Gen Ed requirements are a controversial part of the college experience. While some students love the opportunity to explore classes outside of their core curriculum, others consider it a pointless waste of time. Generally, the idea behind General Education requirements is valiant. Students should be experienced in a diverse range of topics in their education. While it makes sense to specialize our knowledge in one area, it’s also incredibly beneficial to experience other fields and have at least a cursory level knowledge of a wide array of things. 

Gen Eds generally give STEM students the opportunity to engage with humanities, and vice versa. This is incredibly important for our culture, and as we find ourselves shifting more and more to a culture driven by thinking machines and artificial images it’s more important now than ever that students are being taught the cultural importance of art and humanities. As the administration and faculty at this school are reevaluating the Gen Ed CORE requirements and curriculum, I believe it’s time to make the case for a Fine Arts Gen Ed requirement at UMaine.

The current Artistic and Creative Expression category is a bit too broad and encapsulates too many courses that don’t involve a hands-on engagement with the Fine Arts. Students should be taking something more directly involved with art, whether it’s a studio class or an introductory music course. There needs to be a requirement for students to create something. While courses like art history are important and do promote engagement with art and culture, they don’t promote hands-on learning experiences where students practice creative expression and begin to understand art and the artistic process.

We have a good art program here at this university. I personally have taken Drawing I here and it taught me so much about art and the process. It fostered an understanding and an appreciation that I never would’ve gotten from taking something like HTY 265: The Power of Maps, which is a real example of a class that fulfills the Artistic and Creative Expression category. Art is something everyone can do. While it takes years to master a craft, anyone can pick up a pencil or a brush and start learning. It’s one of the truest forms of expression we have. The work force wants to take your time and your labor, art is how you reclaim it. You make something that belongs to you and only to you. 

This wouldn’t be an unfair expectation for students. While lab courses are long, they are not impossible to fit into a busy schedule. Many schools require students to do a hands-on Fine Arts class. Even my high school required us to take one. My high school digital media class gave me hands-on experience with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro. These are valuable tools in a wide range of career fields. The things you learn in an art class you can take with you your entire life. We are starting to forget how important art is for culture, and this is one way that we can begin to reclaim it.

The 2025 release of Jared Hess’s ‘A Minecraft Movie’ has seen a huge cultural revitalization of Minecraft in mainstream pop culture. While Minecraft has always been a dominant force, recent promotional and marketing pushes have seen kids from four to 24 flocking to McDonald’s to track down the Grimace Egg or to Walmart to find the action figure of the lead Steve, portrayed by Jack Black. These crowds have also flocked to the theaters to watch the infamous movie. Even the local Black Bear Cinemas in Orono saw massive turn-out on the first Wednesday after the release, where students rushed to claim the last available supply of UMSG, inc. funded free movie tickets. The line to the theater went out the door. However, what could’ve been a wholesome trend driving people to the theaters has also revealed a pattern of troubling behavior.

The movie has a much-memed scene on the internet in which Steve’s character sees the infamous Chicken Jockey, a ‘mob’ from the game composed of a baby zombie riding a chicken, and exclaims “Chicken Jockey!” This scene has been much discussed since the moment it was first revealed in the trailer, in part due to the comedy of Jack Black’s line reading. However, during this scene, movie theaters burst out into pure chaos. I’ve seen videos online of a theater room in which various people in the crowd throw large bags of popcorn while also holding up a live chicken that they had somehow brought in. This trend is not only a problem in theaters far away. Barstool Black Bears has a video on their instagram of the crowd reaction to the scene on that Wednesday night, and in the video it’s clear that popcorn was thrown. While a bit of crowd merriment is okay, making a mess is not.

This trend is indicative of a greater lack of care for how to act in public and also an incredible decline in empathy for service workers from the teen/young-adult population. Social media is heavily to blame for this. It’s not uncommon to see videos on Instagram reels or TikToks of people walking into random kitchens in fast food establishments and doing various pranks, even going as far as to dip brooms in fry vats which is a huge Health and Safety risk. Service workers are beginning to suffer for the sake of creating viral trends. This bad behavior is being encouraged by the algorithm in exchange for likes and views.

Movie theaters as an institution are still struggling to recover under the boot of streaming, especially after the pandemic. This trend driving people to the movies is huge for profits, but creating a mess in the theaters is hurting the workers who keep these places running and operating smoothly. It also risks creating a longer turnover time, potentially delaying the next showing and throwing things off schedule. This is also in tandem with a cultural devaluation of art and the reduction of art to irony. If this is how we’re going to culturally engage with movies, then movie theaters are going to continue to suffer as studios pump out movies that profit only off of the hype of memes. ‘A Minecraft Movie’ is a movie made for kids. Adults in this space need to be mindful that they are the invaders here and they’re creating potentially unsafe environments for the movie’s target demographic.

