Tim’s unlikely journey from rural Readfield, Maine, to 91¸ŁŔű to Los Angeles provides a backdrop for his latest gig: speaker for the 2026 undergraduate commencement ceremonies at his alma mater.

In this episode of “The Maine Question” podcast, host Ron Lisnet and Allen Adams, communications specialist and marketing coordinator for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, speak with Tim about his journey, the business of show business, memories of his days in Orono and much more.

From hospital unit closures and job vacancies to an aging workforce, Maine is facing several challenges in sustaining its healthcare industry. Yet there are still opportunities for the state to bolster its healthcare workforce and services if industry and higher education work together.

91¸ŁŔű is working with Northern Light Health on attracting and retaining the next generation of medical professionals. Leveraging 91¸ŁŔű’s biomedical research and Northern Light Health’s talent pipeline, both institutions also seek to mold the state into a biomedical industry hub and expand partnerships to realize this goal.

In this episode of “The Maine Question” podcast, 91¸ŁŔű President Joan Ferrini-Mundy and Dr. Jim Jarvis, director of Clinical Education at Northern Light Health, discuss this growing partnership and what it could mean for healthcare in Maine. Andre Khalil, a professor of biomedical engineering at 91¸ŁŔű, also shares his work in the fight against breast cancer as an example of how the university uses innovation to improve people’s health.

Job-related stress in professions like nursing and teaching are increasingly overwhelming many who chose these career paths. At a time when teachers and nurses are in high demand, professional burnout is forcing them to rethink their careers.

Faculty at the University of Maine recognized this happening in nursing and education students before they even stepped into the professional world. To reduce it among students and maintain a healthy workforce in Maine, they brainstormed creative programming to help future nurses and teachers cope with demanding professions.

In this episode of “The Maine Question” podcast, 91¸ŁŔű faculty members Kelley Strout, Jesse Kaye-Schiess and Faith Erhardt, along with nursing student Ian Beaulieu, explore these programs and more with host Ron Lisnet.

91¸ŁŔű has many research projects that use Zebrafish as a model which have led to some groundbreaking discoveries. In this episode of The Maine Question podcast, we explore that research and how it uses this remarkable fish.

Can Zebrafish improve human health?

[background music]

Ron Lisnet:

This humble creature is known as the zebrafish. It’s a favorite for people with aquariums in their homes because they’re easy to care for, hardy, and fairly low‑maintenance.

What you may not realize is they play a major role in advancing human health in some of our most intractable diseases, everything from cancer and muscular dystrophy to infections. These little guys play a key part in much of the biomedical work being done at 91¸ŁŔű, which is taking a major step forward with new investments and facilities to grow and use these zebrafish.

Today on “The Maine Question” podcast, we are going to dive into that work. What makes zebrafish so valuable for research? What special capabilities does it have, and what kind of work is being done here at 91¸ŁŔű?

Welcome in everybody. I’m Ron Lisnet. This is The Maine Question podcast, and we’re excited to talk about zebrafish today. Let’s introduce our guest. Rob, maybe let’s start with you.

Rob Wheeler: Sure. My name is Rob Wheeler. I’m a professor of microbiology here. We study a human fungal pathogen. It’s a fungus called Candida albicans. We try to understand how it causes disease and how our immune system protects us against it.

Ron: Ben?

Ben: Yes. I’m Ben King and an associate professor here in the Department of Molecular Biomedical Sciences with my colleagues Robin and Melody. My research focuses on the innate immune response to influenza virus infection.

Ron: This is that time of year, isn’t it?

Ben: It is, unfortunately, but it happens every year.

Ron: Melody?

Melody Neely: I’m Melody Neely. I’m the associate professor and chair of molecular and biomedical sciences. I’m a microbiologist, and I use zebrafish to study infectious disease, specifically streptococci and how the immune system reacts to it.

Ron: Before we get into the science and all that’s going on here at 91¸ŁŔű, let’s talk about this little creature, this animal here. What do we know about zebrafish in the wild? Where and how do they live?

Ben King: They are a native fish species to South Asia, so in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, the Ganges Basin and other areas. They are in a fairly warm climate, where it first introduced and started to be used as what we call a genetically tractable organism in the 1980S or so.

Ron: They can tolerate living in not so clean water and less than ideal conditions. Is that right?

Rob: Absolutely. They’re very hardy fish. They’re great for aquarists, and that makes them great for us, too.

Ron: Let’s talk about what this creature allows you as scientists to do on a basic level. What are the most common applications or uses for zebrafish in the science world?

Melody:

I believe that toxicology is a big area since they are an animal that we can look at from pre‑birth. They lay their eggs outside the body and they’re fertilized. From the second they’re fertilized, you can start asking if things are toxic to them.

It can be a really nice first pass for looking at new drugs or new compounds that you might want to use eventually in a human.

The other major thing is as larvae, up to about two weeks old, they are transparent. That allows us to be able to inject fluorescent bacteria and be able to see where they go in the body.

We also have transgenic zebrafish that have fluorescent immune factors. It’s the only animal model in which you can look and see bacteria interacting with an immune cell in a live animal in real time.

Ron: You could see inside without destroying the embryo?

Melody: Exactly. While they’re alive, and then you can do that over time. You can put them back to be incubated and take them out hours later and ask, how has that environment changed?

Ron: Obviously, humans and fish don’t look anything alike and just live completely different worlds, but I was surprised to read that we share 70 to 85 percent of our genetic background with zebrafish? That seems surprising to me for two beings that are so different.

Ben:

The genome, as we call it, the collection of all genes in these organisms, the first report was in 2013 or so. It’s smaller than our genome, but interestingly, there are actually more genes. During the evolution of this species as well as what we call teleost fish, there was what they call a genome duplication event.

All genes that, say, we have, have some kind of a last common ancestor between fish and humans. There was an additional round of whole genome duplication. In many cases, zebrafish have two copies of a particular gene. In some cases, they’ve lost one of those copies and it’s become nonfunctional.

All of the major signaling pathways that are involved with human disease are conserved largely in zebrafish. That makes them a really powerful model.

Ron: When you study, in your case, a fungal disease, Candida, does it affect these fish the same way it affects a human? I know there’s a shared genetic material, but are the ramifications the same?

Rob:

It’s pretty incredible that there are so many things that are the same between the fish and the human. It interacts with the same types of immune cells, and the same types of immune cells are required in zebrafish for resistance to infection as are required in people.

For many years, the mouse has been a premier model for understanding infectious disease, but we always were pretty sure that mice are not people. In some recent work, it’s clear that in important ways, they’re different, and the ways they respond to infection are different.

One of the current projects we have going on in our lab right now, there’s a gene that people don’t require for resistance to fungal infection. Mice do require it for fungal infection resistance, and zebrafish also don’t require it.

Maybe in some cases, zebrafish may be a better system to understand how our immune system protects us against fungal disease.

Ron: We have more in common with fish in some cases than mice, which are mammals.

Rob:

In some cases, yeah. In some cases, even though we all have our inner fish.

[laughter]

Rob:

Many years ago, it was appreciated that all vertebrates have a very similar developmental pathway, and that’s what we have. When you look at a very small human embryo, it looks a lot like any other vertebrate, including fish.

Then believe it or not, these fish have a liver, so you can study fatty liver disease. They have kidneys, you can study kidney disease. They have pancreas. They have brains. You can study lots about both simple and very complex behaviors in those fish.

Ron: It goes without saying, they’re probably a little less work than taking care of mice, right?

Melody: Yes. Definitely.

Rob: 91¸ŁŔű 100 times less work.

Ron: One of the other fascinating things I came across was the fact that it can regenerate body parts. Talk about that. What’s going on there?

Ben:

They can regenerate essentially any tissue after injury. There are some things that have been first characterized or described in the scientific literature by folks even working with other fish species back in the early 1900s.

They can regenerate their fins quite readily. In about two weeks after, if part of their fin was removed, it will completely regenerate in that time. Their hearts, if they’re injured, they’ll regenerate.

Ron: Really?

Ben: There are scientists that study also how the zebrafish regenerates its spinal cord. You can sever the spinal cord and it will regenerate. It’s quite a very powerful model.

Ron: If there was any way to replicate those features in a human, heart disease, people that are not able to walk, that’s the big‑picture goal out there, isn’t it?

Ben:

Yeah. Certainly, a lot of individuals work on tissue regeneration. It’s a very powerful model. There are other organisms that also have tremendous capacity for regeneration, like the axolotl and other models.

Using a comparative approach, one can try to tease apart what are the genes because we share the genes. It’s a matter of trying to reactivate some of these genes maybe in humans in order to have more regenerative capacity.

Ron: How close is that to crossing over to humans? Are we a long way away from humans being able to repair a damaged heart or anything?

Rob:

Every year, the money that NIH spends to run basic science labs leads to development of new potential drugs. It may not be that we transform people into fish, which we don’t want to do, but we may be able to find molecules that allow fish to do it.

Then instead of putting a regular Band‑Aid on, put a Band‑Aid with one of those molecules on and your cut heals way faster.

You put a gauze around or you put something around the spinal cord that’s been severed, and maybe we’re able to do that 10, 15, 20 years from now. Understanding those basic aspects of normal growth can really help us.

Ron: I know you each described what you’re looking at, but maybe just a big‑picture look. What’s the big question each of you are trying to answer with your research? You have to put on a cocktail napkin or tell somebody in an elevator, “This is my mission. This is what my life’s work is at the moment,” Melody, how would you describe that?

