President Botman has named USM’s next Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs – Dr. Kate Langdon Forhan of Northeastern Illinois University.
Forhan is currently the dean of NEIU’s College of Arts and Sciences, a post she has held since 2002. Her selection caps a hiring campaign that yielded 97 applicants from colleges around the country.
It was also announced that Dr. Forhan will begin her job unusually early – whereas such positions typically change hands in July, at the start of a new fiscal year, Forhan has negotiated to leave her current job and start work at USM in April.
“The team of people I’m working with [in Illinois], they’re in good shape, and the college is in good shape,” Forhan says.
“When I met with the President and search committee at USM, it was clear to me that the sooner I can be there, the better.”
Forhan will inherit one of the most senior administrative roles at a University grappling with major budget limitations and uncertainty about its future: in the short-term, the school is still contracting its operating budget to reconcile a sudden funding shortfall of $2.7 million.
In the long-term, it faces a likelihood of deeper cuts in the coming years, and a major restructuring effort is underway.
“We’ve entered a new world and a new reality,” says President Botman.
“Dr. Forhan will have major input in how we implement a new strategy.”
She will relieve interim provost Mark Lapping, who has been holding the job since Joseph Wood relinquished it to act as interim President in 2007, for the presidential search that resulted in Botman’s hire.
When Botman took office in July, she declined to ask Wood to return to the position; instead, she initiated a search committee consisting of various faculty, staff, members of the community, and student body president Ben Taylor. Ads were immediately placed in prominent academic journals.
“We made sure to start the search early in order to stay ahead,” says Taylor. “A lot of other schools were hiring this year.”
Taylor says that while only a small percentage of students may have been aware of the job opening, he feels he was able to bring student concerns to the search process. Aside from reviewing cover letters and resumes – roughly 1,500 pages, he estimates – he was also granted private 30-minute interviews with all four finalists.
“From my perspective, it’s all about how they handle a student with an issue that reaches their office,” he says.
“Once you get to the provost, you’re usually fairly upset.”
Forhan hopes her interactions with students aren’t necessarily so stressful.
“It’s important that people know who you are, and be able to find you.” says Forhan, who plans to open a second office in Gorham in addition to the existing space in Portland’s Law building.
“If I see [students] sitting on a bench, I’m not averse to asking ‘hey, you – what do you like about this place?'”
Aside from channeling student concerns to the President’s office, the provost is expected to provide a similar link to the school’s faculty. For that reason, members of the search committee focused as much on each candidate’s prior lives as scholars as to their accomplishments as administrators.
Following B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of California, Forhan earned her Ph.D in political science from Johns Hopkins University; she has written and edited several books, with particular focus on medieval French writer Christine de Pizan, believed by many to be Europe’s first female to do so professionally.
Forhan may be asked to return to the classroom to teach in her area of expertise, as Botman is doing with Egyptian political history this spring. But Lapping points out, as he prepares to assist in the transition, that much of his workday is largely tied up in the budget crisis. He says that the focus of his job has shifted in recent months, and that this month the UMaine system has given its chief academic officers a daunting agenda: “To change the system, by collaboration.”
In her scholarship, Forhan has been fascinated with the metaphor of the “body politic” to describe the roles of people and groups within an institution. And in that spirit, even she has a hard time pegging down the role of provost at USM.
“We are all interdependent,” she writes. “…so sometimes a provost is an eye or an ear, or a heart or a hand, or an arm or a foot, but so is everybody else!”