A Week of Two Truths
The first week of a fall semester has its own special rhythm—the parking lots are suddenly fuller again, there’s a line at the Owl’s Nest, that particular hum of a campus remembering its true purpose—and this year that first day came with headlines. On Monday morning, as our students returned, the University of Maine System announced its highest preliminary fall headcount in a decade, and reporters quickly noticed where the growth was coming from. By Monday evening, the Maine Monitor, the Bangor Daily News, the Press Herald, and WABI had all told some version of the same story: the university that was, not so long ago, by some accounts the smallest in the System is now serving over 4,200 students—seventy percent more than a year ago, and three and a half times our enrollment from five years ago.
And on that same day, we lost Dr. John Zaborney.
I have thought a good deal this week about how to process both simultaneously, which seems impossible. John joined the UMPI faculty on September 1, 1997—twenty-nine years ago this week, the very same day I did. The History and Political Science program he coordinated for many years, moved online, and then brought into YourPace in 2020, now enrolls more than 230 majors, the largest such program in the entire University of Maine System. Put otherwise: a meaningful share of the growth that made the papers on Monday is made possible by the work John led with his colleagues. The enrollment story and the story of a teacher whose scholarly and curricular work culminated in designing a new master’s program are not two separate stories. They are interwoven, and it is a story about what we give of ourselves to meet the needs and dreams of our students.
The Numbers, and What They Aren’t
Some necessary context, because the coverage this week has been generous and I would rather we understand our own story within a larger picture. The figures released Monday are preliminary, drawn from data in advance of the official October census, which means we have a whole second fall session to add in before the final numbers are available. But the direction isn’t in doubt. Last fall, at this point, we enrolled 2,404 students; this fall, the preliminary count stands at 4,252 as of this morning. Roughly four-fifths of those students are enrolled through YourPace. This means that the campus many of us walk across each morning is, in a certain sense, the visible portion of a much larger university, one whose students live in every state and many countries. Their learning is, in turn, made possible by the people in Preble, South, Folsom, Pullen, and Wieden who teach them, advise them, assess them, bill them, counsel them, and answer their questions at hours frequently well before 8 AM and after 5 PM Eastern time!
This is the continuation of a trajectory developed and implemented over time rather than a change. In May we graduated 1,752 degree completers, the third consecutive record and the largest class in the history of the institution, with our first-ever Graduate Hooding Ceremony the afternoon before.
And yet it is especially important to acknowledge that growth of this magnitude is not without cost. It is precisely because we (collectively and individually) absorb pressure so well that the pressure can become invisible. Our systems for admissions, transfer evaluation, financial aid, and student records were originally built for an institution of a fraction of this size, and in places they are being asked to do things they were never designed to do. When those systems strain, we make up the difference. That is neither invisible nor unappreciated; rather, it is the opposite of unappreciated, but I also realize that it is not visible enough nor is it appreciated enough. Part of what this year must be about is building the infrastructure—human and technological—that lets our care for students scale without exhausting the people who provide it. It means getting the UMS to make the changes it can to assist us better or finding the tools for us to make those changes ourselves.
Strong Ground, Redux
Last spring, I wrote and talked about our strong ground: the idea that growth is sustainable only when it does not outrun culture, and that our greatest strength is not a platform or a program but the people who animate both. I call that out again now not because it needs restating but because this fall will surely test that theory. A university that has more than tripled in five years is, by definition, one where many colleagues have known this place only as it is now. The memory of what it took to get here—the years when YourPace was an argument rather than an enrollment engine, before we had envisioned Free for Four, and a time when the humanities were being told, elsewhere, that their day was done—is, quite literally, history. John Zaborney was one of the keepers of that history. His conviction, which I quoted on Monday because it seemed to me to explain both his scholarship and his teaching, was that the past is not a refuge from the present but the only ground on which the present can be understood. That is as good a definition of strong ground for higher education as I know.
So I will ask of us this semester what I asked in January, with the added urgency this week has supplied: that we operate above the line, seeking solutions and support when needed rather than assigning blame; that we choose curiosity over certainty, especially about one another’s work; and that we remember, when the systems are strained to their limits, that the person on the other end of that is a colleague doing their best inside a structure that has not yet caught up with our ambition. And they most need our care and understanding.
What’s Ahead This Fall
A few items, briefly, that you will hear more about in the coming weeks. Jason Towers rejoined us on July 1 as Vice President of Strategic Growth and Workforce Development, and his first months have been spent exactly where I hoped they would be: on the processes and systems that must be brought to the standard our growth now demands. Following the cabinet’s August retreat, Strategic Plan 2028—Our Purpose, Our People, Our Promise—has been revised, with outcomes refined, added, and in some cases retired; the updated plan will be shared for community review shortly, along with an invitation to help shape its next phase. The University of Maine System Board of Trustees will meet here on campus at the end of this month, and I am grateful in advance to all who will help us host them. Our AI Council continues its work on how agentic and generative tools might support and amplify human work rather than replace it. I would commend to anyone interested MIT’s recent report on AI and the university, which Anne Fensie shared with us, as it is among the more thoughtful treatments of the question I have read. And my thanks to Emma McNally, our amazing HR team and Hoot Squad, Sodexo, and everyone else who made last week’s welcome-back breakfast happen. It reminded me, once again, how much this community values simply being in a room together.
Closing
The first Owl’s Roost I ever sent, in the fall of 2016, went to a campus roughly a third the size of the one reading this. This edition goes to a community serving nearly 4,100 students—and one that spent its first week of the semester doing the hardest thing a community can do, which is to celebrate and to grieve at once, and to do both honestly. I do not think there is a better measure of an institution than that.
Enjoy the coming long weekend. And thank you—for the work, for the care, and for holding, together, what this university has become.
With gratitude,
