to be in the same room. So they didn't like it. So let me respond to that. Using part of our conversation from from earlier in the interview, I would not be successful. In a distance learning environment, I needed to be in a classroom. I needed to converse. I needed to be able to read people's reactions to the information that they were receiving or the argument that was being made. That's true of me, but it's not true of everyone. I wanted to be in a classroom and I wanted to get my education that way, but not everyone will. And what we've learned in the pandemic is that people can adapt and will adapt. And having adapted at least a core, a cohort of, let's say, three or four years of high school plus three or four years of college at that experience, that eight, let's call that an eight year gap, a group of people who have had to change on a dime. They're not all going to go back to one style or another. So the winners when it comes to an education model will be those that can adapt to the marketplace. And there's nothing more important than adapting to the marketplace than in a state that has a declining graduation rate from not a rate, a declining number of students coming out of high school. I don't think we should seek to dictate what style people want to be taught in or what various styles they want to be taught in. Our job is to make sure that we're delivering a great education product in the style selected by the individual who's paying us to provide that education. So you talk about the marketplace, that makes sense to me. You've got to understand what your market is and you've got to appeal to people and you've got to offer something that will draw people. Correct. That's the market. But but that but that's not the only market. Part of the market, if I might interrupt for just a second, is students and parents are putting more and more emphasis on what's that going? What what's my son, my daughter, my grandchild? What are what are they going to do with the education you're providing? How are they going to make a living? Are they going to be able to if they're a middle class kid coming from parents who weren't born in the middle class, but rose to middle class? Are they going to be able to make the next jump in their life? Are they going to be able to educate their children? They're going to be able to pay for those things. And there's a greater connection. And by the way, I'm a liberal arts graduate. I think I want to I want us to remain in the liberal arts business. But we have to recognize that there are financial pressures on individual individuals, families that are driving them to make decisions that are different than we might have seen in 1962. When or are they are anytime in the 1960s when the children of a veteran were now coming into into college and we're going to receive that that first in their family degree. Now, we have lots of people receiving the first in the family degree, but those parents are pretty nervous about the investment that they're making, much more so than you saw in the post World War Two period of time. I'm not inventing this. This is a reality that exists. And so, yeah, we want our child to have a great liberal arts education. But what are they going to make when they're done? What are they going to do with that degree? And I think that we we need to defend what we do, which is to give a broad education. But we also need to be able to answer the question, and what are you going to do with that? So you on it. I'm listening to you and I said, well, this guy, he understands that he's runs this system and he sees these problems. And then you talk about the market and trying to design a system that will overcome some of the demographic obstacles and so forth. And I say to myself, but he's not really in charge. And you can respond to say he's not really charged because you have in the university system tenure, which means that sometimes it's you don't get to lay off people. That you think you can do it. You have a union that probably has a contract that says, if you do have layoffs, last in first out, no matter how good the teaching is. And so maybe you don't have that. But between tenure and a union and this sense of shared governance that really the fact, if you ask some faculty members, I know I had a battle with the USM faculty when they chased out a president some years ago. She probably should have been chased out. But I wanted, I was saying to her, what's wrong? They were pretty tough, tough on me, tough on her. So how do you do it? They say, you can't govern. We have shared governance and we have tenure and we have a union. And so what do you got to do with it? How are you going to solve it with that? Listen, we have data and we have a system that we want to protect. And we have individual institutions operating under a unified accreditation that I want to see be successful. And so part of that is dialogue and part of it is the reality of studying. These are bright people. Everyone you just refer to are bright people and have the ability to look at data, I believe, and understand the experiences. They're going to be, you know, Vermont in the last few years has seen a number of colleges close. New Hampshire has seen that. Massachusetts has seen. Becker College in Worcester just this past year closed on basically on a dime. These demographic changes are not unique. They are throughout the Northeast. And we have real challenges in the perfect world. We will do better. We will get more students from both in and out of the state of Maine. By the way, if somebody comes and is educated in Maine at one of our institutions, they're far more likely to