Maine community colleges president resigns
John Fitzsimmons, president of the Maine Community College System, announced his resignation on Wednesday in the face of mounting pressure from Gov. Paul LePage.
The Bangor Daily News reported that Fitzsimmons, who served as the system's president for nearly 25 years, made the decision despite support from the community college system's board. He will stay on until an interim leader is named, which is expected later this month.
In 2009, Fitzsimmons was named as Mainebiz's Nonprofit Business Leader of the Year for his leadership over a community college system that at the time was growing in enrollment faster than Fitzsimmons had ever predicted.
Robert Clark, chairman of the system's board, told the BDN on Wednesday that the community colleges were seeing great progress in the last five years, noting that 92% of graduates had found employment or continued education within that period.
However, LePage revealed on Friday that he wanted Fitzsimmons to resign for contributing to what he would later say was a "stagnant" community college system. In addition, LePage said he was frustrated with the system's failure to achieve complete credit transferability between community colleges and Maine's public universities. He also cited the system's failure to continue the Bridge Year program, which lets high school students earn college credit before graduating, after running a one-year pilot.
In response to LePage's criticisms, Fitzsimmons said the governor didn't have all the facts about the community college system's plans for credit transfer or the Bridge Year, for which he said the system had renewed its commitment. He said the community college and University of Maine systems were preparing to launch an initiative this year to establish complete credit transferability.
In Mainebiz's 2009 profile of Fitzsimmons, he said his greatest fear was that the Legislature would fail to provide funding essential to the community college system's growth. At the time, the state had not increased the system's funding to account for an extra 4,800 students since 2003.
"I believe so deeply in what we're doing, it's sometimes challenging when it gets overlooked," he said in 2009. "We're not even close to tapping the potential of the community colleges."
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