Category: News

If elected, it won’t be difficult for Ashley Willems-Phaneuf to step into Student Body President Maggie Guzman’s shoes; during an interview with The Free Press, she was already wearing them. Willems-Phaneuf, a student senator, said she feels like she’s “been in training” to become student body president all year.

A bomb threat made last Friday evening prompted USM police to search the Portland campus. No buildings were evacuated, and the community wasn’t notified of the threat, which officials deemed a prank.

Charles Silsby planned on helping Ashley Willems-Phaneuff with her campaign for student body president. Now he’s running against her. Silsby, a junior political science major, said he had talked with his friends about running for SBB earlier but didn’t decide to run until last Wednesday when he found out Willems-Phaneuf was only one candidate.

Each day, graduate student Heather Anne Wright follows the same routine: she drives an hour to school, works in the biology lab for 10 to 12 hours, then drives the hour back home to Richmond. But amid the commuting and research, Wright says something is missing from her graduate school experience: a community.

The committee in charge of redesigning the academic structure of USM released the first draft of their plan last Monday, calling for reducing the number of colleges from eight to five – eliminating three deans’ positions and eight department heads in the process.

Bob Heiser set the tone at last Friday’s faculty senate meeting with his introduction: “Bob Heiser, school of business and who knows what else.”

The effectiveness of the tobacco policy here at USM is being questioned after University of Maine Orono adopted a Tobacco-Free Campus Policy last week.

Over 150 students, faculty and staff packed the Woodbury Campus Center Amphitheatre on Thursday for a teach-in, where two panels of speakers expounded on the crisis of funding public universities.

Residents in Gorham will now be filling their cups and cereal bowls with Oakhurst milk instead of Hood. USM’s food service provider, Aramark, decided to switch milk to Oakhurst Dairy in their effort to be more environmentally conscious. Retail locations on the Portland and Gorham campuses already sell Oakhurst Dairy products.

Coffee By Design beat out Wicked Joe and the current – and much maligned – Pura Vida in two taste tests during the last week of January.

Nybol Bol moved to the US from Sudan in 1994. Now she’s a shift manager at McDonald’s, where each week the state and federal government deduct taxes from her pay. But because Bol isn’t a citizen, she can’t vote.

The committee in charge of redesigning the academic structure of USM released the first draft of a plan on Monday, which calls for reducing the number of colleges from eight to five, eliminating three deans’ positions and eight department heads in the process.

Vanessa Nash graduated from Hampden Academy last year with a clear plan. She only applied to USM and its competitive nursing program.

Over 150 students, faculty, and staff packed the Woodbury Campus Center Amphitheatre on Thursday for a teach-in where two panels of speakers expounded on the crisis of funding public universities. The event was part of the nationwide March 4th Day of Action to Defend Education, in support of California collegs students, who have protested a…

Brian Greene isn’t like most students at USM. For one thing, he’s a 55-year-old sophomore.

“I don’t really have any idea what I want to do,” said Dylan Webber, an undeclared sophomore. “It’s easier to come here, knowing what you want to do.”

As a girl growing up in Uzbekistan – a country where unmarried women rarely travel abroad – Malika Umarova dreamed of getting a world class education and then returning to her home country to improve public health. Umarova is a 24-year-old first year graduate student in the Muskie School Health Policy and Management master’s degree…

Jelena Price has been working full-time since starting college, first waiting tables at Olive Garden and now working in collections for TD Bank. She enrolled in USM after graduating from Westbook High School in 2005 and plans to graduate with a Spanish degree this May.

A convoluted evolution over the course of 207 years led to what we know today as USM. USM evolved haphazardly through the years, morphing according to the needs of the day, and only took the name the University of Southern Maine in 1978. The school began when the Gorham Academy was founded as a preparatory…

For the past two years, USM – the second largest college in the University of Maine System, and the premier school in Maine’s largest city – has been embroiled in a series of budget crises, beginning with the discovery of a massive deficit in 2007 when Richard Pattenaude was president.

Brad Watts is taking 18 credits this semester – a work load that would send most college students scrambling – and has a 3.4 GPA.

Over the course of three sessions last Thursday and Friday, groups of over 200 faculty, staff, administrators and students brainstormed ways for USM to innovate to offset yearly budgetary gaps and declining enrollment. Fewer than 30 students came to each session.

A group of graduate students are looking to create their own government at USM to represent the roughly 1,700 graduate students who have, until now, lacked formal representation.

Jim Shaffer, chief operating officer for USM and head of the committee in charge of drafting a restructuring plan for the university, met with student senators at their weekly meeting last Friday to solicit opinions and concerns from students who, unlike faculty, have no seats on the committee.