Melody:

I would say that I’m working with streptococcal diseases to determine how the immune system responds. We know that streptococci have the ability to inhibit the immune system to cause disease.

If we can determine what those factors are that strep is causing the immune system to change, we can then augment the immune system in humans to combat that.

Ron: Strep throat that we’re talking, correct?

Melody: Strep throat, necrotizing fasciitis, rheumatic fever, and meningitis from group B strep. Lots of diseases.

Ron: Ben, what’s the long term, what’s the big picture of what you’re working on?

Ben:

Looking at how the immune system responds to influenza virus, and as we’ve all experienced probably influenza infections, one thing that you might remember is a lot of inflammation, so high fever and the like. Looking at how to control that inflammatory response.

If that inflammatory response goes unchecked, then it can eventually lead to tissue damage in the lung and the like. Trying to find ways of trying to control that inflammation so that the response is optimized. There’s enough inflammation to clear the infection, but not too much inflammation to end up with damaged tissues.

There are all of the pathways that we’re studying that we’re interested in in terms of the human immune response are conserved in the zebrafish. We can introduce the virus to the zebrafish and study that response.

As Melody was talking about earlier, one thing we’re currently doing is to look at different small molecules that could be potentially antiviral therapies.

That’s important because our go‑to antiviral therapies currently for influenza, there unfortunately are strains of influenza that have over time, because of the use of those antivirals, they’ve acquired resistance. We need new antivirals in the future.

Ron: That’s the goal, is a new, more effective drug?

Ben: Yeah. That would be a way of…

Ron: Now, Rob, Candida fungal infections, I think, are more common than a lot of people know. A lot of people may not have heard of it, but…

Rob: Unfortunately.

Ron: What are you looking at specifically?

Rob:

Candida causes is the fourth most common cause of hospital‑acquired infection in the US. In those infections, it can be quite deadly. Even though we have good drugs against fungal disease, they are not good enough.

Then one of the most pervasive diseases that Candida causes are yeast infections in women. We still don’t really understand why some Candida strains cause disease and some don’t, why some women get disease and some don’t.

These are questions that have bearing for a lot of people. We’d like to understand about how candida causes disease, and then from that, understand how we might be able to help our immune system to deal with that.

One of the things we are interested in for fish is to say OK, well, this patient is taking a drug that helps their autoimmune‑related disease, like arthritis or psoriasis, but they become more susceptible to fungal infection from that. Why is it that they become more susceptible to fungal infection?

Is there a way to find drugs that can treat psoriasis or other autoimmune diseases but leave the rest or the important parts of the immune system intact?

Ron: Making progress?

Rob:

Day by day, yeah. Today was a really fantastic day. I had a nice chat with one of my students, and he found that this drug that affects a really important immune cell, it seems to affect the ability of that immune cell to kill the Candida.

Previously, a bit thought it just blocks the immune cell from getting to the infection, but now, we seem to be able to see by following the same fish, the same immune cells over time in the confocal microscope for 18 hours, now you can see the individual fungal cells be killed, and you can see that the drug makes a difference in the ability of the fish to kill them.

Ron: That’s a big day in the research world.

Rob: Absolutely. That happens once in six months.

Ron: Take them where you can get them, right?

Rob: Absolutely. It’s a good day today.

Ron:

Checking in on our other guests here, and they look like they’re doing OK. I want to thank Mark Nilan, who’s the lab manager for the zebrafish facility, who gave us our extra guests here.

As a matter of fact, now we’re going to step away and we’re going to take a look at the newly‑renovated zebrafish facility that has just come online, and Mark Nilan’s going to give us a little tour of that.

Mark Nilan:

This is our new facility we just put together, and it’s up and running. We do research on human disease with these animals. Everything is updated, better lighting, we have control of our heating and cooling in this room, our water system is state of the art.

We have doubled the space, I would say, and that allows us to expand our colony. They can produce a lot of eggs each time they spawn. They can spawn every two weeks. Each female will give 100 to 300 eggs. They’re easy to keep.

Here at Maine, we’re doing things like muscular dystrophy. We’re doing muscle diseases, and so the muscles are at that early stages. Being a vertebrate is the key. I always ask that on tours when people come in because the first thing I always ask is how can you do research on a fish?

We’re not fish. We’re not even look like a fish, but we’re vertebrates. We share that early development. Exactly.

Other things they do here are the flu. I believe it’s 85 percent genes are shared with us humans. Now we’re in the water system room. This is what you’d see if you went to the 91¸ŁŔű pool in the back room, kind of the same thing.

The difference, however, is you want to kill everything in the pool. You bleach the…Here, we don’t. With all those things, the lighting, the temperature, the water, precise, steady, the fish are locked on. They’re dialed in because that’s what makes them produce.

If they have any fluctuations, it makes them slow down. It is just fish in here. Everything about this room is for the growth and care of the fish.

Ron: Thank you, Mark, for that tour. For you folks that work with zebrafish, this new facility must be quite a revelation. What does this new facility mean for the work you’re all doing. Melody?

Melody:

For the new facility, it’s better water system. It’s less problems with heat. The fish have to be in a very controlled environment with special heat, humidity. It’s an old building, and so we were having lots of problems with pests and things.

With the new facility, we’ve eliminated a lot of that. We’ve also increased the size so that we can now increase the number of fish that we’re producing to be able to use, particularly the mutant fish that need to be maintained over time. It provides more facility to be able to grow those.

Ron: It’s beautiful. They’re natives of Southeast Asia, so they like it warm, I would imagine. How about for you? What’s your ability to leverage this new facility?

Ben:

As Melody was saying, the current facility before this one was built, or this previous facility, was old. It was, I think, built in maybe 2007 or so. It’s something where having newer environmental systems is really important. Now we’re able to have a backup.

These zebrafish lines that we have are really powerful tools, but in some cases, this is the only place where these fish exist, where we’ve engineered specific mutations and the like.

If something catastrophic were to happen to the heat or something like that, we could lose those lines, but now that we have two rooms, we can have some redundancy. That capacity is important.

Ron: I don’t know if the fish noticed it, but I’m sure that it’s cleaner, the light’s nicer. It’s just a nicer place to live than the old one.

Melody: Yes.

Ron: How about for you? Does the new facility make your job easier?

Rob:

Even though zebrafish are a really powerful model system and they make lots of eggs, they can make lots of eggs, they don’t always do it. The better we can keep them, the happier we can keep them, the more likely that we can count on that.

I used to have a student, she would set up four experiments to make sure that she had one experiment to do, sets up four different crosses of fish. If we can be sure that they’re going to spawn, then she just needs to set up one. Then every time, she can get that experiment done.

It’s an incredible gift to have not only a gifted aquarist like Mark to run the facility, but also a really high‑quality facility that is going to enable us to use the zebrafish to their greatest extent.

Ron: How common are zebrafish labs and the similarities to the work you’re doing among other research universities hospitals or other labs and such? Is this a common tool used in human health research around the world?

Melody:

It has become more so. It didn’t really start to be used until 1999, 2000 for infectious disease, which is what we all work on. Since that time, it has really expanded, and then it’s also expanded into the cancer realm.

There are huge research labs at Harvard, at UT Southwestern that study human cancer mutations and genes using the zebrafish. We have actually come up with a lot of knowledge about how to treat cancer, how cancer develops, what genes are involved in that using the zebrafish that we could not use mice or rats previously to do.

Ron: Is there anything that 91¸ŁŔű has a niche in in terms of zebrafish research, or discoveries, or milestones that have been reached here at 91¸ŁŔű?

Rob:

Absolutely. We have one of the higher concentrations of zebrafish researchers in the US. If you think about there are large medical facilities, medical schools that have a number of zebrafish researchers, but that’s within much larger faculty.

We have this great concentration of people that are using this model, and that allows us to work with each other collaboratively to raise the same fish lines, to make new fish lines…

Melody: Share resources.

Rob:

share technologies and so on. This is a really unusual situation where we have several people using zebrafish for infectious disease that are sitting around the table, but also another group that’s interested in using zebrafish for understanding muscular dystrophies as well. It’s a very powerful model for that as well.

When you eat a fillet of salmon, that’s all muscle. The zebrafish is mostly muscle, so that gives you a great opportunity to understand how muscle develops and works.

Ron: Go ahead.

Ben:

The influenza virus model that we use in my laboratory with zebrafish was actually developed here at the University of Maine. Carol Kim, who was a professor here and moved on to be the provost at University of Albany, she, in her lab, were the first to demonstrate that you could introduce influenza virus infection in the zebrafish.

I carry on that work in my lab. That’s something where now there are groups over the summer. There were two papers, one from University of Toronto in Canada, another from a group in Europe that used this influenza model in the zebrafish.

It’s great to see University of Maine make that scientific contribution and have these other labs also be using the model.

Rob:

Melody was the first to do streptococcus infection in zebrafish and our lab, the first to do fungal Candida albicans infection in zebrafish and published that. We are on the cutting edge here, for better or for worse.

[laughter]

Ron: I’m just wondering, when you introduce a flu virus to a zebrafish, does it affect fish like it does humans? Did they swim slower and are achy? How does that look?

Ben: We have to introduce it by injecting the virus into the zebrafish just to establish an infection. There is inflammation, as there are in humans, and their movement does slow because of their immune response to the infection.

