All Political and Stuff:
Post Graduate Education and Why Many Young Mainers are Leaving

A little over a week ago, i was complaining to Dan about not having a desk. The next night Annie called me up asking if i wanted her desk since her new apartment will not have enough room for it. I said sure... the only hang-up was that i'd have to somehow get it from Cambridge to Allston, and it's too big for my car. The next night, Q called up saying she would be in Boston the following night, with her truck. I called up Adam (Annie's ex in whose basement her desk resided), and he happened to have that next day off. So now, through the help of FOUR friends, i have a desk. Yes, the universe sat that one on my lap. It all fell into place rather nicely. And now that i have a desk, or "a room of one's own," as Virginia Woolf might like to refer to a space for a woman to write, i suddenly feel enabled to write a LOT. And i have been writing, for those of you who have noticed, academic article type stuff rather than journal type stuff. Yes, i guess having a desk makes me want to write. And it turns out my true calling just may be academic writing. Or at least i have a lot of bull shit to spew.

At any rate, this is a letter that i recently wrote to the Governor of Maine. I also sent it to the congressmen, senators, secretary of state, head of the Maine Department of Education, The Courier Gazzette, Lincoln County News, Portland Press Herald, & The Camden Herald.. Please feel free to react, or, more importantly, write a letter of your own regarding either why young Mainers are leaving or post-graduate education in Maine or both.

Start.


To: Governor John Baldacci
Office of the Governor
#1 State House Station
Augusta, ME 04333-0001

From: Lindsay B. LeClair
121 Glenville Ave. #2
Allston, MA 02134

May 24, 2004

Re: Post-Graduate Education and Why Many Young Mainers are Leaving

Dear Governor Baldacci:

I am writing to you with great concern for the topic above from the perspective of a young Mainer who left.

Six or seven years ago, Governor King spoke to my class at Medomak Valley High School in Waldoboro, Maine and implored us to stay in Maine after graduation. Even if we had to go to school out of state, he pleaded us to come back and make our lives in Maine. Governor King stressed the importance to Maine’s future to have us stay. It would perhaps prevent Maine’s economy from being entirely tourist based, and he suggested that if there were more young people around, more jobs would eventually be created by supply and demand.

Six or seven years down the road, young Mainers are still leaving. When Governor King spoke to my class of ’98, many career-oriented high-schoolers were planning on going to college, but not necessarily graduate school. The times have changed rapidly since then, and when I completed my baccalaureate degree at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts in 2002 and was ready to work for a while until pursuing a doctorate in Literature in Cultural Studies, the only job opportunities available to me involved customer service or manual labor. I am not above either of those, in fact, I am 24 and have 12 years of customer service and 6 years of manual labor under my belt. But that’s not why I went to college. So I couldn’t work in Maine until I started school again. Furthermore, there was no suitable graduate program. There are a couple of masters programs in English, but no doctoral programs. Considering that I want to be a literature professor, which requires a doctorate now, there was no program in Maine for me.

Please realize that I am not attacking the educational system in Maine. I know many people who have received impressive educations through the University of Maine system, and I always express with pride the incredible opportunities I had through the Maine public school system. I would not be who I am today if it weren’t for those opportunities and the community’s encouragement. I am, however, asking that the board members for the Maine Department of Education to consider expanding the extant graduate programs from catering to those in business and the sciences to also catering to the humanities and liberal arts. For example, there happens to be a wonderful location in Camden where MBNA has moved out that would make a perfect location for a graduate school extension of the University of Maine. Such an expansion would contribute invaluably to the surrounding community. Real estate opportunities would increase for students looking for off-campus housing. The jobs that the university alone would provide would allow many looking for opportunities in office management, clerical work, administrative and assistance opportunities, not to mention maintenance and landscape possibilities to find employment, and also, perhaps, a place to me to be a professor someday. Is all this a pipe dream? Maybe. But I dreamt it up with some fellow Mainer-in-exile friends of mine, and we all hope that someday when we come back, there will be opportunities like that to come back to.

So I have left again, gone back to Massachusetts after having graduated from college here to work in Boston while I look for a doctoral program in the liberal arts that will allow me to be competitive in the workforce of professors someday. There are very few things I am sadder about in my relationship to Maine than the fact that what I want to do with my future is incommensurable with what is available for me in Maine. I know a lot of other young Mainers who feel the same way. Please keep this letter in mind when you make future decisions about education in Maine.

Sincerely a Mainer in exile,

Lindsay B. LeClair