Letter

July 11, 2001

Dear YCTC Community Member:

First, please excuse the rather impersonal salutation of this letter. I thought it best to distribute this information to you as quickly as possible and forgo the several days required to personalize and sort this many letters.

Recently the Maine Technical College Board of Trustees approved the enclosed resolution at their June meeting. The press gave this resolution only cursory coverage and I want to make sure that every member of the college community has the opportunity to read the resolution and to understand what it means for YCTC. Moreover, as we complete our long-range planning process and move forward with our accreditation self-study no one should be taken by surprise because of this resolution.

Please take a moment to read the resolution, which describes the “Core Services and Attributes of Maine’s Technical Colleges.” The same items enumerated in the resolution were circulated to the college community earlier this spring and comment was invited at the last College Round Table of the year. While I am not so sure that the YCTC community endorsed these core services in “overwhelming” fashion as described in the resolution, no one has approached me with any negative comments regarding these core services and attributes. What is important is that these core services and attributes are quite congruent with the college’s statements of vision, philosophy, mission, and affirmative action provided on pages four and five of our catalog. In fact, they are quite representative of what came out of the Future Search process. From my perspective very little is changing in this regard.

The more apparent change, at least to me, is the move to be described as “A Comprehensive Two-Year College System”. Obviously, there is some difference between a technical college and a comprehensive two-year college system, in name only if nothing else. Can we be comprehensive in nature and retain our technical college aspects?