The tradition of Maine Day has proven itself to be an unsquashable cockroach beneath the shoe of the University of Maine Administration. The historic day, held on the last Wednesday before finals week, was inaugurated in 1935. From there, a day of service and on-campus celebration evolved into a day of drinking and light vandalism at a local apartment complex, the Avenue. The school voted to get rid of Maine Day by no longer giving students the day off from classes during my first year. This alone was a mistake. 

While I fully understand the health and safety sentiment behind not wanting Maine Day to happen, taking away the day off ended up punishing every student for the actions of a small but loud group of people. The day off was a much needed break for students going into finals week. The spring semester has way less three-day weekends and breaks. After spring break, the school year just keeps going straight to finals week. 

However, this did not kill the tradition. In my past three years here, I have still heard tales and seen photos of large gatherings of people at the Ave on the day formerly known as “Maine Day.” It’s clear that making classes mandatory for the day did nothing to kill the party spirit of the Black Bears. If the University cannot kill Maine Day, they must prioritize harm reduction to make the day as safe for students as possible.

A health-centric approach to the day is crucial for the university. Cutler Health Center closes at 5 p.m. and is appointment-based, meaning they are unable to respond in the case of a health emergency. The UMaine Volunteer Ambulance Corps provides full coverage that day, but that doesn’t mean the health response should stop there. The presence of a medical tent for students would mean students who believe they or a friend are experiencing a medical energy would be able to quickly and easily locate a place to go to for help that would not involve ambulance transportation.

Free water is also crucial, since dehydration is a huge concern in crowds consuming mass amounts of alcohol. Ideally, these would be stationed at the Ave so that students participating in the festivities can have access to water to prioritize their own health. Another huge concern is bathrooms. Since it is an apartment complex, there is no public access to bathrooms. The presence of a portapotty would avoid situations in which drunk students have to perform their bodily functions on public property. 

However, I do not believe that the Ave would allow these things. I do not believe that they care for the health and safety of the partiers. Maine Day is undeniably a huge inconvenience for the Avenue Management. They would rather pretend it is not going to happen than to put in work to make it safer, since this could be perceived as encouraging the party. However, these efforts to squash Maine Day both from the university and the Ave just end up reinforcing the dangerousness of the behavior by deprioritizing student health. 

The early days of Trump’s second reign have been characterized by the term “executive order.” Numerous executive orders have come forth with varying degrees of constitutionality. These executive orders have been an exertion of will over bodies both at the national and state level. The most controversial and relevant of these has been related to transgender athletes competing in sports. Janet Mills’ refusal to comply with this order in particular has put Maine in a contentious position. The University of Maine and the state as a whole are now under the public eye. 

Conservatives who hadn’t heard of Maine prior to a month ago are now screeching about “Woke DEI” in a state not at all known for its diversity. Diversity in Maine is not nearly as existent as in other states, which means this scrutiny is especially ironic. Almost all of this controversy is centered around, from what I can tell, a single transgender high school athlete in Maine. Anything else is a matter of speculation. It’s impossible to distinguish with 100% accuracy who is cisgender and who is transgender. An athlete who started transitioning as a girl when she was young could in theory have gone through puberty with estrogen and not have the hormone or physical “advantage”  that conservatives use as their argument against transgender athletes. This is a false complaint as well, since sports are entirely built on natural advantage. This is not a widespread issue in Maine in any way that Trump and his followers can prove. As far as racial diversity goes, Maine is 90% white, as of the 2023 Census. The state does not make sense as a target for the far-right to paint as a social justice, diversity, equity and inclusion safe haven.

Despite “problems” of diversity hardly existing in Maine, Mills’ resistance has set the standard for compliance with corrupt rule. These executive orders and Title IX investigations have been an attempt to bully the state into forced obedience. University students have been on the receiving end of this pushback. We’ve been threatened with federal funding being stripped away from the state and the University. We’ve had to worry about whether or not our scholarships and our Pell Grants will continue through our educational career. The Office of Diversity and Inclusion had to rebrand to avoid losing their funding in the wake of the anti-DEI push. The University, which has slowly been growing to accommodate more and more diverse students and progressive institutions, is now finding itself in a massive eight-year cultural regression.

