Transcription of Maine’s University #267
Male: You are Listening to “Love Maine Radio,” hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle, and recorded at the studios of “Maine Magazine” in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at LoveMaineRadio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Susan: It’s that combination of undergraduate and graduate, really is what enriches the environment. In honors, students do their intensive reading and discussion. They work through tutorials, and more and more high level, and then by their senior year, they’re doing an honors thesis with a faculty committee that partly is focused on the work they did, so their scholarly work. Part of the defense they go through is focused on their reading list, and they put together this series of readings that they thought were just central to their education. They’re basically examined on the readings, as well as their thesis. It’s a very sophisticated achievement. The students that go all the way through the end, and go to the brunch and get their medal and their stein, they have really accomplished something.
Danielle: I’m looking at this 5-year-old, and trying to talk to him like a 25-year-old, so that’s my fault. It’s been a journey, and an extraordinary journey. He is fun. He is excited. He is a diva. He breaks down, he gets right back up. He’s resilient. It’s teaching me a lot about who I need to be, as a leader, a mother, a friend, a parent. There’s a lot of forgiveness that goes with being a parent, because they teach you that you are completely fallible, but all you have to do is keep coming back to them with love and encouragement, and they give you another chance every time. It’s amazing to me.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to “Love Maine Radio,” show number 267, “Maine’s University,” airing for the first time on Sunday, October 30th, 2016. The University of Maine system provides a high quality education to students from our state and all over the world. Today, we speak with University of Maine President Susan Hunter, and Danielle Conway, dean and professor of law at the University of Maine School of Law. Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa: As many people know, we have many, many Belisle’s that have gone through the University of Maine system, including most recently my son Campbell, who graduated here in 2016. For that reason, I am quite grateful to my next guest, Dr. Susan J. Hunter, who became president of the University of Maine on July 7th, 2014. Prior to starting her appointment as U Maine’s first woman president, President hunter served as vice-chancellor for academic affairs for the University of Maine system.
She began her full-time career at the University of Maine in 1991, as a faculty member in the department of biological sciences. At U Maine, her administrative positions included chair of the department of biological sciences, associate provost, and dean for undergraduate education, and five years as the executive vice-president for academic affairs and provost.
Her research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She received a PhD in physiology from Pennsylvania State University. Thanks so much for coming in.
Susan: It’s a pleasure to be here, it really is. It was great to meet you on the day before commencement, on campus.
Lisa: Yes, this was a very interesting story that I love. I know that you also like it, because we drove on to campus and Campbell was going to, I think it was an honors brunch.
Susan: He was at the honors brunch, so it’s a brunch we have every year for the graduates of the honors college and their families and their faculty mentors.
Lisa: We did not know where we were going. I was driving along, and we rolled the window down, and there you were on the sidewalk. We had no idea who you were and we said, “Can you help us find this place?” You said, “Why don’t I just take you there?” and you hopped in our car.
Susan: I introduced myself, and it turns out of course I’m the president of the university.
Lisa: Yes, and obviously we wouldn’t have let you in the car if you hadn’t told us who you were, if you were just some random person, although there are very nice people at the University of Maine, so I can think probably we might have found somebody else who was equally accommodating. It still says a lot.
Susan: It seemed like the most logical way to get you from where you were, outside Alumni Hall, to Wells Commons, given the traffic pattern on campus that day because of people moving out of dorms and whatnot. I will say, the people in my office sort of said, “What? You jumped into a car with two strangers just outside the building?” I said, “They looked really reputable.”
Lisa: I’m glad to hear that. I would hate to think that I looked something other than reputable.
Susan: No, perfectly aboveboard. I hope you had a good day on campus and then a good day at commencement.
Lisa: We did, and I think that I told you on that day that my son, he graduated with double majors in biology and Spanish, and he received a really great education. I don’t think he could have been more pleased, and as his parent, I also could not be more pleased with what he was able to accomplish at the University of Maine.
Susan: I think that we hear that over and over again. First of all, I know he’s going on to Tufts Medical School after a gap year, or he’s going down to South America.
Lisa: Correct.
Susan: I think we hear that over and over from students and their parents. In some cases, it’s students who say, “Maine wasn’t my first choice,” or “U Maine wasn’t my first choice, it’s where I ended up. I wasn’t sure, and then I fell in love with the place, and really I walked away with a tremendous education, tremendous connection to people on campus.”
I think part of that is, we’re big enough to be a true research university, and we are. That provides enormous opportunities for students. It also provides enough scale and scope that there is, I think, a place for everybody. The number of activities, the whole spectrum of everything is available, but it’s small enough that it still feels like a neighborhood. I’ve been there for 30 years. I started as a part-time. I started as an adjunct, and eventually got hired as a full-time person.