remain in Maine. We need inward migration on an ongoing basis to Maine. If we want to see the kinds of economic growth that we want to have play out. So, you know, it takes dialogue. It takes conversation. It takes in some sense as it takes the experience we've had in the COVID pandemic to understand that there are this larger larger than we thought cohort of people who want to have their education delivered in multiple modalities. They may want one course taught one way and another course taught another way. And the institutions that respond to those needs or those desires will be the successful ones. And those that refuse to respond in an appropriate way at least are in some peril. OK, so you're right. But faculty say we're in charge. You're not going to make these decisions unless we make them together. You're not going to make them. We have a union. We have ten you're not going to get rid of any teachers and bring in new ones or whatever. You're not going to do it because we have tenure. So how do you accomplish these things? Well, the desire is not to have fewer people. Desires to increase the audience of people that that keep people occupied, that keep them employed. On the other hand, there are people like me getting older. There are going to be retirements. There are going to be changes. There's going to be people are going to adapt. I want each of our universities to be successful. This is not about trying to close anyone or to treat everyone as one university, which was a term that was used in Maine to describe some of the changes. And I've stopped. I said, we're not going to use that anymore. What we're talking about is working together. How do we, if we all have the same last name and we're all in the same family, how do we work together to have a successful family business? OK, so the Alfon Foundation has funded a study to combine in a unit the Graduate School of Business, the Muskie School of Public Policy, the Law School, and there was pushback. First, for instance, the faculty, the business faculty in Arno said we're the business school. And people in USM said we're in the middle of the market. We had all kinds of people want to go to graduate school because there are people here. So whatever happened with that was I knew there was resistance a few years ago. What happened is there's a an MBA program, which in the pandemic is largely online, which has 402 students, which is multiple several times over of the total number of MBA students who were in the programs that existed previously. That's a reality. It's having said that, I don't think I would have handled all of that the way it got handled. I think that we could have used better terminology. We could have been more collegial in figuring those things out. So, you know, one of the things about being a president or a chancellor of a system as I am is you inherit history. And even though you weren't here, you get blamed for history. We've got to work through some of that, I think, the realities. And we have to build confidence in the concept that what we're really trying to do is to make sure all our universities can be as successful as they can be and that we are a family of universities and in a family, you help one another out. So did it get resolved? You have 402 MBA students? Yeah, MBA students. 402 in the system? In the MBA program. And who teaches them? People in Arno or people in University of Southern Maine or both? To some extent, both. You know, the original concept was that Southern Maine would provide about half of the teaching and and Arno would provide half of the teaching. And I think as of a year ago or so that semester, I think it had dropped to about 4 percent. What's 4 percent? Southern Maine was teaching about 4 percent of the courses and University of Maine or other faculty were teaching the majority of that. Again, I think that that is a great example of the right thing to do, but the wrong way to do it. And I have said publicly that I think that if I had been chancellor, I might have done it. And I hope perhaps I would have done it in a different way and brought about the results. So for instance. In a different way. So let's use a different example. We are seeking to tie together to have worked together the engineering program, which is a relatively small program at the University of Southern Maine with a much larger engineering school up at Arno where we're making it very clear that students who are educated in this combined engineering program who receive their education at Southern Maine will in fact receive a Southern Maine degree. And students who take that program at the University of Maine, the same program, the same alliance of educational professionals providing it, well, if they graduate from the University of Maine in the engineering program, their degree will say that. It's a very different approach. We're not eliminating anyone. But let's go back to the market. Yeah. I looked at this the other day for some other reason, obviously the metropolitan, whatever statistic for Greater Portland is over 530,000, over a half million. A lot of people here, a lot of jobs here, a lot of businesses here. So if we want to develop technology jobs in this area in Maine, a lot of them are going to be right around here in Portland. Sure. But only 4% of the people getting MBAs are being taught from the University of Southern Maine down here in the Southern part of the state. Works fine if everybody's online and there's a pandemic. But there may come a time where people want to go at night to a classroom, to interrelate with other MBA students, to interrelate with professors and so forth. And we're saying 