The Portland Campus is home to the Edmund Muskie School of Public Service, the Bio Sciences Research Institute, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and the Osher Map Library, and the USM School of Business.

The primary academic areas at the Portland campus are business, nursing, history, political science, economics, sociology, biology, physics, chemistry, math, english, psychology, media studies, modern and classical languages and literatures, and American and New England studies.

Many department offices are located around the perimeter of the campus center in converted multi-story homes as well as in the major buildings.

In 2021, the university removed the Woodbury Campus Center and broke ground on the 210,000 square foot, 580-bed Portland Commons dorm,[10] which opened in August 2023.

It has 385 studios, single, double and four-person apartments with views of the city and Casco Bay.

Portland Commons is the second largest passive house building at an American university.

It houses the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, where the current collections represent the African American, Jewish, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender communities.

[18] The library also has rare book collections, including holdings in pre-20th century New England textbooks.

The primary academic areas residing in Gorham are industrial technologies, engineering, art, music, theater, counseling and education, anthropology, geography, environmental sciences, and geosciences.

[26] The Maine-Greenland Collaboration is an interdisciplinary research project to investigate the environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural challenges facing coastal communities in Maine and Greenland.

The program allows teaching students to work in Maine classrooms while completing their degrees and aims to ease the shortage of teachers.

[30] The Quality Control Collaboratory (QC2) is a partnership with the Maine Brewers' Guild to provide laboratory analysis and testing for the craft beverage industry.

In 2023, the National Science Foundation provided $400,000 in funding to the center to develop an ethics training program for scientists working with AI.

[34] The Charles Scontras Center for Labor and Community Education is located in Payson Hall and formally opens in Fall 2023.

In the fall of 2022, Sodexo introduced delivery robots that carry food to students on both the Gorham and the Portland campuses.

The robots can deliver Starbucks lattes and falafel from food trucks parked on campus.

[41] The Brooks Dining Hall on the Gorham campus was renovated in 2019 at a cost of $2.5 million allowing it to expand the vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free food.

In fall 2022, a lack of staff led the newspaper to discontinue updates to its websites and social media and focus on print publications.

A mix of USM students and volunteers from the greater Portland community produce all the music and local public affairs programs.

[47] The route is a limited-stop line operated by buses running on natural gas.

All USM students and faculty ride the bus for free by showing their campus ID card.

In 2024, Town & Country Federal Credit Union donated $750,000 to create The Collab: Esports Arena within the Brooks Student Center on the Gorham campus.

Students reported that the system was prone to errors, it issued tickets to cars doing drop offs, and the company was difficult to communicate with.

In the spring of 2022, students reported dissatisfaction with the food served by the dining hall, complaining of undercooked meat, overcooked pasta, and a lack of vegetarian options.

[57] President Theodora Kalikow and Provost Michael Stevenson announced that four departments would be closed: the Recreation and Leisure Studies Department, the GeoSciences Department, the Arts and Humanities program at Lewiston-Auburn College, and the graduate program American and New England Studies (the Recreation and Leisure Studies closure was later rescinded[58]).

A week later, twelve individual faculty members in various departments were informed that they would be laid off effective May 31.

As a result of protests led by USM students,[59] the layoffs were rescinded by Kalikow.

[60] Later that year, Chancellor Page asked Kalikow for her resignation as USM president.

[61][62][63] This process was restarted in October 2014, when Interim President David T. Flanagan (former CEO of a power company) and Provost Joseph McDonnell announced that the three programs targeted for elimination in March would indeed be eliminated, and two more: French and Applied Medical Sciences.

[72][73] All of the faculty layoffs were immediately challenged through grievances filed by the union against the University of Maine System.