I think it allows people to feel comfortable, and still feel like they’re part of a community. That’s what works, it’s academically, but it’s also a good feeling of home and friendliness, and people note that when they’re on campus. People are really friendly, helpful, engaged, all of that.
Lisa: I liked knowing the amount of effort that you put into all levels of education. My son did the honors college, which has really changed in the years since I knew it, many years ago. I was at the University of Maine for a year and a half before I transferred, and was in the honors college. The fact that you now have a building that the honors college is affiliated with, you now have this brunch. The students are doing these papers, which are very high levels of research and intellectual thought. You have a broad breadth of offerings for all different types of people.
Susan: Right, and the honors college is one of our define signature areas of excellence. I think what makes it special is it tends to attract students who are looking for that very intensive, I’d say the reading of intense discussion with faculty small group leads them through very sophisticated readings. All of the students in the honors college are of course majoring in something. You don’t major in honors, and so it really is that companion piece of what one might envision as the core or the ideal of a small liberal arts college, married up with a university that has over 90 undergraduate majors, and 75 masters and 30 doctoral programs.
I always mention that, the graduate offerings, because the presence of graduate students really makes a campus very vibrant. It adds to the energy, but it also adds to enormous student opportunity, because students work with faculty, but faculty who have graduate students actually have more opportunities to offer. The graduate students also play a role in mentoring. A faculty member can manage more projects with graduate students, and therefore have more places for undergraduates to fit in. It’s that combination of undergraduate and graduate, really is what enriches the environment.
In honors, students do the intensive reading and discussion. They work through tutorials, and more and more high level, and then by their senior year, they’re doing an honors thesis with a faculty committee that partly is focused on the work they did, so their scholarly work. Part of the defense they go through is focused on their reading list, and they put together this series of readings that they thought were just central to their education, and they’re basically examined on the readings as well as their thesis. It’s a very sophisticated achievement. The students that go all the way through the end and go to the brunch and get their medal and their stein, they have really accomplished something.
Lisa: Campbell sent me his reading list, and it was striking to me that as a student that was doing biochemistry and Spanish, and he was very focused in the sciences when he went through, he had a very liberal arts set of books that he had examined over the four years that he had been there.
Susan: That’s really the goal. Those students who are willing to take on that challenge, it’s ideal if … They can be in any major at all, but I think in some ways, when you see somebody in the sciences or a technical field, and then look at their reading list, the compare and contrast is even more apparent than a student who might have majored in one of the liberal arts fields. That’s not a negative, it’s just you are more aware of, in a sense, the reading list when you compare it with somebody or look at it with somebody who majored in one of the STEM fields.
Lisa: It strikes me that you are wanting to help stem the brain drain. The University of Maine, it offers so many things depending upon what your desires are. One of the things that it has been doing and it’s got to be doing for at least a decade now is scholarship money to the top students in high schools around the state. My son took advantage of that, so he got this great high-quality education, and he got it really through having a full scholarship-
Susan: He got a scholarship.
Lisa: … To the University of Maine. That’s so forward thinking, to be able to say, “We really don’t want you to have to leave the state to get a good education.”
Susan: That’s something that we have been working on, and we are, I’d say, putting even more intense focus on it, in part because the state of Maine is really looking at both I would say a demographic and a geographic challenge. We are the state with the oldest median age population, and we are seeing a decline in the number of high school graduates due to population decline, not because people are leaving high school.
When you look at that, you realize that the state is facing a shortage of people in the teen to 20s to 30s age cohort, and seeing a rise in those of us in my age cohort. The whole state can’t run, we cannot have an economy based on 1.3 million retired people. We actually have to do everything we can to both hang on to the talent we have in the state, and make it attractive to stay in the state, and attract people from other states.
We’ve got some programs that we’ve named the Maine Matters program, where we’re really trying to make the University of Maine more affordable for middle-income families. We have our Maine Match program, and that program is really aimed at students who are looking at U Maine, and they’re also looking at flagship land grant campuses throughout New England, so UConn, U Mass Amherst, UVM, UNH, and we’re offering a plan that we want to look at the financial aid package that they’re getting there, and do the best job we can to make our financial aid very attractive, so that they will choose to stay in Maine and come to their flagship land grant campus.
For out of state students, we’ve identified six states; it’s Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Rutgers, where the flagship campuses’ in state tuition is more than our in state tuition. In this case, we offer a two-tiered merit award. This is an academic merit award. Tier one students from those states, if they apply and they are granted a tier one award, they pay to come to the University of Maine, they pay what they would pay to go to their flagship campus. It’s this flagship match. If they get a tier two award, they would pay more than tier one, but still not the full cost of being an out of state student.