Ron: We should mention that the handling of these creatures follows all the protocols, safety, and for the benefit of the individual fish. That is all baked into what you do, I imagine.

Rob: Absolutely. These are with any vertebrate animal that we use for research, and zebrafish are certainly one of them.

Ron: I’m sure you all have students that you work with, whether they’re grads or undergrads. What’s this experience like for them? Is it bring it a little more “to life” other than reading about genes and DNA in a book or doing some sort of test tube type of situation in a lab? Does it bring the knowledge and the education home a little bit more?

Melody:

Absolutely. I think we all have a lot of undergrads in our labs, but also graduate students. The undergrads, it’s something accessible. Working with a zebrafish is something that an undergraduate with less training could work with as opposed to mice, a mammalian model.

Even just collecting embryos that have been bred and fertilized and counting them, that type of thing, they’re fascinated by that.

Looking at a green fluorescent protein that’s in a zebrafish and be able to see that in the microscope, that brings it to life that this is a live animal and that we are actually seeing not only the development, but seeing how other organisms within them are interacting.

Ron: It becomes a little more real, I imagine, for these students the first time they look and say, “This is a live creature I’m dealing with here.” Does that make a difference for your students?

Ben: Yeah. We have a robust set of courses that are around discovery so they’re not just following some kind of a protocol where they…

Ron: A cookbook.

Ben:

Exactly. Our phage discovery courses, which Melody has been and is part of, it’s where they’re taking soil samples, isolating a phage and characterizing that, sequencing its genome, annotating it, in many cases, publishing papers on that new genome. We’re fortunate to have some endowed fellowships that students can compete for.

Because of that first‑year experience, they’re interested in doing more and more research. They’ll pick a lab. If they work with one of us, then obviously they will most likely work with zebrafish and hopefully carry that through their entire time here at the University of Maine.

That becomes something where they might have initially been inspired to maybe try research, but they can get their hands around what research is all about and learn that there’s potential for great discoveries, but there are other things that make research difficult and frustrating at times.

It’s something where hopefully they can be inspired to go to graduate school or go out into the biomedical workforce in some way. Many of our students are…it’s amazing to watch where they go.

Ron:

Next time any of us visit the pet store, we should have a newfound respect for the guys in the tanks there.

[laughter]

Melody: Exactly.

Ben: Absolutely.

Ron: Talk about where we’re headed with all of this. What’s the next frontier? What are next hopeful steps or advances that we might be looking at in…Pick your time horizon. Anything come to mind?

Melody:

Working with the immune system. That’s what comes to my mind at first because that’s what I work on with infectious diseases, is I think we’re going to find ways.

A lot of this is through Ben’s work and looking at small RNAs and molecules that are involved in the immune system that we don’t know how they’re working in humans, but we can study them individually in the zebrafish.

Previously, if you have a disease or an infection, the idea is you treat it with an antibiotic or some kind of a drug, or go to bed and drink lots of water. Now, instead of trying to treat the infection, we can learn things about the immune system and ask, how can we augment that to make it better at responding to this particular disease?

We’re not just targeting killing the bacteria. We can target by learning more, just the knowledge that we’re getting from learning about the immune system that’s so similar to ours. We can figure out ways in which we can turn that on or turn it off when we need to, to keep from harming the body. That’s what I see.

Rob:

If we think about the evolution of drugs that affect the immune system, you think about steroids, which are still used frequently today and that are a whole body drug. These are drugs that affect every part of the immune system in your whole body.

Now, if you look at the commercials that are coming out, you’ll see that there are many individual biological therapies that are out there, antibodies to one immune molecule or another, now are coming out 30 years after we discovered those molecules and understood what they did in people.

The work that we’re doing now is going to bring that next generation of immune‑modulating drugs to market, I’m sure.

Where now, as I mentioned before, instead of just using this drug which will treat the psoriasis but make you more susceptible to infections, now you find the drug that treats the psoriasis, and then a different drug that maybe makes you less susceptible to those infections.

Ron: Do any of you have aquariums at home?

Melody: Not at the moment. I used to.

Ron: I’ve seen you have a dog in a classroom.

Melody:

Yes.

[background music]

Rob: We’ve had a lab aquarium where we get the retired zebrafish and we give them a good home.

Ron: That’s very nice. That’s great. Thank you all so much for coming in. Fascinating work, and best of luck in whatever the next steps are.

Melody: Thank you.

Rob: Thanks, Ron.

Ben: Thank you.

Melody: Thanks for the time.

Ron:

Thanks for checking us out on The Maine Question podcast. You can find all of our episodes on Apple Podcast, on Spotify, on 91¸ŁŔű’s YouTube page, as well as our website. If you have questions or comments, you can send them along to mainequestion@maine.edu. This is Ron Lisnet. We’ll catch you next time on The Maine Question.

[music]

 
 

91¸ŁŔű Advanced Manufacturing Center (AMC) is helping manufacturers in the state integrate new robotics, such as AI, machine learning and automation technologies, into their operations. These mechanical helpers can take care of the three “D’s” in manufacturing — work that is dull, dirty or dangerous. They don’t get bored, can’t be overworked and aren’t subject to injury.

A group of University of Maine faculty and staff teamed up with industry stakeholders to create the , which lays the groundwork for growing and diversifying the state’s great outdoors over the next decade. Collaborative partners, including the university, the Maine Office of Outdoor Recreation, Maine Outdoor Brands and others, launched the roadmap in January.  

In this episode of “The Maine Question” podcast, a few experts who worked together to develop the roadmap discuss the various outdoor-related industries, their potential for growth and the potential challenges they face.

[background music]

Ron Lisnet: Hello, and welcome to “The Maine Question” podcast. Thanks for hanging out with us. I’m your host, Ron Lisnet. Today, the Maine Question heads into the great outdoors. Now Maine, of course, has a well deserved reputation as vacation land, and that history goes back all the way to the beginning of the state.

Outdoor recreation has helped define the state, and it’s also big business. It’s a big part of Maine’s economy to the tune of around $3.4 billion, that’s billion with a B. Is that the maximum potential that the Maine outdoor recreation industry could reach? What is the ceiling for it, and what would it take to get there?

Those are some of the things we’re going to talk about today. What kind of development? What kind of workforce is needed? What other factors might help it realize its full potential?

91¸ŁŔű has been part of a collaboration that is looking at just that issue, and it has helped develop what’s called the Maine Outdoor Recreation Economy Roadmap, which charts the way forward for the next 10 years. That is what we’re going to talk about here today with our guests, and we welcome everybody in.

Maybe we can just have you start with saying your name and your title, what you do and how you were involved in this project, and why is that of interest to you? Why are you in this world talking about these things to begin with? Let’s start with Jessica.

Jessica Haight: Hi. My name is Jessica Haight. I’m the recruitment and retention manager at Sunday River. I’m here to talk about the workforce development piece of this. I participated in the recent Maine Outdoor Economy Summit and was on a panel there talking about similar things workforce.

It’s an interesting thing to see how much the state embraces and supports that from early levels up through higher education and beyond to people who are already in the workforce or upscaling them. I’m here to talk about that.

Ron: Jason?

Jason Entsminger: I’m Dr. Jason Entsminger. I’m an assistant professor of entrepreneurship and innovation in the Maine Business School. I’m our state specialist for small business in the University of Maine’s cooperative extension program.

In that dual role at the university, I get to do applied research, economic policy planning, helping businesses, connecting with industries like the firm that Jessica works for and really representing moving forward Maine businesses.

On the outdoor rec economy road map, I’ve been part of the core team over the last year working on implementing with our partners, like Maine Outdoor Brands, the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development, Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, and other trade associations and industry associations in the state.

Being able to be part of this roadmap and seeing the process from the beginning of this current road map initiative to now on implementation phase where we’re starting to think about how we grow Maine’s outbreak economy in a sustainable and meaningful way has been a lot of fun. I’m really excited to talk about in this podcast.

Ron: Mikayla, you started looking at this when you were a student, right? You’re still a student now, but now in grad school?

Mikayla Reynolds: Yes. I am a master’s of business administration student. I have concentrations in sustainability and public and nonprofit management, which I think is really important for the sector when we think about outdoor recreation.

I was also in a special topics class that was led by Jason where we really focused on entrepreneurial ecosystem opportunities for outdoor recreation in Maine. I did an internship actually with Maine Outdoor Brands, thinking about the road map and have participated in outdoor summit and other activities as well.

Ron: Well, it looks like we brought in the right people to talk about this. That’s great. Anybody can jump in on any of these questions. Maine has obviously been a long‑time destination for people who love outdoor recreation.

Did that begin with hunting and fishing? I mean, there’s all also homes for the rich and famous when they want a summer getaway thing. Give us an idea of what’s the historical arc of all this.

Jason: I’m actually from away. I’m a new Mainer. I moved here in 2022. One of the things that I really liked when I moved here was learning about Maine’s outdoor recreation and its history, going all the way back to the role of our native populations, of our tribal populations and how they utilized Maine’s natural landscapes and natural spaces.

I grew up out west in Nevada. Coming here was like coming home just with more trees. Working with the tribal populations, really understanding from them the role that outdoor recreation has played in Maine’s history since prehistoric times, really.

One of the early stories that I learned was a tribal oral history about the moose in Mount Kineo, which is this oral history story from Maine’s tribal populations about how the mountain was a mother cow moose that laid in place there and the role of Maine’s natural landscapes.

