University of Maine Chancellor Richard Pattenaude’s challenge in transforming the system is taking all of the anecdotes he hears and using them to create a smarter educational model.

Anecdotes abound. A nursing student wonders why she must drive to Lewiston to watch a class televised from Portland. A nontraditional student can’t make a class schedule that fits with her full-time jobs in the workplace and home.

A laid-off worker needs higher education to find a new career, but a four-year commitment to the university system isn’t feasible. A lawmaker says higher education is the keystone to economic development but hasn’t quite arranged the right marriage of the two.

And a student weighs the costs of higher education carefully, given the troubled economy, tight credit and the community college system, which in lowering the financial barrier to higher education, competes with the UMaine System for students.

Inside these anecdotes are common threads Pattenaude and the new 12-person committee tasked with reinventing the university system must find, because the system’s challenges are, well, systemic. Each anecdote is a suggestion for how to transform the university for the coming age.

The elephants in the classrooms, it seems, are community colleges, whose entry into the higher education market has turned the landscape sideways. University of Southern Maine officials credit community colleges for declines in USM’s student numbers, which have led to that three-campus system’s own transformational soul-searching.

The University of Maine System’s seven-campus size is more insulating, but the concern echoes. Here’s the question: How do Maine’s public colleges and universities avoid detrimental competition while striving for the same goal – making higher education in this state more accessible to everyone?

It’s here that Pattenaude’s experience at USM should serve him well and, if his talk with the Sun Journal editorial board is an indication, it already has. Pattenaude spoke of programs with USM to bring classes to rural campuses, such as Machias, that utilize both systems’ strengths and needs.

Most heartening, though, to hear from Pattenaude, was his commitment to technology to improve university functions and instruction. This strikes us as the right strategy – adapting the system to students’ high-tech tastes, while stretching its reach through online distance learning.

So that nursing student could watch that lecture on her home computer or download it to her iPod. Or that nontraditional student could take online courses at her convenience, rather than the university’s. Or that laid-off worker could start developing new technical skills.

Maybe this will finally help find those strategies to marry economic development and higher education, rather than continuing to tout the necessity of one for the other.

The UMaine System committee and Pattenaude have a big job ahead. If we were to offer one slice of advice to them, it’s this: Write down all those anecdotes, as you hear them.

There will be a test.