A Professor, Laid Off, Returns as Provost to Plot Her University’s Comeback

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Jeannine D. Uzzi had been teaching at the University of Southern Maine for 12 years when she learned that she was going to lose her job. Facing a budget deficit of $16 million, the university’s administration had decided to cut five programs — including modern and classical languages, the department in which she was an associate professor. Tenured and tenure-track faculty positions in those programs would be eliminated.

Ms. Uzzi did not take the decision lying down. She testified against the cuts at meetings of the University of Maine system’s Board of Trustees, participated in disruptive protests, and worked with a group of faculty to come up with an alternative plan to save the programs through administrative salary reductions and voluntary early retirements. Despite their efforts the programs, and Ms. Uzzi’s position, were cut in 2014.

So the professor went out on the market. Early in 2015 Ms. Uzzi, a longtime resident of Maine, landed a job she was excited about: director of faculty programs for the Associated Colleges of the South. Her young children were still in school, so she worked from Maine through the spring semester with a plan to move to Atlanta in July. She sold her house and began to pack her things.

Meanwhile, after a false start in its search process, the University of Southern Maine was concluding its search for a new president. Glenn Cummings, a member of the faculty who had moved on to become interim president at the University of Maine at Augusta, filled the role.

Mr. Cummings had the summer to put together a leadership team at the embattled university. One of his first tasks: Find an interim provost. Mr. Cummings spoke to the faculty about who might join his leadership team. Ms. Uzzi’s name kept coming up.

“Everybody said she was a spectacular teacher, an impressive researcher, and an exceptionally engaging leader,” Mr. Cummings said. “I said, ‘Well, that sounds like the kind of characteristics I’d like to see in a provost.’”

Over breakfast one morning in June, Mr. Cummings asked Ms. Uzzi: Would you consider staying in Maine and returning to the university that had fired you, this time as provost? She was shocked.

Ms. Uzzi knew immediately that she wanted the job. But she was hesitant to give up on a position she had just started, especially since she didn’t have a contract yet.

In the end, she agreed to take the job. By September she started as provost.

Now, with two former faculty members at the helm — one a former thorn in the side of trustees — the University of Southern Maine is trying to pull itself out of a traumatic period marked by enrollment declines, rapid administrative turnover, and layoffs of tenured faculty like Ms. Uzzi.

“When it came down to it, I was always at USM for the mission,” Ms. Uzzi said. “It’s always suffered from a lack of enough resources, and there’s never enough money here to do everything we wanted to do.”

Maine as Bellwether

By the time Ms. Uzzi learned that her department was marked for elimination, Southern Maine’s problems seemed to be coming from all directions. After years of incremental steps meant to stave off decline, the University of Maine system office, led by chancellor James H. Page, determined in 2014 that it was time to take some drastic steps to fix a deepening budget shortfall.

Maine’s high-school student population had been declining steadily, which pulled down enrollment at public universities throughout the state. At the same time, a community-college system, started in 2003, had found its footing, offering a cheaper alternative to Southern Maine. Other universities, most notably the University of Southern New Hampshire, competed for students online.

The University of Maine system went six years without a tuition hike while state appropriations remained flat or increased incrementally. During that period, administrators at both the university and the system level got pay raises. Many faculty members came to feel that the budgetary woes would be best solved by slimming down the bureaucracy, not cutting academic programs. Mistrust between the faculty and administrators festered.

These issues were not just the story of the University of Southern Maine. Every public university in Maine saw budget cuts in 2014, when the system projected it would be $90 million in debt in five years if it held course. Across the country, public universities still reeling from the recession made deep cuts; public regional universities including the University of New Orleans, Western Carolina University, and Delta State University, in Cleveland, Miss., eliminated entire degree programs. Over the last year the cuts have continued at public regionals like Chicago State University and Western Illinois University.

Public regionals, long accustomed to having local students drawn naturally to them, are struggling as competition with online universities, community colleges, and other institutions grows and resources tighten, said Richard Hesel and David Strauss, principals at the Art & Science Group, a higher-education consulting firm. Those institutions need to tighten up their admissions and fund-raising operations and find ways to differentiate themselves in order to survive, they said.

“What they’ve been historically is relatively generic places that serve an area, that don’t know how to go out and recruit,” Mr. Strauss said. “Maine is a small state, shrinking demographically, so it’s something of a bellwether overall.”

Meanwhile, turnover has deepened the University of Southern Maine’s struggles. The institution has had five presidents in the past five years, including one who never actually started in the role. (Harvey Kesselman, provost of Stockton University in New Jersey, had accepted the job before Mr. Cummings, but he decided to stay at Stockton after its president resigned abruptly.) Mr. Cummings replaced nine people in his administration in his first two months.

Fiscally Conservative Change

Ms. Uzzi’s decision to take the job as provost did not immediately ensure her appointment. Both she and Mr. Cummings said some members of the University of Maine system’s Board of Trustees were hesitant to bring her onto the leadership team because they thought she might go easy on the faculty. Ms. Uzzi said she can understand now where they were coming from.

“They saw me protesting what was happening,” she said. “I held signs in support of the academic programs. I really felt I had the students’ best interests at heart. They also had the best interests of students and the state of Maine at heart. We came to different conclusions.”