I think we see that throughout Maine’s history. Henry David Thoreau was here in the 1800s. There’s a great letter from Teddy Roosevelt to James Sewell about the role that his time in Aroostook County played in his formation as a young man, as an army officer and Teddy Roosevelt’s love, of course, for natural spaces and the creation of systems that protect our natural spaces.

I always think that Maine’s history has always been tied to outdoor recreation in various ways, whether it’s on the water with tribal populations using waterways to transport or our inland areas where people are using lakes, rivers and mountain scapes to recreate and be in the outdoors. Of course, there’s the first phrase you learn as a new Mainer, “Upta Camp,” right?

Ron: Right.

[laughter]

Jason: The role of Upta Camp. We were just talking as we were walking over to the podcast about you guys got snow today, skiing and the role. I can only imagine some historical ski resorts and things like that. You live in a prehistoric place.

Jessica: Yeah. I’m from Southern New Hampshire, so I’m not from super far away. I moved up to Maine in 2020. Growing up in Southern New Hampshire, everybody went on vacation to Maine. We went camping here.

We went to summer camps here. My high school senior trip, we went whitewater rafting. Went up to the Forks. You go to Maine to go on vacation, whether you’re going to the coast or you’re going to the mountains, you’re going to go ski or any of those things.

As a New Englander, it’s just ingrained in you that you know these things. We’d all heard the name of Sunday River before I ever ended up working there.

I don’t have a whole lot of the historic background that you just brought, but I would just say from being a person who grew up here, everyone knows that you go to Maine to go on vacation regardless of what you’re doing there.

Ron: Now, are you a Mainer?

Mikayla: Yes. I’m a Mainer. I grew up camping, hunting, fishing and go seasonally every year. I have a license where I’m always constantly out hunting and fishing and just spending my time outdoors. Done numerous hikes in Acadia, climb Mount Katahdin, enjoy spending my time every season in some sport. I’m a Mainer. I spend time outdoors.

[laughter]

Ron: Let’s put some facts and figures to this. How big a business? How many jobs? What role does it play in the Maine economy? How many visitors? Are there any numbers that we could put to those questions?

Jason: You mentioned the total economic impact from the Bureau of Economic Analysis called BEA, for short. In terms of total number of people employed, Maine employs around 30,000 people as of the most recent numbers, which was from 2023. 2023 numbers, we had 30,000 people working in the industry.

That’s a mix of people working in seasonal positions at Sunday River, permanent positions there, people working on the coast, but also people working in gear manufacturing and in other sectors that support the whole wreck economy.

That’s one of the things I think is so important is these numbers that we’re thinking about, they’re about all of the ways that all the parts of Maine’s economy touch on outdoor recreation, not just one specific sector or another, but it’s this whole broad economy for the state.

We’ve seen some really notable increases in some of those sectors like manufacturing. Really thinking about how we bring manufacturing back in a new age way. We see a lot of firms in Maine thinking about how they manufacture outdoor recreation gear and apparel.

That contributed to $311 million to the state and which was about a 17 percent increase from the prior year. From 2022 to 2023, we saw that outdoor rec gear manufacturing in Maine increase a really large amount. I mean, I treat it as a economist, 17 percent growth in an industry is an absolutely tremendous amount.

Boating and fishing were $384 million. RV, a lot of our RV camps and other RV and retail was $265 million. Jessica’s industry, snow activities, which includes skiing and snowmobiling and snowboarding was a hundred and $108 million, which was a 58 percent increase over 2022.

Ron: How many employees at Sunday River? Any idea?

Jessica: In the wintertime, we’re just under 1,200. In the summertime, we’re about 400. We are open year round, and we do have some of those year‑round opportunities, but obviously, we’re bigger in the winter.

Ron: The outdoor recreation economy, is that a subset of tourism in general?

Jason: It’s more than just tourism. That’s the great thing. That BEA number that we have, BEA has created for about the last decade what’s called a satellite account. That satellite account is a special tabulation that the US Bureau of Economic Analysis does to understand all of the interconnections.

Accommodations, tourism, travel, those are that’s part of that. It’s part of it, but so is the manufacturing side, so is the retail side. One of our partners on the roadmap, for example, was Maine Marine Trades Association. They’re the trade association for boat retail, boat building, for marinas and docks. All of these different types of services play into it.

Even the things like we call periphery or things on the outside of the core be like insurance. Insurance sales to businesses are part of it. Finance is part of the industry. Research and development and innovation in new product technology is part of it.

Right here on Indian Island in Old Town, we have Johnson Outdoors. It’s one company that does manufacturing. We recently heard them speak when we launched the roadmap as part of a panel about some of the new innovations that they’re talking about there in Maine, bringing that engineering innovation here to Maine. That’s all part of the whole industry.

Ron: It trickles down and it goes in all directions. What was some of the spark that, Mikayla, maybe you can speak to this, that led to the creating the road map? How did this effort get underway, and what was the impetus to do it?

Mikayla: Sure. What I would say to that is I think that the intention is that we want to really pull the sector together. There are all these moving pieces.

The roadmap is really a strategic opportunity to bring together people from across the industry to think strategically and intentionally about where do we go from here, and what are all the layers of that and the partnerships that should be really facilitated to really promote, and strengthen the industry as we look down the road ten years.

Ron: It seems obvious, but the university being involved in that, we have expertise researchers. I mean, that is the role that the university filled, basically.

Mikayla: Absolutely. I think things like the class that was hosted is really an opportunity to bring in a younger focus on outdoor recreation, but also to think about the literature and how can we apply the literature to outdoor recreation from the entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective. Then also, an opportunity to really center in the work of the university.

There’s definitely opportunities for the university from the researcher perspective, but also as an opportunity to bring together different programs. If you wanted to have a summer youth program, that really center on outdoor recreation, that can be someone that’s facilitated through the university in some form with other partners. What would you [indecipherable] ?

Jason: One of the things that I was thinking of when you’re talking about this is just where you, University of Maine alumni, end up landing.

When we held the Maine Outdoor Economy Summit at Sunday River this year, I was checking out of my hotel room at the resort. It turned out there was a Maine Business School alum there who works in the industry, has a business degree and works in the industry.

I think from the university standpoint, we do. We have that expertise, but I think we also have deep connections to our industry partners, like Sunday River, to our businesses. That’s been the impetus for our involvement. 91¸ŁŔű has done helped out with a large number of these other roadmaps. FOR/Maine was one. Blue Economy was one.

One of the things that I think is really interesting about Maine is we were one of the first states to actually create an agency in Maine for outdoor recreation. That was created in 2018. It’s the Maine Office of Outdoor Recreation under the Department of Economic and Community Development.

Part of the roadmap impetus started with that, that the state has made an investment in terms of having an office now with dedicated staff thinking about the outdoor recreation industry, partnering with main outdoor brands and our other trade associations in the state that relate to outdoor rec, wanting to really think about economic planning.

They had started an initial effort, did some pre‑planning, received some federal money for pre‑planning in around the time that the pandemic was really reaching its height, seeing the role that outdoor rec was playing in the state as people during the pandemic were looking for more outdoor opportunities.

We saw huge growth during the pandemic in not only visitorships in outdoor spaces across the country and across the world, but also in people looking for and purchasing gear, experiences, travel tours, all of this stuff.

That’s really where I think the impetus for creating this 10‑year strategic plan came from, was that the state’s been making these investments in the industry. It didn’t just start overnight.

We’ve been working up towards this point, and the university coming in as a partner when the state was ready to sit down and utilize federal ARPA funds, American Recovery Plan Act funds, from the Economic Development Administration, to put together this 10‑year strategic plan is the culmination of several years of work prior.

Ron: Now we talked about hunting and fishing as the tradition, and that still obviously is a big part of it. We talked about skiing, of course, with Sunday River.

What are some of the newer activities that might start drawing people to Maine that are newer sports or newer things you can do in the outdoors that might add to the suite of options that are there now? What’s growing now and what might be coming down the road that hasn’t even started yet? Any thoughts?

Jessica: I think that one of the things that’s maybe, not necessarily bringing in new people, but bringing in the same people during different seasons is industries that ordinarily would be considered seasonal, like skiing, for example, and ski resorts that are turning into bike parks in the summer.

What do you think of a golf course? That’s traditionally a summer activity, and it lies dormant all winter. Cross country skiing and snowshoeing at the golf course, they have all this big area for it. Some place that was maybe always a snowmobile lodge, but they buy ATVs for the summertime.

You have people that already love these places that already want to come and visit here. Maybe they have a camp up here. Go to camp.

Now, it’s not just in summer or not just in winter, and they can find ways to utilize these beautiful properties that they have and all the lodging and all the infrastructure that goes around it. Instead of having it lie dormant for part of the year, they can use more of it.

Ron: It used to be in Bar Harbor that after Labor Day, it was a ghost town. Now there’s the shoulder seasons and, in the fall, it can be as busy as the summer.

Jason: I think we’re also seeing a lot of innovation around assisted activities. Electronic bikes, e‑bikes, electronic kayaks are being developed. Some of these assisted things, particularly as we understand both in the state and in the country, we have changing demographics of people who are going outdoors.

Boomers are going outdoors more as they’re starting to enter retirement and they are looking for equipment and opportunities there. One of our partners on this is the director of the Maine Marine Trades Association, and she shared when we were at a meeting one day on the core team an activity she does. It’s skating on the ice, but with a parasail.