It has resulted in, I think the number is now 38 percent increase in confirmed out of state students for this coming fall, so it looks like it’s being successful. I’ll just say one more thing on this, and that’s we see when people graduate from U Maine from out of state, it’s about 15 to 20 percent stay in Maine for their first job. Even if we don’t change the percentage, if we just jack up the number of people and the percentage stays the same, we will be retaining more people. We will be attracting people, educating them, and more of them will stay in state. That will really benefit the state of Maine.
Lisa: Do you think that you, as a university system, are benefitting from the recognition that Maine is a great place to live, a great place to visit?
Susan: Yeah.
Lisa: I know what I do with “Maine Magazine,” that’s sort of my position, is predicated on that. I’ve lived here all my life. Is this also something that you think that students are coming to recognize as they’re applying to go to college, and wanting to experience themselves?
Susan: Yes; the short answer is yes. It seems to have taken off a bit more, and I think in part that’s because, part of it is the financial aid packaging and that. Part of it is marketing, and frankly being, I would say, more aggressive and more perhaps professional, having people that really know how to do that. We’ve done a much better campaign of PR; billboards on the highways in New England, the radio and TV spots.
We had a firm that we hired that did some marketing for us, and they were able to get really good stories in newspapers. We had a front page story in the “Boston Globe.” The “Hartford Courant” covered it, so it was mentioned, there was something in the “Washington Post.” When you get that kind of coverage then, it piques peoples’ interest, and then more people start to come and look at the campus.
They spend a day there, and they come to an open house, and all of that; it frankly gins up interest, which is great, because then more people discover you. They realize that there really is something, when you make the trip to Orono, Maine, there’s really something to find. That’s why we encourage people to come visit, especially people that either haven’t ever been there, or haven’t been there in a long time, because it is a different place. We need people to come and see it, and the place sells itself.
Lisa: You have a really impressive background, with your PhD in physiology from Penn State, and also having research supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. You’ve had two very interesting … At least two that I can think of … Very interesting, academically-oriented careers. That research piece I find so important, because what’s happening in the state of Maine, the work that we’re doing to discover new things or to build on research that’s been done previously, I think that’s really going to help us as we move into the future.
Susan: Into the future, yeah. Frankly, I’ve had a fascinating career. I’ve been incredibly lucky. I’ve been the beneficiary of great opportunities. I had fabulous mentors all the way along. The research side, when I was a faculty member, I collaborated with people at the Jackson Lab, which is a world-renowned research institute. I think having that background makes me … In many ways, it certainly helps my job, the jobs that came after it. I think I resonate, the faculty wouldn’t quite claim me anymore, but privately they do, and people on campus talk to me as, “You were a faculty member, and we know that.”
I taught, I did research, I had graduate students, I was involved in graduate committees, big grant operations, so that just helps. I think it helps take the university forward. I think it’s a perspective that is appropriate for a research university, so I think it’s all positive. I’ve been very lucky in all of the things I’ve gotten to do, to be honest.
Lisa: You mentioned the centers of excellence. Tell me what that is, what that looks like.
Susan: Several years ago, as part of the strategic plan that was developed when my predecessor was president, there was a designation called signature in emerging areas of excellence. There was a year, and the process of identifying them actually occurred the year I was vice-chancellor for academic affairs, so I talk about my ten-month sabbatical off campus, but that was that period.
Provost Hecker, who is still the provost, really led that initiative. It was really a campus-wide, really a faculty-driven initiative. There were all kinds of focus groups and conversation groups, and faculty wrote proposals, and the proposals were whittled down. Teams of people said, “These four proposals are way too similar, all of you get together and write one.”
From that emerged our signature areas of excellence, which were really umbrella areas. Two of them are units, the college of engineering and the honors college. The rest of them are umbrella areas that many units and many faculty can fit under. It’s a climate change. It’s advanced structures for infrastructure and energy. It’s forestry and the environment, and I always forget one, marine sciences, I think I’ve gotten most of them.
All of them are areas that we have a national or an international reputation. If you look at those signature areas, and you think back to the legacy of the land grant university, they’re logical in the sense they are core areas of strength. The emerging areas, and I’d have to look at my list to get all of these right, are the areas that with attention and focus and planful, thoughtful building, will get to that next level of excellence.
We use those areas to define where we want to go. We think about it in terms of fundraising. We think about it in terms of hiring faculty, and that’s not to say that we don’t hire faculty in other areas. We do, as many people would say, you have to build out from your areas of strength. If we were growing in areas of engineering and the STEM fields, it’s really engineering is a STEM field, but the rest of the STEM fields are growing, too. We have to think, “What else do we have to grow?”
Clearly, we’re going to add people to the English department, if we’re growing the number of students. We have to add people all over campus, we just have to be thoughtful how we do it. Those areas really define, in many ways, our identity. I think it makes it easy to talk about the university, and make it in some ways more comprehensible. Universities are a little, organizationally, they’re odd to figure out. When you’ve spent your whole life in one it makes sense, but for most people they probably don’t make sense, how we’re built.