95% of it will be in R and O. No, but see, that's incorrect. So I want to be respectful. Yeah, that's good. Because I'm on charge of the show. Yeah, but let me push back a little bit. So you just described the geographic area with a large percentage of the population of the state of Maine. In fact, I'd even go further. It's probably about 700,000 people. I come from a smaller state than Maine, but... Not in population. But not in population, about three and a half million people. But have you ever visited stores? I have, I drove to... You know why? I wanted to see, with a basketball arena, I wanted to see they have an indoor football place now. No, they have a practice facility. But the reality is it's away from everything as well. And the reality of Maine is the vast majority of engineers who are in that career, continue to be in that career, are in fact educated at one of our institutions and overwhelmingly at one of those two that have engineering programs. That's the reality. What we haven't made available, I think, is graduate education, engineering education in this part of the state. And that is a problem and one that has to be addressed because engineers, just like everybody else, have to move along in their careers. They have to, they want to take graduate courses. They want graduate degrees. They want to be introduced to other areas. And one of our universities can provide that service and already has the faculty to do it. And one of the things we want to do in the state of Maine, to grow the state of Maine, to be more responsive, to be more like 128 was in Massachusetts in the 1970s or what Southern Maine was in the 80s and 90s, Southern New Hampshire was in the 70s, 80s and 90s. We want that to play out here. And if we're going to do that, we have to produce more folks with computing and engineering backgrounds to drive the economic growth for the next 20 or 30 years and thereafter. And so we seek a model to introduce the capacity to do that. And I think we live in a age where distance is far less important than it ever was and that we can overcome the problems of distance. But can we overcome the problems of demographics, of wealth and how that wealth is distributed? And I think that's the question that we have to deal with as a system, as a state, as a region because some of these issues are playing out. As I said, Connecticut's the seventh oldest state. Massachusetts is a little bit better because of a larger than both of those states because of a larger immigration. But New England is getting older. Every single day, New England gets older. So back to the centers and the combination of the law school and some business courses and the musky school, what's the status of that now? So we have 402 people in the MBAO program, 71% of those from Maine. Is that part of the concept of the center? Yep. The law school has its largest class in years, has a new dean, Lee Softley, who served in the judiciary in the state with great distinction for many, many years, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I have to tell you, he's telling us about Lee Softley and he's praising her. I talked to somebody today and told him I was going to have this show and the guy said to me, and I know Lee Softley very well, he said, and you know, Lee Softley is very high on him. She thinks he's excellent. So that's why I smile when you started praising her. I said, this is a mutual praise. Your comment about whether Lee does think that or not, but my mother's immediate response, she would come home and she'd say, Daniel, I met Mrs. Jones today. And I said, yes, ma'am, Mrs. Jones thinks you're a wonderful boy. Yes, ma'am, you had something to eat there, yes. And she said your habits at the table were very good and you were a good conversationalist and she thinks very highly of you. And then she'd pause and she'd say, see, Daniel, you fooled another one. Well, you fooled Lee. So anyway, back to the center and how does the law school has its biggest class? It's largest class in many years. Yeah, it's, again, you know, when I came here, the law school was in trouble. There was a panel studying the law school. What is there a road forward? I was for 15 years the chairman of the Board of Visitors of the law school and they did have their issues. Right, and I'm not here to blame you for any of those. Thanks. I think Maine's economy would suffer mightily if we were not able to provide for the legal needs within the state. I'm not saying that you couldn't attract talent from outside the state. I think it would be difficult to attract enough talent from outside the state. I came to the conclusion relatively quickly that it would be bad for Maine to be one of the states that didn't have a law school. The firm that you're affiliated with hires a lot of folks from... I do. And all of the big firms do. But more importantly, in some senses, and forgive me for saying this, is we are the largest provider of rural legal assistance. And although you might be able to, you know, up your hiring from outside of the state by some percentage to overcome a closed law school. Not in Prescott, it won't happen. And so I became convinced rather quickly that we needed to take steps to save and then strengthen the law school. And I think that's exactly what Lee is doing. She accuses me of fooling her into taking the job, but I know she likes it. So while we're on the law school, and I just want to go... Well, before we, you know, while we're on the law school, is there going to be a new building someday, do you think? Well, we are moving the law school into downtown Portland. The 1L class will move into a new building, not a new