After a tumultuous three months, University of Maine System Chancellor Dannel Malloy, hired in 2019, has survived to fight another day — or another year, to be exact.

Malloy has been in the crosshairs ever since a botched search ended up selecting, and hiring, a new president for the University of Maine at Augusta who’d been the object of no-confidence votes at his previous New York state campus. Malloy and a few others knew about this, but didn’t inform other members of the search committee; after an uproar, the contract was bought out.

This is the kind of inexplicable, unforced error that makes one realize that, despite being the longtime mayor of Stamford, and twice elected governor of Connecticut, Malloy isn’t a politician — or at least not a very good one.

Whether he can be a good chancellor — and I, for one, believe he was a good, though sometimes unpopular governor — very much remains to be seen.

I have interviewed Malloy twice, once at the beginning and once at what could have been the end of his tenure, before the Board of Trustees extended a one-year contract. I can report that he is decisive, determined, and disciplined in carrying out the trustees’ mandate, but his qualities can also make him appear too single-minded and heedless of dissenting opinions.

Conflating the UMA debacle with faculty reductions at the University of Maine at Farmington — a campus that has not balanced its budget in 10 years — press and broadcast reporters created a maelstrom around the chancellor that piled on criticism without any attempt at balance.

There’s plenty to be said on both sides, but let’s start with — since it’s so far largely unreported — Malloy’s achievements since 2019.

He made two major decisions on taking office: to seek unified accreditation for all campuses, and to provide independence for the University of Maine School of Law in Portland, previously administered by the University of Southern Maine.

The results of the first initiative are prospective, but it could solve several problems created by the relatively loose system organization, which has always included substantial campus autonomy.

It fully addresses transferring credits to other campuses, and from community colleges, that the system was always working on, but never quite solved. The inability to make such transfers was one of the factors in sagging enrollment at Farmington, which used a different credit-hour system.

Now, Maine students should be able to complete their degrees faster and more inexpensively — an essential change when colleges and universities across the country are competing for a declining pool of high school graduates.

The second problem is the system’s previous inability to attract many out-of-state students, whose higher tuition payments add much-needed revenue. Unified accreditation, when fully achieved, could make a small university system — by national standards — more competitive; there are just 20,000 “full-time equivalent” enrollments.

The law school’s independence is also important. Despite the inevitable lawyer jokes, law schools also struggle to attract students, but Maine’s is holding its own. Like it or not, legal services, like financial services, are a driving force in today’s economy, and Portland is, or should be, a hub.

Maine Law is now poised to grow, for a couple of reasons. With independence, it was able to attract a top talent in its new dean, Leigh Saufley, who stepped down as the second longest serving chief justice of Maine.

Saufley has been able to secure a downtown, waterfront building as the new home for the law school, in the heart of “lawyer land,” just a few blocks from the state and federal courthouse. USM faculty criticized the move, but the Portland campus is getting its own $100 million student center, and first residential housing.

Nor has the rest of the state been neglected. Aroostook County will have its own legal clinic, staffed by Maine Law students, in a region where lawyers are as scarce as they are abundant in Cumberland County.

All this has became possible with the aid of a $240 million commitment to UMS by the Alfond Foundation — by far the largest gift ever bestowed on the public universities of Maine, and an endorsement of Malloy’s leadership. It’s already helped reinvigorate the law school, graduate business and engineering programs, and attracted new federal grants.

So much for achievements. None of these changes can be accomplished without ruffling feathers and disturbing the status quo, which also creates controversy.

The question is whether Malloy is the right person to keep these largely positive developments on track, or whether he will instead follow other reforming chancellors of the past who made premature exits.

We’ll consider those factors next week.

Douglas Rooks, a Maine editor, commentator and reporter since 1984, is the author of three books. His first, “Statesman: George Mitchell and the Art of the Possible,” is now out in paperback.  He welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net

 

 

 

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