Lisa: As you’re talking about your areas of excellence and the forward growth, and the things that you had done to ensure enough students are on campus to create a high quality education for everyone, I’m wondering how the economic downturn that our state experienced, and some of the University of Maine, any time there’s problems with the economy, the university system has always impacted.
Susan: Yes.
Lisa: I’m wondering how this worked in your situation.
Susan: It certainly did. The economic downturn caused declines in enrollment. If you look at the funding of the university, we’re really funded from the state appropriation and tuition and fees. We do get substantial funding from the state, so this in no way is a criticism. If you look around the country, you see a decline in the percentage of state funding across public higher education in general. There are many states that have gotten to the point that their state universities are getting 5, 6, 7, 8 percent funding.
We are up in the high 30 percent funding. The funding is always … Funding remains relatively constant. Our board of trustees, in order to address the affordability issue, which for Maine families is very, very real, have held tuition, no change in in state tuition for 6 years, which is remarkable. Nowhere else in the country has done that.
Of course, that means there’s more of a … If everything is squeezed a little bit, it is a challenge. I think that in some ways it’s a good challenge. It’s forced us to look at what we do and how we do it. I’d say the University of Maine system is a very different enterprise than it was just a handful of years ago. When I was associate provost, and even my time as provost, with two different presidents, we are a different breed of cat now.
I’d say that’s one of the pieces that I’d say is in some ways a legacy item that would come back when people look at the presidency now, and that’s the degree of partnership and the degree of coordination. We’re still working out the details. It’s a work in progress. It won’t be done in one year or two years, but our university system is a very different, I’d say animal, than it was. The chancellor and I worked very well together. We laugh because we do occasionally, I’d say we laugh about it because we say we disagree on some of our tactics. We don’t disagree in terms of our landscape and our long-term perspective.
A piece of what I want to do before I stop being president is really talk to the campus, and bring the campus into discussions about what the job really is, and how the next president, what they have to be looking for. The old model of the land grant president for Maine is really not what the job is anymore. It’s really to take the university and be the leader across the state, and to take our mission as a border-to-border enterprise very seriously.
That means being the best partner we can, with every other aspect of our University of Maine system. That’s a little different. That is not a criticism of my predecessors at all. It’s the evolution that has occurred, but we have to maintain it. We have to really be ready, when we’re looking for another president, that we have some idea what this job really is, and how it’s different than it has been in the past.
Lisa: You have two more years to accomplish this.
Susan: I have two more years, yes.
Lisa: After that, hopefully you’ll have the right person in place.
Susan: I hope so. Certainly, I’m sure we will, but in two more years, I’ll retire.
Lisa: One thing, I guess my last question/comment is that I’ve been impressed to see the upgrade in facilities, having spent my short amount of time there many years ago, and coming back with my child, and actually my other child is going to start at the University of Maine as a transfer student this fall.
Susan: Oh, wonderful, in what field?
Lisa: I think she’s going to do gender studies, history, art-
Susan: The college of liberal arts and sciences.
Lisa: Exactly.
Susan: Which is actually the largest college of liberal arts and sciences in the state, if you really think about it, and we have wonderful, small private institutions, elite small privates, but just the scale and scope of our college of liberal arts and sciences is actually bigger, that’s all. I just thought I’d throw that out.
Lisa: I feel good. I’m going to start writing checks this summer, so that is good to know. I also have noticed, you are known for having high-quality athletics, but you also are doing a lot of good for the health and well-being of non-student athletes on campus. You have beautiful new facilities.
Susan: The rec center, yeah.
Lisa: It’s amazing to me, and as a parent, that feels really good.
Susan: The rec center was built about ten years ago, I think, is about right. I’ve been a gym rat essentially all my life. I played sports in college, so I went to the rec center when the rec center was about this big. It was in the basement of the field house. The rec center was built really as a student initiative. The students voted that they would pay an additional fee so we could fund it.
That facility, that and the expansion of the union years ago, are the two things that I think have really in a sense gelled the community. It is a fabulous space. It has a recreational pool with a little bit of lap swimming, but basically a fun pool. It has multiple basketball and volleyball courts. It has multiple fitness areas. It has a heavyweight area, that people who really lift a lot of weight go to, and then a lighter weight area so that everybody can find their spot. I don’t think people feel intimidated going to the rec center.
It’s used, I go there in the morning. I go, I’m an early morning person, and I actually have a personal trainer who’s one of our students. It has nothing to do with being president. I pay the bill. If you just sign up and pay the bill, you can have a personal trainer, and he’s fabulous. There are people from the community that use it. There are all kinds of workout groups that get together, and it just has made such a difference. Even going early in the morning, there are a number of students there. It’s not their peak time. I think 4 o’clock in the afternoon I don’t even venture in, because I think that’s not my zone.