Despite this, Mills stands strong in her efforts to resist Trump’s attempts to overwrite rules through vague orders. She has made it clear that she does not intend to give in easily or without legal challenges. This is exactly the type of leaders we should be seeing in response to the regime of a cruel and uncaring executive. While Mills is not a perfect figure and it’s entirely unclear how unwavering she will remain when it becomes time to worry about being re-elected, her current actions have admirably put Maine on the map as a state that won’t give in.

The University’s move to prioritize online classes has not been a well-thought-out implementation of the program. Online classes have problems that aren’t as prominent with in-person classes. Certain programs going fully online has also created an inequity in learning experiences.

The learning experience in an online class is not as enriching as an in-person class. Even regularly engaged students find themselves struggling to get valuable information out of an online lecture without really intent notetaking. My minor is part of one of the programs that has had increasingly more and more courses only offered online. I find myself taking a lot of online classes for it, but I never learn much from them. I end up focusing on just getting the homework done and speeding up the lecture videos because a 50-minute online video feels harder to focus on than a 50-minute in person lecture. 

Online classes lack the essential human component. The main engagement you have with other students in the class is the discussion board posts. Effectively, students pay upwards of at least $1,000 to read what ChatGPT thinks of the readings and reply to it. To add on to this, online classes charge an extra online service fee just for being online. This means that students are being forced to enroll in online classes for their program, which might’ve been in-person when they enrolled, and then paying extra per credit for it.

Deciding what programs deserve to be in-person or online is also tricky. For example, Surveying Engineering Technology is a program that is now entirely online. The website says it’s offered both online and in-person, but a search of all classes offered this semester under the ‘SVT’ course designator says the class is online except for a class labeled ‘SVT 102: Surveying Principles for Civil Engineers,’ which falls under a different program altogether. However, wouldn’t it make sense for a program oriented around surveying to be taught in-person so students can have real hands-on surveying experience? The programs offered online tend to be the ones with a low number of declared students, but prioritizing the educational experience based on the number of students involved creates an inequity. Students interested in labor and unions minoring in Labor Studies do not have the opportunity to take classes in person, but are not eligible for the lower-priced online program credits, if their major is offered in-person. 

Online classes can not deliver the quality of education that many people want from their in-person class. Forcing students in certain programs to move their studies online is not fair and creates an imbalance, with students in already less-prioritized and funded programs receiving even lower-quality learning. Not only are they being given lower-quality education, but they’re being forced to pay more for it: $25 extra per credit, so roughly $75 extra per class. For a student taking a full online course load, that’s an extra $375 just for a standard 15-credit single semester course load. Online courses are a good option. I’ve taken some online courses that I’ve actually enjoyed and learned from. However, students being forced to take online classes is a bad move.

YikYak is a social media app with an enormous potential for both good and bad. It’s the watering hole by which the various campus herds converge for sustenance in the form of information. For those who are unfamiliar, YikYak allows users to post on a forum for students at their school anonymously. Often, this simply leads to campuswide jokes and discussions of pertinent campus topics, but sometimes the guise of anonymity simply leads to a blind feedback loop of lies that causes more harm than good. Ultimately, regardless of the truthfulness of information spread, YikYak cultivates a culture of complaints that don’t often lead to any positive change in the student experience.

Again, YikYak can absolutely be a positive forum when it comes to getting student attention directed toward issues that matter. Sometimes, valid issues are discussed on YikYak and students are encouraged to take action and make a change in their situation. This can range from talking to a campus resource to emailing a professor about a concern. The app can be a source of information for students on campus affairs, as long as the information is vetted. Posts are deleted entirely once they hit -5 in Yakarma (the aggregate of upvotes subtracted by downvotes in the style of Reddit), which means there is some level of selective vetting that can occur since students have the power to delete misinformation. However, they have to be able to spot the lie and label it as misleading to do so.

The guise of anonymity more often than not leads to misinformation campaigns. People misunderstand how campus affairs work and end up spreading falsehoods about administrative actions or the actions of the student government on campus. Sometimes, people start rumors out of nothing but boredom. My freshman year, a bunch of frat brothers banded together to convince YikYak that one of their brothers had died. This did not happen and the brother was in fact alive. I’ve seen posts that I could verifiably say were about me or people I knew and were just not true. Anonymity emboldens students to say things without caring about potential consequences for people involved. However, YikYak is not truly anonymous and it’s important to know that the school can still figure out who posted things and you need your school email to enroll.

The biggest problem about YikYak is that people aren’t willing to transform any collective opinion on the app into collective action. There will be multiple posts complaining about something related to Student Government but there will never be any of those same users coming to talk to their Student Government representatives. They’ll complain about administrative action but they won’t talk to administrators when given the opportunity or refuse to testify in front of the Board of Trustees. It’s incredibly powerful to have a place where students can come together and form their opinions on really important issues, but this needs to transform into students taking action. It’s created a complaint culture where students will hit post on a YikYak about an issue and think that it’s a meaningful and final contribution to the cause. Student movements can start on YikYak but if they stay there, that’s where they will die.