building, a renovated building. A wonderful building. A wonderful building. In the old port. In the old port. When does that happen? With them walking distance to the court house. And we hope that that will all be done in time to open classes in August, actually at the 304 Street building, yeah. Oh, wow, that's quite a building. And that will... It's pretty rapid, isn't it? It's pretty rapid. And also, I know from my own experience as the chairman of the Board of Visitors that the students are very sensitive to where they are, where they go to school, what the facilities are. They've been in a lousy, terrible facility for a long time at the downtown campus of USM. This is gonna make a big difference. So, Leah sent me here to ask you to make a major donation to the law school because you think so highly of it and you know how important it is. I'm happy to take your check and bring it back to the organization. I would love to do that. I don't have my checkbook. Oh, there you go. I'll come back then. Yeah, I don't have my checkbook. So, but the foundation, the Alfond Foundation had made a pledge of tens of millions of dollars for this center, this consolidation. What's the money gonna be spent on? In part, helping us move to a new building, perhaps produce a permanent home. For that building, a higher additional faculty. The Alfond Foundation made a $240 million commitment to the system and in various tranches of money to be matched by money that we need to raise. It's around main athletics. It's around the law school, MBA program, musky school. It's around engineering and it's around the success of our students, making sure that we increase our retention rates and our success rates and our experiential learning opportunities for those students. $240 million at the time it was done was one of the 10 largest single commitments made to any public educational institution in America. I think we've slipped to the 11th or 12th. And so you ask me, how am I gonna get some of these things done? The Alfons are helping. The reality to have the money to double the size of the engineering program and computing program, the engineering computing output at our universities to drive economic growth which in itself will return monies to the state by making the state a more wealthy place because we attract those jobs and you know how income is garnered on people's income. So you know, I think it's a, we're just so grateful to the Alfond, Mr. Alfond who set up the foundation, the family members who continue to serve the foundation, the investment vehicles that generate the kinds of money to be invested in our system is greatly appreciated. They also support many other institutions in the state for which we should all be grateful as well. So now you've got to hire a new president at the University of Southern Maine. And the University of Anagusta. Oh, and Anagusta. So we're a little provincial on this program because this is carried throughout the cable system in Greater Portland. So most of the people watching are in Greater Portland, although they do, this station is affiliated with other public access stations in Maine so they do feed those stations. But back to my provincial inquiry, which is the University of Southern Maine, which a lot of people, including me, think is the key to the economy in this area and can be an even bigger factor in the economy of Southern Maine. So we're very interested in what happens to the University of Southern Maine and whether it grows and we think it can be a very, very significant educational institution, not just in this area, but maybe in New England. I agree. I absolutely agree. When deciding to take this job, I looked at the University of Maine and the University of Southern Maine, so Orano and Portland Gorham, as two places that are more likely to attract additional populations because they're not as tied to the local demographics as some of our other universities are. Those universities are gonna have to step up to a great extent their outreach, those smaller universities. I agree with you that Orano and Southern Maine are real growth opportunities. Again, how can we afford to make those opportunities better and stronger in a system that's in the oldest state in the nation and one that has financial limitations? And so to find the way to do that is going to be very important. Having said that, there's some massive investments that are being made in both places. At the very moment, I'm speaking to you, a new engineering building under construction, a major engineering building under construction up in Orano. You see a dormitory and being built in Portland. You see an additional parking facility moving forward. You see a student center moving forward. You have people in the community who want to move the music program from Gorham to be celebrated in Portland as well. So these are major investments that are ongoing at those places, but we're also making investments out in Farmington up at Preskyle, at Fort Kent, we just completed a building. Augusta now has, I think, about 65 students living in residence over the last couple of years. There are investments being made that we are hopeful will allow us to be even more successful and meet the needs on a broader basis. In the system that I lead, Southern Maine currently represents about 25%. Orano represents about 50%. And the remaining universities represent about 25% of our capacity, or at least our number of students. This is way off the point, but if the University of Southern Maine, I look at, I follow sports. So I look at around the country, some what used to be state teachers colleges and now regional schools for state