It has made a huge difference, and it’s part of just, we’re trying to get people to come to college, experience what is essentially a huge buffet table. Part of it is certainly academic, but the rest of it are the other things. It’s becoming healthier. It’s becoming conscious of choices that you make about your lifestyle. It’s becoming engaged in community. Figure out what activities you like, but everybody can find something.
Develop your artistic side. Get involved in a musical organization. Be involved in theater. Maybe you’re the backstage person who likes to paint scenery. Write for the newspaper, be in student government, there’s just a vast array of opportunities and it’s that combination of that plus the academic. It is really what generates educated people. That’s, I think, a main product of a university or educated people.
Lisa: Dr. Hunter, how can people find out about the University of Maine?
Susan: We love to have people come tour, certainly. We certainly have a Web site, and we’d love for people to look us over and then come visit. When you come up north, or even drive up north, it’s only, in spite of the fact that it’s two hours from Orono to Portland, it is not four hours from Portland to Orono. We love to have people come visit, and you never know, I might just hop in your car and drive around with you.
Lisa: We won’t promise that, just for people who are listening.
Susan: No, but we really would love for people to connect with us. There are ways to arrange to come. There are group tours, certainly open houses, and admissions runs constant tours, in a sense. People that are interested in a particular unit or department can make a connection and actually meet with faculty or a department chair, sometimes a dean. People will go out of their way to make sure that a student who’s interested gets to see what would be most interesting to them, and make a connection that might be the thing that they say, “Oh yeah, this would be ideal for me.”
Really, what we want people to do is come look at us. We’d love for people to select coming to Maine, but what we really want to do is have more people get educated. We really want people to find the best place for them, and that means that it may be that the best place for a student is to go to the University of Southern Maine, or to go to the University of Maine at Farmington. We think we have a vast, a wide array of opportunities in public higher education in Maine. Basically, we want people to check them out, and figure out the best position for them, what suits, what fits.
Lisa: I appreciate your taking the time to drive down here, the two hours from Orono, a little bit more than two hours.
Susan: A little bit; it depends how heavy-footed one is, I suppose.
Lisa: I wasn’t going to say that. You can say that.
Susan: I have never been pulled over. I’m okay.
Lisa: I appreciate your being with us today, and also being part of my children’s education, and my brother’s and sister’s and aunt’s and uncle’s and parents’, both of them. We’ve been speaking with Dr. Susan Hunter, who is the president of the University of Maine. I look forward to seeing what happens over the next two years, or the remainder of your presidency, and I look forward to see what happens with the University of Maine system.
Susan: I think there’s a lot of excitement to come. I think the one thing about the people on campus, they see themselves as here to work for the people of the state of Maine. As more and more people think about it, as really we have a statewide job to do, it translates into work all across the state, and helping people all across the state, and that’s ideal.
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Lisa: My next guest is Danielle Conway, who is dean and professor of law at the University of Maine School of Law. She joined the law school officially in July of 2015, and is nationally known as a leading expert in public procurement law, entrepreneurship, and as an advocate for minorities and indigenous peoples. Thanks so much for coming in.
Danielle: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: I guess, as it usually the case, I always have to ask the things that I don’t know about first. I don’t know what public procurement law is. What is that?
Danielle: It’s okay. Public procurement happens all around you. It’s what makes society work. It is the means by which the government regulates itself in the purchasing of goods, services and construction, for all the things that we need to do as an organized society.
Lisa: How did you become interested in this?
Danielle: I became interested in public procurement because of my military obligation. I was an ROTC cadet. That’s how I paid for my university schooling, and I had to fulfill my obligation as an Army officer. The Army said, “If you would like, you can go to law school. We’ll give you an educational delay.” I delayed, went to Howard University School of Law, earned my law degree, passed the bar, and I was summarily called back to government service, as a captain in the U.S. Army. They said, “You will be practicing public procurement law.” That’s how it happened.
Lisa: I thank you for your service. It’s amazing, you’re in the Maine Army National Guard. You were sworn in in 2015, and you have more than 25 years of active and reserve service with the U.S. Army?
Danielle: That’s exactly correct, and I have to tell you, I got a wonderful letter in the mail last week which alerted me to my eligibility for retirement. I’m announcing, with you today, that I am going to be retiring with 28 years of service.
Lisa: Wow, that is amazing. You’re a lieutenant colonel at this point.
Danielle: That’s correct.
Lisa: You’ll retire, I’m assuming, with that same rank.
Danielle: Yes, it’s been an honor to serve, and I have to thank all of my mentors, but more importantly all of my fellow soldiers who made it possible for me to do 28 years, and do the good work that I believe I’ve done for the government.