Ron: A sail. Yes. I’ve seen that.

[laughter]

Jessica: That’s wild.

Jason: It is the most incredible wild thing. Their people are so innovative. People are coming up with new sports all the time. I think that’s like how snowboarding started.

Mikayla: Probably.

Jason: It was people came up with these new ideas. There’s this constant innovation in recreation. One of the things that I think particularly with Mikayla that the roadmap was looking at is also how we get youth involved. I think youth are constantly looking for these new ideas and they’re coming with all these crazy activities to do.

Part of this is looking also at the youth camps that We have University of Maine. We have a number of 4‑H camps. I’d never seen a state with so many 4‑H camps before I moved here in Cooperative Extension.

We have a lot of private youth camps getting people engaged in the outdoors. I think the youth are coming up with new ideas all the time of things that they want to do and can do. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before there’s some new crazy ski sport that’s…

Jessica: I’m sure.

[laughter]

Ron: Maybe put the sail in on a skier and then take off.

[laughter]

Jason: Well, I always think about one of the first stories I was told by a colleague when I came here to University of Maine was that, I guess, at some point in time on the main campus, we had a ski jump?

Ron: Yes. We did.

Jason: Right?

Ron: Yeah. It looked very scary, by the way.

Jason: [laughs]

Jason: I was terrified. You could go see the pictures in the historical archives at the university. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before somewhere, hopefully, not a university campus, that ski jumping comes back like that.

Ron: I think you said about 30,000 jobs in terms of the industry, the workforce. Maybe talk about growing that pool and the importance of workforce development? I know you’re particularly involved with that end of it.

Jessica: Absolutely. I think that what I said in the opening was that, the state of Maine is very invested in supporting these types of programs, which is an awesome thing to see. There’s lots of opportunities, grants, different things to help upscale, or upscale I should say.

I think that what we’re finding is the earlier you can get in front of people, the younger the kids are and present these opportunities as actual career opportunities, not just something fun to go do to have fun, which it is. It’s our creation.

This could actually be a career path. I think that’s really important. There’s so many different ways to try to get in front of kids. Businesses can do this. Something that we host is a career exploration field trip. We invite kids from high schools from all the local areas, which is a lot of towns. They get to come in and we have different career stations set up.

A lot of kids will think like, “Oh, I don’t ski. I can’t work at Sunday River.” It’s like, “Well, we have all sorts of other things that go on here too that have nothing to do skiing. We’re a business, so we have an accounting department. We have an HR department. We have marketing, which is really interesting to some kids and is a huge part of the outdoor recreation sector as well.”

Then we have the jobs in the trades. We have lift mechanics and we have snowmakers. Those are cool jobs that are really niche that people can go and see. We also obviously have a lot in hospitality with the food and beverage and the lodging.

Just opening people’s eyes and getting it out in front of them and not just the students, but also in front of their teachers who are bringing them there so that when they’re having these conversations with their students about what path they’re looking for and what are opportunities, “What do you want to go to university for,” and all of those things.

Making sure that the outdoor recreation is not something that is, I don’t know, has a stigma being looked down upon. It’s like, “Oh, that’s just for fun,” or, “That’s what you could do as a stopover job,” or, “It’s only seasonal.” There’s so much more to it than that.

I think just educating the general public from the kids all the way up through the teachers and everybody else who’s involved, the parents who are going to help these kids make decisions about where they go to college, it’s important to let them know that there’s real careers here.

Jason: I’ve had conversations with a colleague of ours in the Department of Education here at Maine, the State Department of Education, who is the specialist for natural resource, career technical education. Vocational education where outdoor recreation is one of the topics. Bringing that into our vocational and technical schools as well.

Ron: Let’s talk infrastructure. What is needed there to build out places to recreate or to improve what is there already? I mean, is that part of this?

I know you mentioned the golf course is there. You might as well go ski on it in the winter, or the hotel is there, now for ATVs or snowmobiles. Some of that infrastructure is there. Is there work to be done to build out what’s needed? Any thoughts on that?

Mikayla: Well, I think one big thing is there was the the main trails bond that was recently passed, which is really supposed to look at how do we plan out and really bolster the infrastructure around our trail systems.

Both the trails that are shared for ATVs as well as snowmobiles, but other forms of trails that also could be strategically put into different communities, especially our rural communities and just thinking about the planning out of that.

Ron: Public‑private partnerships. Is that part of the the deal here?

Jason: Yeah. I think that’s been talked about all. One of the things that has come up a lot in all of the economic planning I’ve done in the States since I’ve been here, but particularly in the road map, I think this is something Sunday River has faced, is housing.

Housing for workers that is affordable, has been a real challenge, especially in the last few years as we’ve seen shifts in our real estate market.

I remember it, the Outdoor Economy Summit, that some people from the communities around from the towns around Saint David were talking about what they’ve done to help create housing opportunities.

I know that in Millinocket, there are a number of housing initiatives going on where that is in the gateway to the Mount Katahdin area, Wildwoods and Waters area.

Housing has definitely come up. I know here at the university, we’re doing all kinds of research on housing infrastructure that we can build housing, but also how we deal with seasonal housing. Transportation’s come up a lot too. Is that a thing that you guys say?

Jessica: Absolutely. I mean, we’re in a super rural place. We’re in Western Maine. There’s no public transportation there. The closest city is Portland. You can get take a bus or a plane there, but it’s an hour and a half to keep going to get up there.

Even people who are in our community that want to be able to come to us, want to be able to come and work, it’s hard. There’s been a lot of different initiatives from different directions. There’s things as simple as carpooling with your teammates, with your coworkers.

It’s a community of people who all work together. A lot of them are coming from the same place. Having a conversation about that. There’s GO MAINE, which is, they have the ride share portion of it. They can work specifically directly with businesses or it can be anybody who goes on to there and help to get the ride share.

We’ve had talks with the Department of Transportation talking about getting bus stops put in. Obviously, that’s a really long game. That’s not something that you can do overnight, but those talks are happening.

Western Maine Transportation has or The Mountain Explorer, I should say, has a couple of different routes. I know there’s one from Sugarloaf to UMF. It’s really successful. It brings people back and forth. That used to exist over in our neck of the woods, and it isn’t something that’s happening right now.

There’s lots of, like I said, talks about trying to get that going again because the transportation is definitely key. I mean, the folks who can come in from out of state and drive up, that’s great. For all those people who live here that need to just be able to get to work, finding a way for them to be able to do it is important.

Ron: Where are visitors coming from? Do we have any info on the demographics? Are there markets that can be developed either in this country or internationally? Obviously, New Englanders make up a big portion of that, but it’s more than that.

Jason: Yeah. It’s definitely more than that. I think part of what’s going on here is, “How do we bring visitors in?” There’s also, “How do we promote the main brand,” which has been a large part of this, of what is Maine, the essence of Maine, and that being a large attractor.

A lot of the road map was thinking about this as well. I know in terms of of visitors, we do have visitors coming from all over, and the main office of Tourism, the main office of Outdoor Recreation, and the main office of Film are now combined under one single director, Carolyn Luecht. Then they have their own office directors.

There is integration between from the state level in terms of coordinating these. I know Carolyn has gone all over to various trade shows, so has our partner with Maineopter brands, Ginny Kordick, their director promoting both Maine products and Maine destinations in places like France.

In Quebec, we had the Maine Outdoor Economy Summit. There was a whole group, we call it family trip. Familiarization trip of a bunch of Quebecers who were down. People coming from Quebec over, but I think, really thinking about how we expand markets to people.

One of the startups that I know here in Maine is Maine Black Travel. They’ve seen them at a number of pitch competitions. I know she’s thinking about, for her own business, how does she create opportunities for people from diverse communities to come and feel and experience Maine from all over the country?

Maine businesses themselves are also thinking about this exact question of, “Where are new markets for our visitors,” and, “Who could come and visit Maine and feel comfortable here and come enjoy our natural scenery and our natural beauty.”

Ron: What part can New Maine play in this helping develop this, other than the obvious of educating folks for the next workforce and cooperative extension in particular? What part could they play in this whole effort?

Jason: I’ll talk about the cooperative extension part. I’m really interested for you to hear what our partners and our student have to say about the educational component, workforce development component.

Maine Cooperative Extension is really touching on all different kinds of things, from sustainable management of our industry. Thinking about how we sustainably manage destinations, how we sustainably manage natural resources, forests, how we deal with PFAS, and doing research on that, and doing education on that.

We have a large positive use development program within University of Maine Cooperative Extension that is bringing children into the outdoors, teaching them about STEM education and integrating that with the outdoors, aquaculture education and integrating that with the outdoors.

Then creating some of those early pathways for youth through the positive youth development and 4‑H programs. Then, there’s the business support that we do. It’s the work that I do as a state extension specialist.

Really, I think that outdoor recreation is touching on so many different components of what Maine Cooperative Extension does to serve the state in taking a research base that happens here at the university.

How we understand new technologies, how we understand natural processes, and building that into educational experiences for Maine communities in non‑traditional ways where they’re not coming onto campus to learn.

Ron: Right, and for the university, the part it can play here seems pretty obvious in some ways, but just can you speak to that?

Mikayla: Yeah. I think just having opportunities for students here on campus to reconnect with the outdoors. We have Maine Bound on campus, which I think is really great. I’d love to see. I’ve been here on this campus for six years. I would love to see more promotion of Maine Bound and the activities that they do. That’s just a small piece.

