enlarge Jack Milton/Staff Photographer

USM President Selma Botman talks Friday with student Jamie St. Louis. Botman also teaches, leading a seminar class in modern Egyptian history. FEFF

enlarge Jack Milton/Staff Photographer

Selma Botman, president of the University of Southern Maine, meets Friday with members of the engineering faculty. “I came here because I believed in the mission of USM, and I still do,” she said in an interview. “I got a world-class education and I want to help others achieve the same thing.”

GORHAM — Like many people, Selma Botman learned the value of education from her parents.

Her father, Isadore, was a Russian immigrant with an eighth-grade education who worked in a shoe factory near Boston. He would take her there on Saturdays and show her how he sewed soles on shoes, one after another. She was so impressed, she thought he owned the factory.

When she complained of being bored, her mother, Gertrude, introduced her to the wonders of the public library, just down the street from their Chelsea triple-decker. Again, the little girl was captivated when her mother told her that all of the books in the children's section belonged to her.

"My parents believed strongly in education," Botman said recently. "They knew it was the only way out of the grinding working class that they experienced."

Botman's avowed passion for education won over the selection committee that recommended her to become president of the University of Southern Maine last July.

That passion sustains her today, when Botman will be inaugurated in a 1 p.m. ceremony on the Portland campus, at a time when USM is in the midst of a deepening financial crisis and on the threshold of a major administrative restructuring.

"I came here because I believed in the mission of USM, and I still do," Botman said. "I got a world-class education and I want to help others achieve the same thing."

Botman, 58, took the helm at USM shortly after a budget crisis forced university officials to slash spending by $7 million. In December, she had to find $2.7 million in additional spending cuts to offset state revenue and endowment losses that came as a result of the worsening recession.

Now, Botman and her staff are developing a $120 million budget for 2009-10 that will require an additional $4 million in spending cuts. Everything's on the table, she said, including vacant teaching positions.

Despite these setbacks, Botman expects to roll out a five-year strategic plan in June that she started working on last summer, and she wants to start a public discourse in September on an administrative restructuring that will start in the fall of 2010.

"She definitely got more than she bargained for when she took the job," said Ben Taylor, student body president. "She's handled it well, I think. Through it all, I've found her to be open, accessible and genuinely concerned. But she's not a pushover. She's willing to take a firm stance when necessary and she's capable of working with the diverse personalities and interest groups on campus."

The search committee recommended Botman for the job because of her long-standing commitment to public education and her experience in dealing with complicated university politics, said Rick Vail, president of Mechanics Savings Bank. Vail is a board member of the USM Foundation and sat on the search committee.

"She had a reputation of seeking input and facts before making decisions," he said. "She has proven that she can make decisions that not everyone is going to like," but are in the best interests of the students and the university as a whole.

Vail said it also helped that Botman had an established Maine connection and a particular interest in coming to USM. She and her husband have a summer home on Peaks Island, and their younger daughter, Megan, graduated from Bates College in Lewiston.

Botman is married to her childhood sweetheart, Tom Birmingham, a lawyer and former president of the Massachusetts Senate who teaches government at Tufts University. They have two daughters: Erica, 26, a Harvard College graduate who is a fashion buyer for Lord & Taylor in New York City, and Megan, 23, who is a fashion planner at Lord & Taylor.

Botman came to USM from The City University of New York, where she was executive vice chancellor and university provost. For several years, Botman, who lives in the USM president's house on the Gorham campus,...