Lisa: This is an important thing, and I don’t know that as many people know about the military and legal connection as they do, say, doctors in the military. Is this called the JAG program? Is this part of that?
Danielle: Yeah, our corps is called the Judge Advocate Generals Corps, and we are the largest law firm in the nation. At last count, we had about 1,600 lawyers represented in the JAG Corps. We do everything from criminal law to defense work, from public procurement to environmental regulation. We write policy. We advise commanders. We make the military engine work, and we make it work according to the rule of law.
Lisa: How did this prepare you to become a dean and professor of law at the University of Maine School of Law?
Danielle: I am very fortunate that as a military officer for 28 years, I have learned from some of the best leaders in the business. Many people think about the military as this authoritarian organization. In fact, it’s an organization that promotes teamwork, collegiality, respect and dignity. It’s those characteristics that I bring to the deanship. Having spent 28 years learning from the best leaders in the business, something had to wash off.
Lisa: You also have done, you’ve authored numerous books, chapters and articles. You’ve delivered numerous speeches. You’re really sort of a multi-communicational individual. How does one get good at all of these different aspects?
Danielle: Great question; one gets good at these things by saying “yes” to everything. I made it a rule when I started practicing to always say yes, not because I was trying to meet particular stepping stones, or get to a particular place. Something about the law and something about leadership makes you always want to try something new. By saying “yes” to tasks or assignments, you learn something. That’s how I’ve progressed in my career, to actually learn a lot about a lot of things.
When you do that, you begin to see how everything’s interconnected. There’s really nothing you’re not exposed to. If you say “yes” to it, learn from it, transfer that knowledge to the next task.
Lisa: This must serve you well in your, I’ll say your job, as a mother of a 5-year-old son.
Danielle: Yes, he is a task.
Lisa: What has that been like for you, to have such a strong intellectual and communication background, and now you have a 5-year-old?
Danielle: See, it’s a problem, because I’m looking at this 5-year-old and trying to talk to him like a 25-year-old, so that’s my fault. It’s been a journey, and an extraordinary journey. He is fun. He is excited. He is a diva. He breaks down, he gets right back up. He’s resilient. It’s teaching me a lot about who I need to be, as a leader, a mother, a friend, a parent. There’s a lot of forgiveness that goes with being a parent, because they teach you that you are completely fallible, but all you have to do is keep coming back to them with love and encouragement, and they give you another chance every time. It’s amazing to me.
Lisa: Yeah, I’d have to say that that’s true. There’s so much about parenting that’s just about showing up-
Danielle: It is.
Lisa: … And being willing to engage.
Danielle: It is. Some days you show up with your A game, some days you show up with your C game. You just show up.
Lisa: It’s true. My kids are now older, so sometimes … They’re all great kids, and most of the time they will tell me all of the great things they learned from me, and every so often they’ll slip in something about my C game. I’m like, “Thank you for keeping me humble. That’s really very sweet of you.”
Danielle: They are very good scorekeepers.
Lisa: Yes, they absolutely are. You have an interest in minorities and indigenous peoples, and specifically I think you have an interest in people who are seeking asylum. Tell me about that.
Danielle: As you can tell, and your listeners will learn, I am an African-American woman. It has been a very interesting row to hoe, being who I am and being in the places where I found myself. I say “interesting,” sometimes interesting means challenging, other times it does mean disappointing. Most of the times, it just means being resilient and successful and thoughtful about all the privileges I have, and how those privileges should be communicated to others.
I’ve had great successes in my life, and I believe that those successes are going to be best recognized when others can share in them. I’m very interested in immigration, asylum issues, not just facing Maine but facing the nation, how we grow our nation to be inclusive, to respect diversity. These things are critical. It’s critical because it’s how this country, how this nation was founded.
Sometimes you hear things today that make you think people are forgetting that. With the privileges, the challenges, the successes I have, I want others to experience that and understand, it comes from being part of this collective. That is what we are. We are a collective in the great nation that is this United States of America.
Lisa: It seems like we are now at a place where people are, where there’s more friction, there’s more conversation happening. I think that that makes many people uncomfortable. There seems to be more people who are willing to speak their peace about being a minority, or maybe not being a minority. Maybe people were speaking their peace about disliking immigrants. I think this discomfort is probably good, because I think there was a lot of stuff that went unsaid for a really, really long time.
Danielle: Exactly, I think people have to speak. Part of the thing that is most important to me as a teacher, to communicate to my students, is you can speak, but speak with respect, and speak with a belief and a veracity in what you’re saying, but then also listen with the same intent. Listen with the same kind of strength and respect for which you propose your own statement or comment or view of the world. If you can listen as well as you speak, then the friction and the angst and the anxiety that we experience when we disagree will be a learning opportunity.