I also think continuing to host classes where you’re thinking about different sectors, particularly outdoor recreation, is really great to bring in that business perspective. Then as I mentioned earlier, I really do think there’s an opportunity for 91¸ŁŔű to partner with other schools or other camps to put together a youth program experience at the University of Maine.

I also think a portion of that could be from a business perspective. “Who is interested in creating their own outdoor rec connected business in Maine? How can we channel creative ideas and news about what would it look like to start an outdoor recreation business?

What would you be interested in, and continuing to also work with from the business perspective? How can we help consult businesses as they want to grow and upscale in their business?”

Jason: We do have an outdoor industry concentration in the MBA program at the Graduate School of Business. Anyone looking for upskilling at the graduate level in pursuing an MBA, we actually have an opportunity for them to earn the MBA and earn the concentration certificate in outdoor recreation initiative.

Ron: That’s great.

Jessica: One of the things that we’ve been able to do working with universities both, for a couple of semesters at UMF at 91¸ŁŔű Farmington, we’ve worked with their ORBA program.

They reached out to local businesses and said, “Could you present us a problem, like low hanging fruit, something that you guys just don’t have the bandwidth to be able to solve, that you’d be comfortable sharing the information?”

It was really interesting. There was a number of different businesses around in the area that all gave the students a problem to solve, and they hit it out of the park. The kids did a great job.

Jason: That’s great.

Jessica: We’re about to roll into our second version of doing that, and I’ve also been approached by Buffy.

Mikayla: One of the [indecipherable] .

Jessica: Exactly. Through one of our team members who is a graduate of your program who works with us at Sunday River, he helped us make the connection and talked about when he was a student here, he participated in that.

It was the Wyman’s blueberry thing where they worked with the local main business so the kids could find something out. We’re going to do the same thing. It’s going to be on the spring of next year, but we’re going to continue to collaborate with the university so that we can…

It’s business, but it’s also outdoor rec. It’s all of those pieces that intertwined together without being super obvious. It’s not guiding or skiing, but it’s the business part of it, which is what makes it all go around and keeps it working.

Ron: Would Bethel qualify as a rural Maine?

Jessica: Oh, yes.

Ron: Talk about that maybe from your perspective. What would smart, well planned development do for rural Maine, a town like Bethel or others?

Jessica: When we chose to move there in 2020, we looked at a lot of different towns in the area. It was like, “This is clearly the town we want to move to because the resort is there.” There’s other things in the town. It enables it to have, “We have great restaurants. We have a really fun, cool little movie theater that does other local community theater things.”

Over February vacation, it was a windhole day, so nobody could ski. The bowling alley was packed. It’s just good for all the other businesses in town. There’s other lodging in town, like I said, other restaurants.

For people to be able to come to a place and not go, “Well, this is the only thing to do here,” but, “Oh, if it’s a rainy day, here’s these other things we can go do,” or whatever else is there. There’s the gem museum. In the summertime, people come up there to go camping or hiking, but there’s also all the sluicing in Rock County that happens in the area.

More the little community, the more new businesses come in that support outdoor rec, the more it lifts everybody else up.

Ron: Let’s talk about trends. With young people, the phone, social media is something that takes up a lot of their time and energy. Have outdoor recreation trends changed among the younger crowd, and does that have to be taken into account here?

Mikayla: While you’re looking at me…

[laughter]

Mikayla: I enjoy spending a lot of time out outdoors. I think, for me, it really comes from a place of wellness, well‑being and health. I think for young people who are looking to be healthier versions of themselves or who are thinking about, “How can I disconnect or detach in this very digital era?”

Being outside is a great way to do that, to spend time outdoors, get vitamin D, move your body around? It’s just really great.

I think more people are leaning into that. I think the trend of more low‑impact activities as a way for people to, as beginners, get out into the outdoor rec activities really sets the stage for potentially discovering maybe as a hobby, but then moving into, “This is actually a passion.” Then maybe it’s something where younger people are, “Maybe I could make a career out of this.”

Ron: Correct.

Mikayla: For me, it really comes from a health and well‑being perspective. I think that’s where I think a lot of folks my age and then the younger generations are starting from.

Ron: You’re not an outlier? I mean, there’s plenty of people that think the way you do?

Mikayla: Yeah. I think more often than not, you ask me, “What are your hobbies?” I think hiking comes up a lot. I think spending time outside. I think outdoor yoga is something also that a lot of folks have been chatting about. Definitely not an outlier. Maybe I’m more intense in that. I do it all the time. I grew up hunting and fishing and that thing, but people want to spend time outdoors.

[crosstalk]

Ron: Go ahead.

Jason: What are you seeing at Sunday River? Are you seeing shifts in North Trent or with your visitors and your workers and who’s interested?

Jessica: Well, I will say, sometimes these sports can be expensive. That is harder for younger people. I think that the important thing is to continue to make these things accessible to everybody.

If you are a business that is surrounded by a rural area, is there any way that you can give discounts to your local people? Just one example is, we have a community pass for kids who are in the local school districts.

They can get a much less expensive ski pass so that they can come and actually learn to do it. Whereas, otherwise, maybe they wouldn’t have learned that. If there’s a snow day, the skiing is free for the kids in the school district.

A lot of people are there and their kids are, “Where are they going to go if they don’t get snow days?” There’s just little things that can be done to, I guess, try to help introduce youth to different things. I know there’s a lot of programs for it that are out there that will help.

I remember seeing the L.L.Bean boxes on the beach a couple of years ago. It was like a little pod box that they put out there with a whole bunch of beach gear that maybe someone doesn’t have all this stuff. They can go there, they can use it, they can play with it while they’re on the beach, and they put it back.

To have the opportunity to be able to go and do these other sports that maybe they wouldn’t have tried is really important.

Mikayla: I would also say there’s a lot of gear libraries, I think…

[crosstalk]

Ron: Right.

Mikayla: I hear people who can rent them out or you can check them out for a short period of time at no or a low cost.

I think that’s really crucial and is one of those things that will decrease the cost barrier, but also allow someone to try something out without having to do the huge investment of, “I have to really subscribe to this as my identity if I’m going to spend hundreds of dollars on this equipment,” versus being able to try it out.

Ron: Maine Bound here for 91¸ŁŔű students has that. They rent gear out all the time. Final question for all. Three you can weigh in on this. I mean, I think we all agree that the potential here to grow this, I mean, it’s already a huge industry, but the potential is even higher than that. What might this industry look like in 5 to 10 years? Whoever wants to take a crack at it first.

[crosstalk]

Jason: I was going to say, I mean, I think one of the things that I think about is just how much technology is changing actually in the sector. It doesn’t seem like it sometimes, because we’ve got very traditional activities like skiing, like hiking, hunting, and fishing.

In some ways, the industry allows us to connect with that culture. In many ways, also technology is shifting how we recreate. The use of apps. My partner is a equestrian and has an application that tracks their horse rides.

I mean, there is all kinds of ingenuity happening in this space, whether it’s digital or actually in the gear and tech and equipment component. Where that leads the industry, I think, will be really interesting as we increasingly see the need for technology in the industry.

I think here in Maine, one of the challenges we have is how do we have sustainable growth. You asked about rural communities earlier.

I know one of the things that rural communities see both as an opportunity and a challenge is as the industry in the state grows, how can they be part of that, but still maintain both their identity and the sustainability of their communities without being over‑touristed.

That over‑touristing has been a huge issue in the visitor space, but also in the natural resource use space. I think about people who are engaged in rock climbing and if you get too many rock climbers in a space at one time, it destroys the overall experience.

Really thinking about how we manage that growth in a sustainable way is part of what the 10‑year road map is trying to do. We want to see positive growth for Maine, but we don’t want it to be so much that it harms the actual enjoyment of Maine for Mainers and for our visitors.

Ron: Your thoughts. Are you upbeat about the next chunk of time here?

Mikayla: I’m upbeat about everything.

Jessica: Fair enough.

[laughter]

Jessica: I just see growth and expansion. More people that get the opportunity to come and see things, the more the merrier. I mean, that’s the way I look at it. I’m not from here specifically, but I was welcomed into the community when I came. I don’t see why we can’t just welcome want people to come and enjoy themselves.

Jason: I was really touched when we were at Moe’s about the conversation during one of the panels around how Sunday River is growing sustainably in your own practices about how you manage the resort in terms of, I think, the way you make snow. All these kinds of things are really interesting ways at a business level, at a micro level…

Jessica: Absolutely.

Jason: propelling sustainable growth for Sunday River.

Jessica: There’s a 20‑30 plan that’s put in place. Our parent company has a a lot to do with it as well. It’s a forever project. We want to continue to be here. The weather’s changing. It’s raining out now instead of snowing. We want to be able to still have snow. We want people to still be out there.

What can we do? What’s our contribution to making sure that we’re doing it the right way, reducing energy costs? There’s many, many factors of it. That’s absolutely something that our business participates in and will continue to do so.

Ron: Mikayla, we’ll give you the last word.

Mikayla: Sure. I think the hope that I feel with the road map is really that we can bring together all kinds of different players in the sector for this sustainable growth over the next 10 years.

I really do think with all of those players coming together, we can really position Maine as that destination to go for outdoor recreation, not only for a visitor short‑term perspective, but also bring your businesses here.