The University of Maine is not properly utilizing scholarship funds gifted by donors. Money that should be making impacts on students’ financial situations is being used to relieve the school’s responsibility for their own financial commitments to students.

The Financial Aid Office has been known to do what’s called a Swap or a Transfer of Funds. This involves the office taking scholarship money given to them by donors and giving it to students while subtracting that same amount from their financial aid given to them by the school. This scholarship has a net-zero impact on the student. They’re told they received a scholarship that they might not have applied for and then they open their bill to find out this money actually did nothing. It was a transfer of funds. The school took the money given by donors and used it to replace the money they had already given to the student.
I’ve experienced this same phenomenon two years in a row. I received an email about a scholarship and I found out that it wasn’t actually benefiting me at all. It took the help of an advisor to even figure out what had happened. I was confused as to why I got an email about a scholarship that I didn’t remember applying for. To make it even worse, I received multiple communications from the office requesting me to write a thank you note and to speak about the personal impact the scholarship had on my financial situation. This means I either have to ignore these emails or lie to the donor about the impact the scholarship had on me. In actuality, this scholarship did nothing for me. 

While I’d love to be able to say that this helped reduce my financial burden, this scholarship has a net-zero impact on me. I don’t, in practice, see that money at all. That money makes no difference in my account because the school simply cuts back their own aid by the same amount. Financial aid is a privilege, and I don’t take for granted that the school helps financially support my ability to go here and that it can be revoked at any time. However, once the money is on my account, I’d like for it to stay there unless I do something to warrant it being taken away. To give out a “fake” scholarship is almost insulting. 

This habit is equally troubling from a donor perspective. I would be rather upset if I were to donate money into a scholarship fund, especially one tied to a cause I believe deeply in, just to find out that the money is being distributed randomly to students who didn’t apply for the sake of cutting back their aid. Donors often aren’t even aware of when this is happening. They assume that the money they’re putting in is having a positive impact on students’ lives where the reality might be rather that the money isn’t serving any tangible purpose for them.

The school needs to be more transparent about this process to both donors and students alike. Students should also take advantage of the fact that they might be able to apply to these scholarships and get an actual tangible reward from it. However, this isn’t always the case because some scholarships are used solely for this purpose and do not actually exist on the school’s ScholarshipUniverse platform.

As the winter season begins in Maine, concerns around navigation in the winter once again arise. Snow, sleet, black ice and freezing rain are just a few key concerns Mainers face on their daily commutes. These can make traveling both on and off foot hazardous. Proper footwear is a necessity to avoid slips and proper car maintenance is equally important. 

          The winter can be a dangerous time on campus for many. Falling is a huge injury risk. There are also many issues of accessibility impacting the general quality of life for students with disabilities. These range from minor inconveniences to major impediments on learning, such as accessible entrances not being properly shoveled and salted. Many wheelchair ramps on campus have ended up neglected. Proper salting and shoveling is crucial to ensuring students can get to class safely.

          Safety concerns when traveling are also present in the winter. Commuting students and staff both have to travel on frozen and sometimes unplowed roads to get to campus in the morning when classes aren’t cancelled. Students have had to walk to classes in weather that neared -50 °F with windchill calculated. Official statements were put out telling students to stay inside for as long as possible and to minimize wind exposure, but classes were still mandated. The decision to delay or cancel classes is not one without ramifications, since classes are always affected by a change in schedule, but it’s one that sometimes must be necessarily made for the safety of students. Sometimes, snow days are not called even though conditions may still be quite dangerous. 

          Safety must be a primary concern for the University in the winter. There are steps the University can take to properly protect students and provide a safe campus for students to learn. First, proper shoveling and salting must be a priority. Accessible entrances should be prioritized. There must be a response to snow as soon as possible. Once conditions start to become slippery, salt should be laid immediately.

          There should also be a push for other ways to keep students from needing to travel without drastically harming education. The implementation of remote online days is a step that could be taken to minimize travel in the winter on days where conditions are bordering on dangerous but not quite extreme. I don’t want this to take the place of regular full day cancellations, but they could be implemented on the days that are bad but not quite bad enough to entail possible outages. This would allow students to carry on with their education from home on days where travel isn’t ideal. 