Lisa: How do you feel about the current climate of, say, micro-aggressions that have come up on university campuses, and students saying, “This university professor said something that, maybe it seemed very small to somebody else, but to me it felt very deep and hard.” What kind of a climate is that to teach in, and to be a dean in?
Danielle: I’m a person who has approached the pedagogy with an interest in exploring some of those issues, not in wiping them out. If you are feeling like there has been a micro-aggression lodged towards you, my response is to make that known and then to discuss that. Make it available as information to the person who’s teaching you.
I think on college campuses, it is important to have discourse. It should not be a place where political correctness rules the day. Rather, if we learn how to speak and listen to one another, we can actually work through these things that we call micro-aggressions, we can work through what we may identify as white privilege or economic privilege, and find out why those things do cause oppression to certain segments of our community. Then, start figuring out solutions; how do we address it? I am all for the discussion and the discourse, and I would actually counsel people not to jump to a place where we cannot speak about all of these issues, to find solutions.
Lisa: I do think that that’s an interesting conundrum, that people now feel boxed in by all the things that they don’t know how to say in a politically correct manner. That creates its own set of problems.
Danielle: One thing I learned when I was studying the theory of teaching, from a woman who has been a fabulous mentor to me, Jill Ramsfield, she first taught at elementary and then high schools, and then got a law degree and taught at law schools. She always said, “As a teacher, you have to be genuine in how you listen to people. You have to listen with integrity, and you have to listen with honesty.”
That’s what I’d like to proliferate on campuses. Many of us speak, but how many of us listen? Then, listen with good faith. If someone is presenting a topic to you, and it feels bad, and it feels negative, keep listening. Open your mind, open your soul to it, and try to understand the person’s perspective. Then, try to intervene in that perspective with your own. Each requires a good faith listener at the table.
Lisa: Do you think that we are educating attorneys these days, or really any professionals, but because you happen to work with attorneys, on how to listen?
Danielle: I think that we have implied we taught this skill. I think that there are several courses that have entered into the curriculum that actively teach it. We have negotiations courses, we have skills-based courses where we interview clients now. It’s not the stodgy, stale classroom that some of us may have learned a lot of these techniques from books.
Rather, we’ve actually elevated to a place where we practice these trainings and skills, and we call them experiential learning. Yes, law students are actually getting explicit practice with how to listen. Can we do better? Always. Listening is hard work.
Lisa: You mentioned that you had an interest in law school at least in part because of your ROTC background. Your interest in law school actually goes even further back than that. Tell me about that.
Danielle: I had this wonderful toy, and it was one of those I think Fisher-Price toys, where you would have a plastic record on a little turntable. I don’t know where my mother got this toy, but on this toy was a speech from Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream.” I used to play that Fisher-Price record all the time, and listen to this man’s melodic voice, just resonating in my ears.
I’d listen, and I’d listen to my mom, I’d listen to her friends that would come over. Of course, they’d be talking about politics and civil rights. I kind of put those two things together and I was like, “I think this gentleman, Martin Luther King, Jr., was all about civil rights. Let me find out a little bit more about him.” My mom had these wonderful Encyclopedia Britannicas. This was all before digital. I would go to these encyclopedias, and I would find out everything that it had to say about Martin Luther King, Jr., about civil rights. It was like self-learning, and then listening to all the people around the table.
That’s where it started, and I was about eight years old when I had that toy and first started on this journey of reflection on what these words meant. All of the work I came up with was that lawyers really helped Martin Luther King, Jr. in his march to freedom, and his march for civil rights. It was lawyers who did it, and so I fused those things together, civil rights and law, and look, I started practicing procurement, you’ve got to love it.
Lisa: You say that your role models include your mother.
Danielle: Yes, so my mother, she has a great story and I’m really happy you’re asking about it. My mother was a person who consumed undergraduate degree on a part-time basis. My father was not very supportive of her studies. She had four children, “You should be home taking care of these children.” My mother would study anywhere she could. I would find my mom studying in the bathroom.
It took her ten years to get an accounting degree and then she said, “You know what? I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I want to do more.” She decided to go to law school. I was in high school at the time, so I watched my mom go to law school at night. I watched her study, I watched her pull her hair out, I watched her go to the racetrack to get more money to pay for tuition. It was terrific.
My mother, at night, she did this thing called law school, and she was amazing at it. Her perspective was amazing. She wasn’t trying to get the best grades. She was trying to learn the information. She’ll tell you she got an “Oh, Lordy” degree, not a cum laude degree.
She was an older woman, so she could not go to the law firms like so many of us have the opportunity to do, so she opened up a law firm in her basement. She represented community members. She represented our neighbors who were involved in the criminal justice system. She represented everyone, and it was such an impressive display of community organizing, her being available in our North Philadelphia community, to people who had never laid eyes on a lawyer.