[background music]

Mikayla: Come be an employee here in Maine, and participate fully in outdoor recreation and take advantage of the beautiful natural resources of this state.

Ron: Well, I want to thank you all for coming in and get out there and enjoy it.

Jason: Thank you.

Ron: Thanks so much for joining us. All of the Maine Question podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and 91¸ŁŔű’s YouTube channel as well as its website. Questions or comments, you can send them along to mainequestion@maine.edu. This is Ron Lisnet. We’ll see you next time on The Maine Question.

[music]

For nearly a quarter of the university’s existence, Dana helped students through the highs and lows of being a college student and earning a degree — celebrating the joys and working through the challenges and tragedies.

In this episode of “The Maine Question” podcast, Dana reflects on his time at 91¸ŁŔű one week into his retirement.

Who can give insight to 40 years of student life at 91¸ŁŔű? Robert Dana.

[background music]

Ron Lisnet: Greetings, and thanks for checking us out on “The Maine Question” podcast. I’m your host, Ron Lisnet. In today’s episode, we will close a chapter in the history of the University of Maine. If you were asked to pick someone as the face of 91¸ŁŔű, you’d be hard pressed not to make a case for Robert Dana.

For 40 years, he has been not only a highly visible presence    it’s hard to miss his shock of white hair as he took his daily walks around the Orono campus    he’s also been a shaper and a leader for this community.

For most of those four decades, he has been the dean of students. During that span, he has served that role for more than half of the students who have ever attended 91¸ŁŔű throughout its entire history. Being the leader of a community as dynamic and energized as a college campus is not for the faint of heart. You’re dealing with young people who have a lot going on.

The highs can be super high. The lows can be serious and challenging. He has been in charge of filling multiple roles, everything from celebrating the major milestone of earning a college degree, to lending a shoulder to cry on, to being the stern parent when needed.

Through it all, he has helped create a community defined by three words, kindness, caring, and compassion. We’ll ask Robert how he was able to do that, about the changes he has seen these past 40 years and much more as he retires from the university. Welcome.

Robert Dana: Good morning. Wonderful to see you. For everybody who doesn’t know, it’s 12 degrees below zero today.

Ron: You have a little more time in your schedule for things like this.

Robert: Yeah. [laughs]

Ron: We were going to bring a rocking chair in as now that you’re retired, but we couldn’t find one in time.

Robert: I like that.

Ron: Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Do you remember when you first set foot on the 91¸ŁŔű campus? What was the plan? What was the grand vision for 17, 18 year old Robert Dana?

Robert: I thought it was a miracle that I got here, to be honest with you. I had been a little lackadaisical in my high school career. I was very social and person of the people. Wanting to go to college, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.

I thought, “Maybe I’ll be a pharmacist.” I thought about going into the maritime industry. I thought about going into medicine to follow up to my father. When I got here, I was taken away by the bigness of it and all the opportunity. Wasn’t until I met my future wife that I began to settle down. That was a good thing.

Ron: You settled down at this point, right?

Robert: [laughs]

Robert: No. I’m not.

Ron: 50 years later.

Robert: I’ve been in a great business to keep me young and youthful. Students have kept me hopefully on the cutting edge of what the culture’s doing, but I feel a little bit settled down.

Ron: For those that don’t work in higher education, can you explain what a dean of students does? At its core, what is the job?

Robert: A lot of people think of deans of students as people in high schools, and those are mostly the disciplinarians, the folks who keep order. We, at a university level, our job is mostly to be the primary advocate for students, to decry bureaucracy, if you will, to push back the impediments to success.

We’re responsible, usually, for most everything outside the classroom. That does range, of course, from discipline, but where people live, how they live, how they get engaged, what support services they get, and generally to make the path to successful outcome more achievable.

Ron: You’ve had, certainly, a significant hand in shaping this community. What were the guiding principles, and how close did what actually transpired get to what you were like, “This is the ideal situation”?

Robert: It was easy to see that lots of students were coming to a place like this with every hope and aspiration that one could conceive of. They were coming here with all the expectations of their families and friends. It immediately became clear to me that in an environment like this, you do have to clear the way.

A lot of these students come, they’re very nervous, they’re anxious. For people coming from Maine, many of them were going to classes bigger than their hometown. It needed to make it a place where people felt welcome, where they felt they mattered.

My mantra became, quite early on, to be kind, caring, and compassionate. That was the message we delivered to everyone in student life, and hopefully, everyone at the university.

Ron: You never cross the finish line. You’re always working at it.

Robert: Which is one of the things that makes me feel like a young person still, is that every year, some thousands of people leave and some thousands of people come. There are people flowing in from other institutions. Yes, the work is never done. The culture and climate is constantly changing. You cannot rest on your laurels.

Ron: I know this is not news to you, but people in their teens and 20s, that is a dynamic part of life. How did you deal with the extreme highs and the extreme lows that come with that age group generally?

Robert: We always try to dignify students and to respect them, and to understand that coming into an environment like this with all of the expectations of what could happen to somebody and for somebody who were big. Horrible things could happen to people.

You couldn’t be too black and white in your thinking. We always appreciated the fact that there’s something called human development, and that people are learning to accommodate an environment like this, to learning how to get along with each other, how to have relationships, who they are is changing.

I had a very broad band for behavior, and we had high expectations. Sometimes we’d say, “No, that goes too far,” but most times, we were doing what we call deaning and trying to get people back into a reasonable comportment so that they could succeed here.

Ron: They have to learn how to handle success too, right?

Robert: Yeah. Success is a big thing here. We don’t want people to be arrogant. We don’t want them to be pushy. We want them to understand that doing for others is really, really important. Success is measured not by just their grades, but by their humanness.

We spend a lot of time with people doing that, and people like it, they want it. I was reminded of people from a very fancy business school that I’ve met who are not very humanistic. Others from that school are humans, and they’re kind, caring, and compassion. That makes all the difference in the world.

We need to be decent to people. It can be a cold, cruel place out there. We should never add to it.

Ron: In terms of crisis situations or bad news, people always look at the headlines, and you experienced more than your share of difficult situations. You always were a very steady hand as you did that. Was that a learned skill? How do you tell people how to deal with crisis situations? You’ve had a lot of experience with it.

Robert: We did. There’s a lot of things that can go awry in a place like this, where you think about the multi thousands of students, lots of visitors. These are very appealing places for people to come who don’t have a particular home here but they want to come and do something. You always had to be ready for what was next.

Every day, I thought, “Hmm.” There was something I hadn’t seen before. That was true every day. My disposition, I was raised in a big, big family. There were seven of us kids. One sibling we had lost, so there would have been eight of us. It was chaotic there.

I was a middle child, so I learned to be a conciliator, and a fixer, and to take care of a lot of things going on there. That seemed to travel with me, but sometimes we had to step back and take a breath.

Ron: You’ve had to be a leader in all the ways that that word is defined. How did you learn to become an effective leader? How do you teach others to lead? Because that’s a big part of it, too.

Robert: It’s a big part of it. I just went to the very basic core of people are people. I did come to this later in life. I had a high impression of myself. My mother once told me, “Don’t take yourself too seriously.” That refrain always came back to me.

The other refrain that was always there was we were raised in a very small town in Maine, but we were Jewish. I am Jewish, but we were raised in a relatively intolerant experience. I remember my father, who always said, “Well, we can teach people to understand and to have respect.”

That’s the way I looked at it, is they had to sometimes turn the other cheek. You can put your dukes up, but fighting and boxing doesn’t usually work, so I learned to be a good dancer.

Ron: [laughs]

Ron: I’ve seen that. That is definitely true. Obviously, 91¸ŁŔű is in the business of education, and that takes on many forms inside and outside of the classroom. How do you see the balance between living in a community like this and then the academic part and learning to grow as a person and a citizen?

Robert: You could come, I suppose, to a place like this or any institution like a university or college and you could become a very precise astrophysicist, or you could learn the structures of sentences, or you could learn the technical way to be anything, but you’d still be adrift in the world.

We do live amongst people. We live in a place with changing times. We need soft skills. We need social skills. We need to be people who actually care about something bigger than ourselves. That was always our discussion with students.

Don’t get too hung up on the technicals, get hung up on the bigger picture. One day, you’ll have to confront your end. When you do, you want to be able to say, “Yeah. I did the best I could. I tried to be a decent person.”

Ron: Is it a 50/50 balance, academics and the other side that you talk about?

Robert: I guess it is a 50/50. Obviously, when you leave here, you want a pliable skill. Most people do leave with that. When I talk to people    and I talk to a lot of people who graduated years ago    they usually are talking about the other side of the equation.

Yes, their academic bona fides are really good, they’re great at that, but they talk about the things that made them human beings. It’s interesting.

Ron: 40 years is a long time. I don’t have to tell you that. What’s changed and what’s remained the same about students or higher education in general? Any trends that surprised you or that you’ve taken note of?

Robert: Things have changed technologically. What you’ve heard about that, flipping over every 12 or 18 months, that’s really true. When I started here, we launched something called…I think it was called first class. It was an internal communication thing.

People didn’t know. They would sit at their computers and communicate with somebody across campus, but they thought that they were anonymous. They would vent their spleens and try to assert their intellects or their disputation of authority, and got people in a lot of trouble.

You can just think from that day to today when people are Snapchatting, or Instagramming, or Facebook is fading quickly into the background. That’s changed a lot. The things that have not changed in students is their need to matter, their need for support, their willingness to do for others.

