Author: USM

When Lou Gainey broke his leg the first week of the semester, he wasn’t the only one worried. The students in the biology professor’s General Physiology course were concerned about whether it would be cancelled.

“It meets three times a week. I thought ‘how on earth are they going to cover it?'” said junior Katherine Letourneau.

The final two candidates for USM’s presidency visited our three campuses last week, ending the two-week process of introducing the four candidates to our university and allowing us to meet and question them in return.

During the first week, we met Robert Smith from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and Selma Botman from the City University of New York system.

Several hundred people rose early in support of Republican Presidential hopeful Dr. Ron Paul as he addressed the USM and Portland communities Monday morning at USM’s Abromson Center.

Flyers bearing Paul’s face and his slogan “The Doctor is in” plastered the walls outside the Hannaford Lecture Hall in the event hosted by the USM College Republicans.

The door says Wise Laboratory, and they aren’t kidding around.

When walking in, you could be greeted by its director, Dr. John Wise Sr., who relocated the lab from Yale in 2002.

Or by his wife, Sandra Wise, who acts as the Director of Cytogenetics and Genomic Instability.

Walking through the Portland campus these days, it’s hard to believe that USM is in a budget crisis. The constant drone of heavy machinery and glass-paneled brilliance of the Wishcamper Center seem like signs of a university on its way up.

The $8.2 million loan recently granted to the school tells a different story.

A pair of students sit reading in the leather couches in the corner nook of the Abromson Center next to the twenty-foot-tall table-and-chairs sculpture on the first floor. A gray-haired woman smiles from the reception desk, and upstairs the doors to the skywalk swish open and closed.

It has been said a thousand times over and shown in who knows how many different ways, yet it still doesn’t seem to be heard. We, as college students and a nation, need to start doing something about our carbon impact on the world today.

With gas prices rising and supposedly reaching a new high of $4 next month, it’s time to realize that we can’t rely on our fossil fuels.

The Maine construction company responsible for building Gorham’s technologically apt and efficient John Mitchell Center is at work again-and being watched.

The property recently aquired from Portland Plastic Pipe is being filmed from atop the Glickman Library and Masterton Hall and reloaded every few seconds, Wright Ryan’s progress on the Wishcamper Center, a part of the University Commons project, is converted to a constant stream of progress available via webcam.