She eventually began to work for a union, and then she got the gumption to actually run for municipal court judge in Philadelphia, and she won. The latter part of her career was spent on the bench, doing her work as a judge. I think she is the most amazing, flawed human being that there is. She is my role model.
Lisa: We had Sue Roche on the radio show, from the Immigrant Legal Aid Project. She also did “Maine Live.” I’m always interested to think about lawyers, because you described your mother, and obviously we had Sue Roche on. You were talking with me early about Deirdre Smith, who also does legal aid in the community. Lawyers, they give a lot. There are a lot of good lawyers out there, who are doing a lot of good work. You don’t have always the best … For some reason, lawyers don’t always get the best kind of reputation.
Danielle: Yeah, the narrative, especially these days, is not good around the law, the legal profession, or lawyers. I think lawyers are partly responsible for it. Many lawyers have to work so hard and so long on complicated, sophisticated issues. They don’t pay attention necessarily to the narrative and the rhetoric around them.
I did a survey that I introduced to lawyers involved with the [inaudible 00:52:20] of court. I asked them, “What’s your responsibility in policing the narrative around the legal profession?” A good percentage of them thought, “That’s not my responsibility. My responsibility is to serve my client, to act with integrity, and let my actions define me as a lawyer.”
Unfortunately, because of the digital world we live in, because of the significance of media in our society, we have allowed the narrative about lawyers to be spun by some people who are other than lawyers, and the narrative is not a good one. We need to begin to take that back. We need to explain the relevance and significance of lawyers to our community, and that we are defenders of the constitution. We promote the role of law, and we represent people who are unable to represent themselves. This is the view of the law that I will be promoting, and am just committed to promoting as the dean of the University of Maine School of Law.
Lisa: That leads me very nicely into a question for you, which is what would you like to have happen at the University of Maine School of Law under your tenure?
Danielle: Two programs in particular are quite important to me. We have several priorities, but these two are really important. As I came to Maine, I am a newcomer to Maine myself, I recognized that the bench and bar really needs to diversify, because the community is diverse.
We don’t have lawyers in every segment of the community where we need them. There is a challenge in rural communities. There is a challenge in the newest Mainers accessing affordable legal services. A program that I started when I got here, with the help of my faculty and staff, is the pre-law undergraduate scholars program. It’s an immersion law program, where we bring undergraduate students into the law school for a four-week program, so that they can see themselves as law students, but also receive a program of study that primes them to be the next generation of leaders that this state needs.
The beneficiary group for this is quite broad. We have brought in people who are from rural communities, people who have grown up in poverty, people from the newest Mainer communities, as well as people who have been traditionally under-represented at the bench and bar. We brought them together for this four-week program, 25 deserving students, to teach them about the legal profession, its importance to the community, and how they can use it to actually transform the state of Maine.
Lisa: What would you say to yourself, as a person who’s now along in her career and has achieved this great responsibility, what would you say to yourself as a child, if you had a chance to go back?
Danielle: That’s a great question. What I would say to myself is, “You don’t always have to do everything right. You don’t always have to be perfect. You do have to learn what your voice sounds like, what that voice tells you to do, and you have to be true to that voice.”
As I told you before, I’m an African-American woman. I embrace that, in all of its beauty, in all of its vision. When I walk down the street, everybody knows it. You have to embrace who you are, and that took a long time for me to get there, and I’m sure it takes a long time for other people to get there, regardless of their racial background, ethnicity, socioeconomic situation. I would listen to my voice, and I would tell myself, “Sit still. Learn that voice. Honor that voice. Respect that voice.”
Lisa: I appreciate your sharing your voice with us, with me, today. It’s really been a pleasure to speak with you.
Danielle: Thank you.
Lisa: I’ve been talking with Danielle Conway, who is the dean and professor of law at the University of Maine School of Law. I’m sure that what you want to have happen with the law school, will happen.
Danielle: Thank you, it will.
Lisa: You’ve been listening to “Love Maine Radio,” show number 267, “Maine’s University.” Our guests have included Susan Hunter and Danielle Conway. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit LoveMaineRadio.com. “Love Maine Radio” is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a previous of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter, and like our “Love Maine Radio” Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter at Dr. Lisa, and see my running, travel, food and wellness photos as “bountiful1” on Instagram. We’d love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of “Love Maine Radio.” We welcome your suggestions for future shows.
Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring “Love Maine Radio” to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our “Maine’s University” show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Male: “Love Maine Radio” is made possible with the support of Berlin City Honda, The Rooms by Harding Lee Smith, “Maine Magazine,” Portland Art Gallery, and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music have been provided by Spencer Albee. Our editor producer is Paul Koenig. Our assistant producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy, and our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our post-production team, “Maine Magazine,” or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at LoveMaineRadio.com.