When we had COVID, which was a big disruptor, maybe a sea change disruptor, we’ll say. There was a political time there of isolation, separation, divide, and othering. When COVID came on top of that, people stepped back. The business of just worrying about myself or my own little environment took hold.

It was very scary for someone like us because you’ve got to be in the commons to make a difference. If people were stepping back, it was threatening the basis of what I thought of as higher education. It turns out that families and everybody who comprised of family, they were nervous. They were worried, and so they were self protective.

It caused a lot of ripples in society. They were very unpleasant. I think we’re coming back from that now, and people want to be part of the solution. They’re caring for each other, they’re open to each other.

Isolationism, while we still hear about it and there’s still pushes to big picture, I don’t see it here. I think students are reaching out, extending lifelines, and picking up each other and having each other’s back every day.

Ron: Those three words, kindness, caring, and compassion, how did you land on those, other than they begin with the same sound? Is that something that right from the get go, you came up with, or did it evolve over time?

Robert: I read something yesterday. You’re never supposed to use alliteration in any writing or speaking, so you’re right.

Ron: [laughs]

Ron: You broke that rule.

Robert: Kindness, caring, and compassion, they alliterate or whatever the word would be. I saw enough where people were, I think, self absorbed. I used to hear people say to me a lot of time, “We don’t want to set a precedent,” or, “That behavior is wrong.” There’s a lot of black and whiting of people.

People are saying, “I don’t want to be tied up into this chaos, so I’ve got to structure the world so that something like that doesn’t happen.” I used to find myself saying a lot to people, “Well, how would you like to be treated?” or, “If this was your child, how would you want to treat them?”

These people are coming. Everybody thinks they’re going to succeed here, and this is a place where you can succeed. If we all of a sudden become intolerant and just want to take care of our own needs, we’re not being very decent to people.

It was the golden rule. I go back to my childhood about that. No matter how badly we saw people being treated or we were treated, my parents always said, “Well, just treat people the way you want to be treated yourself.” It was burned into my thinking.

The kind, caring, and compassion, I remember saying it many times, “But we’ve got to be compassionate here.” Just think. You got to call a parent and say, “Your child is not succeeding here. We’re sending them home,” or, “Your child did X, and we’re not going to tolerate it.” Neither of those are compassionate or caring. Just be decent to people.

Ron: What you going to miss? What are you going to be glad that you don’t have to pick up the phone or do anymore?

Robert: I’d miss the students. I’ll tell you, the richness of my experience here, it’s almost incalculably huge. To go around campuses to see students and to want to engage with students, high fiving them, smiling with them, taking pictures with them, supporting them, being at their events, and showing them that we’re all in it together. I miss that terribly already.

What I don’t miss is the 24 hour day, seven days a week, 365 days, and I’ve only had a couple of days of that. I haven’t been woken up out of bed recently. I knew we were getting towards retirement time because for many, many, many years, I was always semi awake.

When the phone would ring, I would just start chatting with whoever it was [laughs] in the middle of the night. Now, as I move towards retirement, I realized I get a little anxious when the phone rang. I realized you can’t really be anxious because you can’t think clearly. I don’t miss that.

Ron: You were notable or famous, perhaps, for your daily walks on campus. I know you with your shock of white hair, you can’t hide from people very well. Interacting with people when you were doing that, was that the best part of your day in some ways?

Robert: Yeah. I love that. I did. I went every day on campus quite a lot and would walk four or five miles every day around the campus at different times. It was to see the campus. I used to bother my friends in facilities management because I would be taking pictures and calling them, and they’d always come and fix things.

Mostly, it was to see students. To have them try to get me up on a slack line or to tell me something they were working on, or would wander up where students live to see how they were faring. To me, it was just like oil being poured into my tank, so I’d go back.

I always told our staff, “Get out of these buildings. Go out and see these students because if you’re having a difficult day, if life is overwhelming, just go out. You’ll have a lot of sunshine poured into you.”

Ron: Now we’re going to test your editing skills on the fly here, but some stories. Any stories to share, people, situations, challenges to overcome, funny, weird stuff? I know there’s probably several racing through your head right now, but what could you share with us? Anything come to mind?

Robert: I do have a funny thing. It caused a whole new business here. We had won the hockey championship in 1993. That was one of those nights I got a call, I think it was about 2:00 in the morning.

They said, well, there was quite a lot of hullabaloo occurring out on the mall, maybe a semi riot and a huge fire, and what were we going to do about it? I said, “Well, I’ll come up.” I came up, and there was maybe 500 students and a big fire. Somebody had just driven a snowmobile onto the fire. If you haven’t seen me in person, my stature is…it’s at five foot six.

Ron: Being generous, but yes. [laughs]

Robert: Being generous on a good day. I waited into the crowd, and I thought, “I don’t see. [laughs] What am I doing? I’m going to get up there and tell them to disperse.” I waited in, and a football player picked me up. Just wrapped his arms around me and picked me up. I thought, “Oh, I’m getting thrown into this fire.”

Ron: [laughs]

Ron: He picked me up, and it was like a trophy. “Dean Dana, Dean Dana.”

[laughter]

Robert: Then they all left. The fire got put out, and it was good. I remember that night. We had lots of things like that, whether it was bump stock, or senior celebration, or Maine Day. We had all sorts of times where people were really happy. Those are the fun times.

Ron: As we’ve alluded to, you’ve been at this a long time. Where do you see all this headed, higher education? Any idea what the next four years or maybe a smaller chunk of time looks like? Where do you see this all going?

Robert: 91¸ŁŔű’s been around for 160 years.

Ron: You’ve been here for 25 percent of that time. That always blows my mind.

Robert: Yeah. I’ve seen a lot. Higher education, in its current iteration, has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. There’s a desire for this and a need for it because you need people to be highly trained. That business of the other side, well rounded students, that’s really true.

I know there’s a big push to online education or places where people never have to step foot on a campus. That will serve a purpose for people, but in terms of improving the society and keeping people engaged with each other and knowing that they have a responsibility, it requires a place like this.

I think states will realize that public higher education’s really important to their health and they’ll continue to support it. I hope the support won’t go down. I hope it’ll go up because the cost of college is a lot. For people all over the globe, it’s a lot. It has to be an accessible opportunity. It can’t be viewed as a luxury. It’s something we all need.

Ron: You can’t replace being part of and helping as a young person to learn how to shape a community, be part of a community, be part of society like that.

Robert: You got to be in it. You’ve got to learn about relationships and communication, you’ve got to learn about selflessness, and you’ve got to learn about supporting the other. Just sitting behind a computer, you don’t get that. We shouldn’t become univariate in our thinking. We’ve got to be big thinkers.

Ron: I know you’re only a couple of days into your retirement, but we appreciate you coming back so quickly and sharing time with us. What’s next? What plans do you have, if any, formed right now?

Robert: My wife and I are in negotiations on how to accommodate each other, because of course, I’ve been here basically morning, noon, and night for a long, long time. Our children are all grown. Cookie, my wife, has been retired for two years. We’re learning to accommodate each other. I’m repelling her hobbies and trying to acquire my own. [laughs]

Ron: Is there a honey do list in there?

Robert: There’s a big, long honey do list, fix that, fix this. I have no real malleable or saleable skills in that respect, so I’ve been looking on YouTube, but I’m sure I can cost myself a lot of money and a lot of problems. We’ll do that. We’re going to go do some travelling.

Ron: Nice.

Robert: We’ll take care of our grandkids. One cool thing I did    which I will see if it comes to fruition    I had seen on the Internet something about being a notary public. I said, “Oh, I think I could do that.”

Ron: [laughs]

[background music]

Ron: I had to take a test.

Ron: The next career.

Robert: [laughs]

Robert: I’m waiting to hear from the state. I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’ll put up a sign    notary public. [laughs]

Ron: Thanks so much. You’re going to be missed.

Robert: Thank you so much. It’s delightful, and I love 91¸ŁŔű.

Ron: Thanks, as always, for hanging out with us. You can find all of our episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and SoundCloud, 91¸ŁŔű’s YouTube page, as well as Amazon Music. Questions or comments, send them along to mainequestion@maine.edu. This is Ron Lisnet. We’ll catch you next time on The Maine Question.

[music]

Elizabeth Allan, professor of higher education leadership at 91¸ŁŔű’s College of Education & Human Development, has studied hazing throughout her career and become an authority on the subject. Founder of , Allan’s recent hazing education efforts encouraged Congress to craft legislation, which was recently signed into law, that addresses this national phenomenon.

In this episode of “The Maine Question” podcast, Allan explains how hazing operates and provides examples on how to reduce or eliminate the practice.

In this episode of “The Maine Question” podcast, marine scientists and economists from the University of Maine dive into what Maine’s blue economy is and how it is evolving.

Coastal communities are racked with complications caused by extreme weather. Businesses that rely on winter-time recreation and marine life are faced with unreliable conditions. And the aspects of Maine that draw vacationers may start to disappear and be replaced. Even with negativity blooming, the future isn’t all withered. Changing climate allows the state to welcome new opportunities. 
91¸ŁŔű is positioned at the center of climate discussion with new research and expert voices who explain and study , as well as those to come. A 91¸ŁŔű economist and a climate data expert address the “lost winter” and “not-so-gloom-and-doom” future of the state in a new episode of “The Maine Question” podcast.