USM - Botman Gets New Make-Work Position; $203K per Year

USM's Botman resigns, will keep $203K salary in newly created post

"Kalikow was credited with creating five new majors and adding 16 faculty members while keeping enrollment steady around 2,000 students."

Great job!
Added $2,000,000 in expenses without increasing customers one bit.

Selma Botman: Liberal arts degrees prepare students to thrive in real world

"Real world." Lol.

College education is make-work for lefties.

Tom C hit the nail on the head!

This is tailor made to make our young people into globalists. There is a certain agenda to make this happen. It is Agenda 21. It is not the 21'st agenda in a long line of agendas. It is the globalist's agenda for the 21's century. Tick them off like beads on a string. DEP, LURC, IF&W, USM, UM Farmington, Maine Revenue Services. All of this under a gang that either never read or forgot the Republican Platform. Those of us who worked so hard for the party for the last four years were soon surprised, concerned, dismayed and grief stricken in that order and now it simmers as rage. We were had.

If the new position is truly needed, why not put the job out for applications from the public? Why is Botman getting a sweetheart deal? I thought Page was supposed to be a conservative. His statements on this made me faintly nauseous.

Bigger pigs at a bigger trough. Nauseating! At the end of the day this position will provide zero benefit to anyone except these swine.

We call this "screw up and move up", life in the public sector is fine.

A Lateral Move - to Avoid Collateral Damage.

Swell.

Naran, I'm not pleased by this either, but as we've discussed elsewhere, your quote above is unfortunately true. Botman is entitled to another year of employment--she may try to make something of her new job, she may not, but it will either be discontinued at the end of next year or immediately put to open competition if the trustees approve it. Page probably strong-armed her to resign and I think he made a smart move in presenting this to the trustees as un fait accompli with a respected replacement ready to step in.

Even former Penn State president Graham Spanier is still a tenured professor there and will probably remain so until he is put in jail where he belongs. At least Botman may well be gone in a year.

I hope this is just the beginning of some serious and needed adjustments in the whole UM system. James Page needs public support if he is going to do that.

Until someone teaches them that they are employees it will never change.
If the students were given a chance to hold vote s of confidence the majority of them would be gone.

Administrative bloat is a major cause of rapid inflation in higher education.

I found and recommend this blog post to help understand the causes of adminstrative bloat.

Compliance with government regulations (federal and state) takes a huge amount of manpower.
Mission creep in response to student, faculty, and community interests plays a part- someone has to advise those diversity groups and do the accounting.
Expanded staff to meet IT needs, both on the programming side and the hardware side, have contributed to bloat.
And there's always sports. How many assisatnt ADs and assistants to the assistant AD are needed to run the athletic departments and comply with NCAA rules? And so on.

What can be done?
First, publicize the facts.
List every non-teaching position that exists because of one of these factors.
Then list the associated costs.
Now, have a discussion with lawmakers and policy makers about their roles in causing the bloat.

Guizot - the Chancellor should have stated the facts, instead of the bosh he issued in the glowing press release featuring Botman's supposed "selflessness" in resigning as USM president. He should have stated the truth - that Botman has another year on her contract, so this new make-work position was created, just for her. Along with the fact that she was pushed out due to the displeasure with her performance. instead, the public was fed a line of pure yardgoods from the UMS PR Department.

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Mainemom - as always, well-stated, and thank you.

The only people dissatisfied were her faculty (the employees) ,I wish we had the power to get a commissioner to get rid of many bad performers in state service
over the years.

Seems like state "service" is the only field of endeavor where performance is not a requirement. First we have to pay McCormick after she's fired now this drone gets a make work job at over 200K after resigning. Who writes the contracts for these leeches anyway? Oh that's right, more of those dedicated, hard working public employees.

Not to mention, the recent revelations about seven ex-Baldacci officials who were gifted with crony jobs in the UMS system, sans job searches and in some cases, the requisite qualifications.