Dr. Glenn Cummings began his academic career in Gorham, ME as a high school history teacher and department head. He served as a faculty member at the Southern Maine Community College and was a long-serving member of the USM faculty, most recently as an assistant professor of Educational Leadership, teaching in the masters and doctoral degree programs. Prior to becoming President of USM, Dr. Cummings served as Interim President of the University of Maine at Augusta.
In 2010, Cummings served President Obama as Deputy Assistant Secretary within the U.S. Department of Education. There he helped manage a $1.9 billion annual budget that focused on improving access to adult education and literacy training, career and technical education, and community colleges. He was part of a team that designed President Obama’s plan to boost America’s graduation rate by 2020. Cummings also chaired the Department’s Green Initiative, which focused on increasing the teaching and learning of sustainability principles in American education.
Cummings received an appointment as Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at University of Southern Maine. He taught within both the Masters and Doctoral degree programs. His doctoral thesis, entitled Turning Green from the Inside Out, centered on the internal leadership of four American colleges in their quest for national-level achievement in sustainability.
In 2010, Cummings took over as President and Executive Director of Good Will-Hinckley organization, an historic 121-year-old school for high school youth located on a 2,400-acre campus in Hinckley, Maine. Under his tenure, the organization used a $10.5 million philanthropic contribution from the Harold Alfond Foundation to create the first charter school in Maine history, the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences. The state-wide, residential school focuses on environmental education, agriculture and forestry.
Cummings is a former Speaker of the House in the Maine House of Representatives, Majority Leader, and Chairman of the state’s Joint Committee of Education and Cultural Affairs, where he sponsored the successful bill to create the state community college system. He provided leadership for the passage of a bipartisan state budget, brokering an agreement on the largest economic investment bond package in the state’s history; he also successfully led an effort to significantly increase higher education appropriations.
Cummings obtained his Doctorate in Higher Education Management from the University of Pennsylvania. He previously earned a Masters of Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a Masters of Arts in Teaching from Brown University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Ohio Wesleyan University.