The pandemic taught us a valuable lesson when it comes to conducting classes from afar. While it’s obviously not ideal over long periods of time, an occasional day of remote work and learning has been proven to be possible. Our faculty have had experience teaching in these conditions. So much of the student learning experience is already online. Paper textbooks and homework assignments are being faded out. The infrastructure is almost there. Regardless of whatever solution the University would choose, it’s important to keep prioritizing safety in the winter.

The current housing options on the University of Maine campus are limited. There’s an utter lack of diverse housing options. Students end up choosing dormitories primarily on the basis of location and not any unique aspect of the dorm itself. Students aren’t choosing to live in Hancock Hall because they like its layout. They’re choosing it because of its proximity to other things. Since the dorms are broken up into complexes, academic buildings on campus end up pretty far away from the nearest dorms. There should be a better distribution of locations for dorm buildings on campus. While there isn’t anything inherently unlivable about cookie cutter dorms, it becomes incredibly uninteresting. There’s no variety in the room selection process. The most interesting thing you can do is decide to live in Doris Twitchell Allen Village (DTAV) or Patch, the suite style dorms on campus. There needs to be new, more interesting dorms.

Currently, Patch Hall is the newest option on campus. Even still, it’s over 20 years old. It’s older than the age of any traditional student on campus. Patch is a good housing option, but it’s unfortunate that what I consider to be the best dorm on campus, I still can only call good at best. In my brief time living in Patch, I’ve already experienced issues with facilities as well as problems with the heating. 

The oldest dorms on campus are in the Honors complex (Balentine, Colvin, Penobscot, Stodder). These dorms have numerous issues—pests, fungus, mold, to name a few that I personally observed. Honors housing options have the notion of being the “nicer” dorms, but that does not ring true at this school. They don’t have much to distinguish them from the more traditional dorms on campus. Honors students sign up for honors housing under the presumption it’s nicer, but the honors freshmen dorms are not much different.

We need more dorm versatility. There are many different forms a dorm can take. We currently have  three primary styles: single, double and suite. Some quad dorms have been made this year, but those were temporary and not a typical dorm style here. We need more diversity to incentivize people to live on campus and to choose housing styles that best fit them. One dorm format I suggest is singles and doubles connected by a shared bathroom. It’s similar to the suite-style format, but simpler for students who don’t want the maintenance and responsibility of a shared kitchen and living room like DTAV or Patch. 

There also should be a bigger push for the living communities. It seems like most people don’t choose to live in these communities. This might be in part because they’re relatively niche sections. A majority of students aren’t  going to sign up to live on the education major floor because they’re not education majors. There just isn’t an incentive to sign up to live in these communities, especially for upperclassmen who would rather move off campus because the dorms on campus aren’t adequate living. 

Students don’t want to live on campus because the dorms are boring and antiquated. The average age of dorms on campus is 64 years old. If UMaine wants to foster a sense of on-campus community, they need to incentivize living on campus. This can only happen by offering interesting and comfortable living environments. 

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is in a bad place. It has historically been the most populated college on the Orono campus. In recent years, we have seen a fall in CLAS students proportionate to a rise in students in the College of Engineering and Computing. While the push for engineering could be a great thing for our school and its resources, we’ve seen it occur at the fall of arts and sciences. 

CLAS buildings on campus lack proper ventilation and get scorching hot. South Stevens doesn’t even have an elevator, which presents issues of accessibility. Meanwhile, engineering students just received a brand new state-of-the-art building in the form of the Ferland Engineering Education and Design Center. On top of this, the new Green Energy and Materials building is being constructed on the Collins Center side of campus. While this building is being funded by the Department of Defense, UMaine will bear the maintenance costs required to maintain and staff the building for years to come. While this is happening, requests for maintenance and new buildings from CLAS are continuously rejected by the Board of Trustees. It’s clear where their priorities stand.

This issue is exacerbated by the budget cuts that disproportionately hurt CLAS. This is coupled with a hiring freeze, meaning new staff aren’t being brought in to teach classes. Minors for CLAS are increasingly being shifted to online-only programs. This leaves very few options for students who want to minor in more niche topics while still taking classes in person. My minor, legal studies, consists of a variety of classes from other popular subjects, like political science and sociology. Despite this, I still wouldn’t have been able to complete it without taking online classes. Some classes that students need to complete their major’s degree program have not been offered at all in recent semesters. 

Due to these factors, I posit that the increase in other colleges, especially engineering, and a fall in humanities is not a sign of shifting interests of students but rather the results of a systemic failure to support CLAS. Numerically, engineering students are overtaking CLAS students because CLAS students are increasingly finding that UMaine has not shown its ability to care for them. UMaine has not shown that it can provide for and maintain our quality of education.