In the end, Mr. Cummings convinced the board that it was worth sorting through the complications, and Ms. Uzzi officially started her new job in September 2015. She is now finishing her second year in the university’s administration, after being made permanent provost last year.

To make the turn from professor (and protester) to provost, Ms. Uzzi has had to recalibrate her relationship with both the board and her former peers in the faculty. She said she empathizes with how stressed out they are balancing teaching, research, and student support, but she also knows personally the consequences when an institution spends beyond its means.

“There are so many benefits that come to me because people already know me and trust me,” she said. “Now I have the purse strings, so sometimes I just have to say no.”

Robert Heiser, an associate professor of marketing in the university’s business school, said that as provost, Ms. Uzzi had been supportive of the faculty.

“I worked with Jeannine on the Faculty Senate as a senator about seven years back,” Mr. Heiser said. “It was during more difficult times, so I know that she can stand up to bad ideas when the time comes.”

Ms. Uzzi said she has worked to assuage the Board of Trustees’ concerns and build a productive relationship. She has been working with them and the chief academic officers at other public universities in Maine to come up with ways the universities can collaborate.

“They are not educators themselves, and they are aware of that,” Ms. Uzzi said of the board members. “They are really open to new ideas, and I feel like when they ask questions, they really want to know.”

Mr. Cummings said the provost’s experience on the wrong side of cutbacks puts her in a unique position to meet the university’s cautious approach to making major changes. “I knew instinctively that she would be exceptionally careful about the budget because she never would want to put another faculty member in the same position she was in,” he said.

Ms. Uzzi agreed. “After Glenn hired me and we began to get involved in the work of running the university, he looked at me one day and said with surprise, ‘You’re fiscally conservative!’ I said, ‘Of course I am. I grew up in upstate New York, and there’s never been enough money.’”

The university’s budget is still tight. As a result, Ms. Uzzi thinks of hiring a tenure-track professor as making a lifelong commitment, like nominating a Supreme Court justice.

“With the current-year budget, there are always places where someone leaves unexpectedly, you have surplus in a line,” she said. “Those are the places where you can really try new things.”

Those new things include strategic investments in new programs the university hopes will offer growth potential to help make up for the loss of the departments it eliminated — modern and classical languages, American and New England studies, and geosciences. It will invest in a new tenure-track professor for a low-residency master’s in social work that combines online classes with some intensive Saturday sessions, Ms. Uzzi said. Southern Maine has added a food-studies minor and a cybersecurity major in collaboration with other universities in the system.

The university also wants to offer a video-game program, so it will create a minor by hiring a professor on a three-year contract.

“We’re going to see what we can make of it in two or three years,” Ms. Uzzi said. “If there’s promise there, maybe we will make a long-term investment.”

Enrollment Challenges

Perhaps the biggest challenge the university faced was the steadily declining student population. In the fall of 2015, the headcount was 7,739, down from 9,385 in 2012. The job of boosting enrollment fell to Nancy D. Griffin, who had been hired in the spring as vice president for enrollment management. Ms. Griffin had been associate dean for enrollment management and student affairs at the nursing school at Johns Hopkins University.

When Ms. Griffin started, she rolled up her sleeves and got “back to the basics of good admissions work,” she said. Along with the system’s flagship, the University of Maine at Orono, Southern Maine had hoped to recruit aggressively out of state. That plan seemed to make sense because Maine’s high-school demographics are not expected to improve. But Ms. Griffin thought more work could be done to enroll Maine students.

“I saw what the admissions team was doing out of state and I said, ‘Wow, that’s a really expensive proposition, and the yield rate for the state isn’t high,’” said Ms. Griffin, a Maine native and Southern Maine alumna. So the university refocused on its traditional role as a driver of the local economy.

“Even though there are smaller numbers graduating, if we could keep more of them in Maine, we’d keep them in our work force, and we desperately need that.”

Her office embarked on a listening tour of every single high school in the state. They asked college counselors what they could be doing better and heard one message loud and clear: The university’s financial-aid packages were not competitive with those of every other college in the state, including the private institutions.

In response, the university has added almost $4 million to its financial-aid budget, which it plans to increase further next year. It also began offering financial aid to transfer students.

Ms. Griffin said her office has tried to work more closely with the nearby community colleges. Students who graduate with certain associate degrees from York County Community College, Southern Maine Community College, and Central Maine Community College can now enroll directly in Southern Maine without applying, she said.

Last fall enrollment at the University of Southern Maine climbed up for the first time in years to 7,855. Ms. Griffin said the university had the most applications it has seen in 15 years.

That’s not to say that the university does not continue to face steep challenges. While applications and enrollment are up, retention remains one of them. Only about 13 percent of the students who started in 2008 graduated in four years, while 37 percent graduated in eight years.

“We’re working really hard on that,” Ms. Griffin said. “We’re moving the needle, but we’ve got a long way go.”

Ms. Uzzi said the university is investing in tutoring, especially in math and sciences classes. After years of turnover, she said, the leadership is planning to stay with the university for the long haul. When they set goals, she said, they intend to be around to see them through.

In the meantime, the university is still recovering from the lingering sense of loss that came with the controversial cuts to faculty and departments. Even though Ms. Uzzi ended up staying with the university after those cuts, she feels it too.

“At graduation this year, there I was onstage as provost,” she said. “The very last classics major at USM walked across the stage. That was emotional for me.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.