Dear Campus Community,
As many of us know only too well, May on campus has its own unique and sometimes frenetic rhythm. The members of our Class of 2026 who will walk on Saturday are coming from all corners, from as close as down the road in Presque Isle and as far as Bangladesh; faculty are grading the last papers and projects of the year; and staff are doing the work that makes a commencement possible — the seating, the regalia, the scripting, the checked-and-rechecked list of names. Historically, this is the season when an academic year proves itself indisputably the life-changing human experience we know it truly is.
I want to take a moment, in this issue of the Owl’s Roost, to mark what we have done together this year — and, more importantly, to note what I believe the work ahead of us may ask.
The numbers tell one story. We are approaching 4,000 students, an institution that as recently as 2021 served roughly 1,100. YourPace — the faculty-designed competency-based program we built together — now accounts for more than 10 percent of the University of Maine System’s headcount; it remains the lowest-cost public CBE program in the country; and it has reached, this year, a point of national visibility that would have been impossible to foresee back in 2017. Meanwhile, American higher education has been roiled by what Sian Beilock, the president of Dartmouth, rightfully calls a “trust problem” — describing, from her institutional vantage, much of what we have been building from ours, here in Aroostook County. (A useful summary of her argument is available here.)
This last point matters to all of us, no matter what role we play here at UMPI, and I want to unpack it a bit — both because I think we sometimes underestimate what has happened, and because it is something I have begun to discuss? more broadly (see, for example, this recent BDN op-ed). Five years ago, UMPI was a small rural campus that the System summarized on its annual budget presentation slides; today, when the Board of Trustees convenes to consider the future of online and adult learning, the question on the table is, in part, what UMPI has shown to be possible. That is a kind of institutional standing — a voice in the room, a frame of reference, a precedent — that we did not have before, and that we now carry whether we wish to or not.
Influence, however, is not the point. Influence is what an institution acquires; it is not what an institution is for. And this is the core of what I’m getting at this day before Commencement 2026 — I want to underscore, now more than ever, that the work of UMPI must be carried out from an ethic of care.
I first invoked that phrase in the spring of 2020, when Covid-19 upended higher education and all of our lives. I used it intentionally, to emphasize at that unprecedented moment, the importance of connection, empathy, and care — not just for our students, but for each other. Joan Tronto, working out of feminist political theory, has argued that care is not a sentiment but a practice — a set of disciplined attentions and responsibilities institutions undertake for the people in their reach. To care, in this sense, is not merely to feel concern but to act on what fully receiving another requires. These are not supplemental options; they are central to what we do. They ask us to see each person in our care — the single parent finishing the degree began decades ago, the veteran completing what they started before deployment, the first-generation student who has run out of options elsewhere, the paraprofessional in our YourPace program earning the credential the profession requires — as a person whose flourishing is the actual measure of what we do here, not as a data point whose persistence rate we report. I like to think that, in our moments of greatest clarity, we cleave to this not as one institutional goal among others but as the very purpose for which public higher education was created.
I name this now because the political moment in American higher education is unkind, and because the institutions that emerge intact from such moments tend to be the ones whose internal culture is steady, generous, and attentive. The federal landscape is volatile. Public trust is uneven. Students arrive carrying more — financially, psychologically, contextually — than students did when many of us began this work. Our growth means we now serve people we would not have reached five years ago, many of them people for whom UMPI is the institution that finally allowed them fully to demonstrate their achievements. They deserve, and the moment requires, our best practice of care.
What does that look like? It looks like a faculty member, even after a long spring semester, who returns student work as quickly as they can because the student is waiting and a delay is its own kind of harm. It looks like a staff member who answers a confused phone call with the patience that the caller is, frankly, not always able to extend in return. It looks like an administration that makes budget decisions by asking who is affected and how, before it asks whether the spreadsheet balances. It looks like a campus that resists the temptations of cynicism and exhaustion that our world so overwhelmingly practices and even rewards.
Commencement is, in some sense, the embodiment of all this. Each diploma we will hand across that stage on Saturday represents a relationship that worked — between a student and a faculty member, an advisor or a counselor or a coach, between a student and the institution itself. The relationships are themselves the achievement. The numbers, the influence, the national attention — these are the consequences of the relationships, not their purpose.
As we prepare to celebrate our largest-ever graduating class, I would ask each of you to pause and remember the moments that counted, the successes we shared, and the lives we changed. Thank you for the year you have given to this place, and to the people, especially one another, in our care.
With gratitude,
