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Lisa Botshon is a professor of English at the University of Maine at Augusta. Amy Rahn is an associate professor of art history at the University of Maine at Augusta. The views expressed here are strictly the writers’ own.

Writing to his wife Abigail in 1780, John Adams famously laid out a generational vision for the new nation: He had studied politics and war so that his children would be able to study mathematics and philosophy; in turn, he hoped his grandchildren would be able to study poetry, music and art.

Adams understood that a healthy democracy must expand human potential over time and that intellectual and cultural growth was essential to self-governance.

In a recent article noting the University of Maine System’s increase in enrollments this fall, Chancellor Dannel Malloy commented that we are “preparing more professionals for good-paying careers and strengthening the state’s employers and economy.”

As professors who have devoted our careers to serving Maine students, we celebrate the system’s enrollment growth. Yet, as we think of our students, we think of the diversity of their career aims and academic interests, and of the unforeseen twists and turns their lives can take. We also know that their educations help sustain them through those changes.

Knowing and believing in the immense capacity of our students, we advise a “yes, and”
approach to education that does not substitute “workforce development” for academic choice and depth.

We worry that higher education leadership is collapsing Adams’ trajectory, narrowing the horizons of the very students public universities were built to serve. Under the guise of “workforce development,” the University of Maine System leadership is systematically
reframing regional public universities like the University of Maine at Augusta as trade schools built for short-term job vacancies.

The hypocrisy here is hard to ignore. Many of the leaders championing this narrow understanding of the value of education built their own high-flying careers on liberal arts
foundations. Chancellor Malloy, for example, studied political science and sociology at Boston College. He forged a career as a lawyer, a mayor and a governor before becoming our chancellor.

However, Malloy and other similarly educated leaders seem intent on denying Maine’s students the comprehensive education that fueled their own successes. Rather than cultivating empowered citizens, they are reducing institutions of public higher education to what the scholar Zena Hitz calls mere “servants of wealth and power.”

This trend threatens to deepen social inequities. Nationally, 70% of public, four-year
undergraduates attend regional public universities like ours. If elite private colleges continue to offer expansive, mind-broadening education in a variety of academic areas while regional publics are stripped down to job-training pipelines, public higher education will no longer act as an engine of mobility. Instead, it will merely serve the status quo, calcifying existing class divisions.

Universities like UMA aren’t degree factories. We are stewards of place. We serve as civic,
cultural and economic anchors in our communities. Among others, we support adult learners, parents and mid-career professionals leading non-linear lives. Stripping away support for public liberal arts education deprives our communities of the broad-minded local leaders, critical thinkers and engaged citizens they need to thrive.

Training students strictly for “today’s economy” is also a failing strategy in the age of artificial intelligence. Automation will sweep through single-skill job markets faster than any curriculum can be updated. What AI cannot replicate are the core tenets of a liberal arts education: critical thinking, ethical judgment, complex communication and adaptability. Far from an outdated luxury, a broad education is the only real career insurance left in an unpredictable market.

We don’t have to choose between workforce readiness and the liberal arts. Maine’s students deserve a “yes, and” education, one that delivers career preparation alongside intellectual depth.

Redirecting the focus of the University of Maine System will take financial investment and political courage. If our state leaders want Maine citizens to have the opportunity to build meaningful, resilient lives reflective of their individual goals and talents, they must
foundationally support the full spectrum of learning in higher education by sufficiently funding the state’s beloved public university system.

We call on our university and state leadership to stop reducing our public universities to mere assembly lines for the “workforce,” and instead reinvest in them as engines of human potential, just as Adams once envisioned.