BDN photo/ Gabor DegreAlthough the Maine Center for Graduate Professional Studies is based in Portland, it’s aiming to help solve some of the problems facing northern Maine, Eliot Cutler told Aroostook County business leaders last Thursday.
Cutler, an environmental attorney and two-time independent candidate for governor, was at the University of Maine Presque Isle March 17 making the case for the year-old center’s objectives — to integrate the university system’s graduate programs in business administration, law and public service, and to build the state’s workforce.
“The central idea is that all of the existing professional graduate programs will do a far better and more efficient job of meeting Maine’s needs and the students’ needs if they work together,” said Cutler, who was named CEO of the center last fall.
Created with a $1.75 million start-up grant from the Harold Alfond Foundation, the center is offering a mix of the old and new, with a multi-disciplinary curriculum in business and public policy, research, entrepreneurship programs and online classes. The overall goal is to train versatile managers, administrators and lawyers and convince them to work in Maine afterwards, Cutler said.
“The case for the center is not about Portland or the University of Maine System. It’s about the challenges that face every one of us everywhere we live in the state,” he said.
“No more paper mills will ever be built in the state … We’re getting older fast. Young people are leaving. Old people are coming. And we’re not attracting enough young people to our universities to replace those who are going away.”
Many companies around the country are looking for employees with qualities such as “creative problem solving,” “strategic thinking” and “collaborative work habits,” Cutler said, pointing to findings from the Bloomberg Recruiter Report.
There are more than 100 members of the graduate center’s board, including Ray Gauvin, a successful Presque Isle businessman who founded the Aroostook Aspirations Initiative, and Emily Smith, a broccoli farmer and Presque Isle city councillor.
Cutler said some companies are worried about having enough young people with versatile skills in the workforce, particularly in rural regions. “If you’re running a company and you can’t find people or can’t bring them in,” Cutler said, “you pull up stakes and you leave, or you expand your operations somewhere else.”
Cutler said that the graduate center will focus on areas of common importance across Maine — including healthcare and agriculture — and try to collaborate with businesses and organizations in different localities.
He said he wants to double the Muskie School of Public Service’s research contracts to more than $30 million and wants to create a not-for-profit affiliate called Maine Center Ventures. This would manage the center’s endowment and operate an “incubator-accelerator,” an investment program for startup businesses modelled after Harvard’s Innovation Lab, which has spawned such businesses as HourlyNerd, an online marketplace for business experts to find freelance work, and Six Foods, the maker of high-protein cricket chips.
Much of the work of the Maine Center for Graduate and Professional Studies is going to be funded through private money, Cutler said. He’ll be presenting specific plans in a blueprint to the University of Maine System board in September.