university systems. And some of them have a good basketball. If the University of Southern Maine wanted to set out to build a basketball program, I use that as an example. A lot of people say, what's he talking about? Sports and university, but you only need a few basketball players. It could be a big draw. I mean, you could actually have a division one basketball program at the University of Southern Maine. Now, I did mention that long ago when Harold Alfon was alive, I said that. And he said, no, you can't do that. I said, why? Because it would compete with the University of Maine basketball program in Orano. You cannot do it. No, I hope that never happened. So, but anyway, it has great potential for a lot of things. You know, we have sports programs at our largest university, which is division one and division three at our smaller universities. And I think each of those universities has programs that help attract students to receive an education, which is first and foremost what we need to do. Whether it drives people to the Alfon arena, ice rink up at the University of Maine, or whether it's represented by a great division three team at Southern Maine, I think is less important than that we give the opportunities to the students to experience what they want to experience. And lots of students leaving high school want to continue their athletic career. They may understand that they're not going to be in the NBA or the NHL or the NFL, but they want that extra time to have that experience that people in your family had when they came to America. Yeah, interesting. Some years ago, a couple of high school football coaches got hold of me and we started a little organization to bring football to the University of Southern Maine. And we'd spent a lot of time, we spent two years at this. We raised money, a lot of people pledged a lot of money because the high school football coaches said, we got all these kids in Maine that are not going to play division one football and they're going to Plymouth State and they're going to all these schools outside of Maine. And you got Maine Maritime, they attract kids just because of the football. And we couldn't get it done. We couldn't get it done. It's a long story, I won't get into it here. Shortly thereafter, the University... I didn't come for a gripe sesson. No, no, no, no, tell me all. I want you to listen to my problems. I'm listening to your... I want you to listen to my problems. And you know, and the University of New England did it and succeeded at those things. So if it wasn't your fault, you were in Connecticut when this happened. So you are not... Just remember that athletics, by and large, we lose money and that's a reality. And I think what you have to do is have the best athletic program for your university that you can afford. And in a state, you know, replication, we're all still drawing on the same talent set. And it's just not a lot of people coming out graduating from high school. We're talking about 13,000 people graduating. We get about 30% of those students coming to our universities. The community colleges gets another large percentage. The rest of it is divided up. And a large number of those students never go to college. And I think that that's where we need to spend some time and energy is to have students understand that yes, there are jobs that you can get today, but those jobs are gonna be done a different way five, 10, or 15 years from now. And that if you don't have the experience in the education to run the technology that runs the job that would pay you $15 an hour right now, then you're going to be out of work. And so there's a different message that I think we have to get better at delivering. And that is that change is happening faster than we could ever have imagined in the world. And that change will create jobs and it will displace jobs. And lower income jobs requiring less education are the most likely to be replaced. And so we owe it to every high school student in Maine to make sure that they understand what an investment is and what a chance is. A chance to get a $15 an hour job for the next two years and therefore miss the opportunity to get an associate's degree or baccalaureate degree or a doctorate, you're taking a chance and you're not making an investment in the long haul. And so what we've got to be able to do is to justify the investment being made. And some cases we do that well, I think in other cases we do not do that well. And we have not necessarily met the marketplace as well as we should. I just listened to carefully to what you said. That was a great statement. One, I hope you make to the legislature. I walk softly at the legislature and I know people know I'm from out of state and I want to remain here. I think the reality is that the legislature in fairness and the governor in fairness are doing the best they can. We need to grow Maine's economy. And if you agree that we need to grow Maine's economy then you have to invest more in our university system. I agree with you completely. I really appreciate your coming here and talking about this because you're really talking about the most important issues in our state education and particularly higher education. We have a state where our culture doesn't feature that. Where would Maine be over the last, or where would it have been over the last two years without the nurses that we've produced in all of our nursing programs in this state? You've done a great job and now we've run out of time. All right. Thank you very much, Chancellor, for coming here. Thank you. Appreciate it. It was very interesting. Nice to be with you. I think that we can talk.