The USM faculty senate voted down a motion of “no confidence” in the Chancellor, according to an e-mail from Roxie Black, Faculty Senate Chair. The motion was voted on at the Senate’s monthly meeting last Friday, November 5th.
The senate replaced the motion of “no confidence” in the Strategic Plan with a motion urging “the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees now work to mend relations, acknowledge the complexity and difficulty of the issues we together face, and move the implementation of the strategic plan forward in an open, collaborative, and collegial effort with all interested students, faculty, staff, and citizens.”
The third “no confidence” motion, this one in the Board of Trustees (BOT), also failed to pass. A motion outlining the inherent problems with the plan to merge UMA with USM replaced it. According to the motion “These problems are not insurmountable, but the process needs to be slowed down so that faculty, students, and administrators on both campuses can deal honestly with both the fiscal and the human situations.”
Faculty members and students spoke out in a community commentary session just prior before a BOT meeting in September, urging board members to delay the vote and extend the scope of people involved in the process.
Following a unanimous Board of Trustees (BOT) vote in September in favor of the proposed Strategic Plan, faculty members statewide began issuing motions of no confidence in both the Chancellor the Board of Trustees. The University of Maine at Machias was the first to pass motions of no confidence in the Chancellor and BOT. The Faculty Assemblies at the University of Maine at Augusta passed similar motions shortly thereafter. The University of Maine in Orono sent similar motions to committee for further analysis and recommendation.