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Cummings to Take Reins at USM as Appointed President Backs Out

Patty Wight
/
MPBN
Incoming USM President Glenn Cummings at a Portland news conference Wednesday.

PORTLAND, Maine - The University of Southern Maine is getting another new president. Harvey Kesselman, who had been scheduled to take over at USM in July, is withdrawing from the job to stay in New Jersey and deal with problems at Stockton University, where he's the acting president.

Taking Kesselman's place will be Glenn Cummings, the acting president at the University of Maine at Augusta, who was a finalist for the top job at USM. Cummings takes over an institution struggling with ongoing budget challenges and the fallout from recent program cuts and faculty layoffs.

Glenn Cummings couldn't help but note the irony of his appointment, mere months after making it to the final round of the selection process. At a news conference, Cummings thanked the committee that led the initial search for the USM post.

"That committee - made of faculty members, staff members, and most importantly, students - they made their choice," Cumming said. "They got two resumes and they handed it to Chancellor Page. And Chancellor Page went with the other guy."

That other guy is Harvey Kesselman. "I would have been proud and honored to have been the president of the University of Southern Maine," Kesselman says.

When the search committee selected him in March, Kesselman was serving as the provost and executive vice president at New Jersey's Stockton University, where he's worked, in one capacity or another, for 35 years. In late April though, Stockton's president abruptly resigned for medical reasons in the middle of an ongoing controversy.

"The president had acquired a casino on the Atlantic City Boardwalk," Kesselman says. "And, unfortunately, we have a major facility that we can't do anything with."

Kesselman says the plan had been to turn the $18 million former Showboat Casino into a satellite campus. But another Atlantic City player, Trump Taj Mahal, is insisting on enforcing a covenant that requires that a first-class casino hotel occupy the property. The deal is now being investigated by the New Jersey Legislature.

So earlier this week, the head of Stockton's board of trustees wrote to UMaine System Chancellor James Page and asked if Kesselman could be released from his contract at USM to keep serving as acting president on the New Jersey campus.

"Stockton is more than a job or a position to me," Kesselman says. "It's my extended family. Chancellor Page understood the dilemma I confronted."

After the a morning news conference announcing the leadership change, UMaine System Chancellor James Page and Trustee James Erwin defended the search process that led to Kesselman's selection.

Erwin says Kesselman was well-vetted. "And he was a terrific candidate. And the circumstances of his not coming have nothing to do with that process, or with the University of Southern Maine. They have entirely to do with the situation he found himself in in New Jersey."

In Glenn Cummings, meantime, USM gets a seasoned Maine educator, public policy expert and political leader. For the past academic year, Cummings has been serving as the acting president at the University of Maine at Augusta.

Prior to that, he spent four years at Good Will-Hinckley, where he transformed the mission of the 121-year-old campus, launching the state's first charter school, setting up an agricultural and natural sciences-based magnet school and building educational partnerships with the Maine Community College System.

Michael Hillard teaches in the Economics Department at USM. "We, for a long time, have wanted good, long-term, stable leadership that can deal with the sometimes crushing problems the university has faced. In Glenn Cummings we have that," Hillard says. "He has been a proven, effective leader in a variety of contexts."

The university has been hit hard in recent years by budget shortfalls, program and faculty cuts and widespread, low morale. Cummings will need to call on all of his leadership skills, as he takes over USM. He sees a bright future ahead for campus and its faculty and students.

"Like a Maine spring, USM is slowly, but beautifully, surviving a dark Maine winter," Cummings said. I am absolutely at the best possible place in its history for this re-emergence of an extremely important university."

The selection of Cummings, who's also served at the U.S. Department of Education and as former speaker of the Maine House, was widely praised by Maine's congressional delegation and by members of both parties in Augusta. Cummings takes over at USM on July 1.