Third in an occasional series.

FAIRBANKS, Alaska -- It's hard for people in the Lower 48 to understand the size of the university that Brian Rogers leads.

When he talks about the University of Alaska-Fairbanks to people outside of Alaska, Rogers uses two maps to illustrate.

First he displays a map of the 48 states. Then, on top of it, goes a map of the territory served by his university. He centers it on Iowa.

"Think of it this way," he said in a recent interview. "If the main campus was in Iowa, there would be branches in South Dakota, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

"There would be major research centers in Georgia, Missouri, Arkansas and Wisconsin and a distance-learning center in New Mexico."

To make things more interesting, and more difficult, he tells his audience to "assume that there are no roads west of Iowa."

That's a lot of territory for a guy from Maine to serve. If Rogers, now 59, had not decided to try a summer in Alaska when he was 19, the odds are that he would be involved in Maine politics or doing something at Colby College today -- if he had managed to graduate from college.

Rogers' Colby connection goes back three generations.

His great-grandfather, Clarence White, taught Greek and Latin at Colby. Rogers believes, but is not positive, that his great-grandmother, Alice White, taught music there, too.

All four of his grandparents -- Ralph and Marion Smith, and A. Raymond and Harriet Eaton Rogers -- attended Colby, as did his parents, A. Raymond Rogers and Joan Smith Rogers. They graduated from Colby in 1949 and live in Waterville.

The family's roots also run deep in central Maine.

His great-grandfather, Harvey Doane Eaton, was involved with the original Two-Cent Bridge and with creating Central Maine Power. His grandfather, A. Raymond Rogers, practiced law in Waterville and was a candidate for Congress from Maine's 2nd District in 1936.

Rogers returns to Maine to visit family every summer -- and will make an extra stop in December after attending a conference at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

Rogers was born in Blue Hill and grew up in several Maine communities, including Brooksville, Kezar Falls and Bar Harbor, where his father was the high school principal from 1955 to 1958. Then the family moved out of state and Rogers broke with tradition.

He didn't go to Colby. He attended Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and Brown University in Providence.

In 1970, after his sophomore year at Brown, Rogers decided to spend the summer in Alaska -- and that changed everything.

"I loved the scenery, the wilderness, the outdoors and the feeling that one could be anything one wanted to be in Alaska, that the opportunities were boundless."

He transferred to the university in Fairbanks -- the school he now leads.

He was active in student life and was editor of the campus newspaper -- but he never graduated.

Instead, he got involved in politics.

First he worked as a staff member at the state Legislature. In 1979, he was elected to the state House of Representatives, where he served two terms.

Then he applied for admission to the master's degree program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Harvard decided that three years of university credits and his legislative service were strong enough to admit him, Rogers said. He received a master's degree in public administration in 1984, and quickly returned to Alaska, where he became budget director and vice president for finance for the university system.

And, at the same time, he became a newspaper publisher.

In the late '80s, he was a minor investor when a friend bought a weekly newspaper, Rogers said. When that venture failed and the paper was about to fold, Rogers bought it. He continued to work for the university as the paper continued its financial slide. Eventually, he sold it -- at a loss.

In 1995, Rogers left the university and opened a consulting company, advising clients on public policy. He was named to the university board of regents and eventually became its chairman.

Last year, when the former chancellor left, Rogers was selected to fill in as interim chancellor until a successor was named. In August, university President Mark Hamilton announced that the interim post had turned into a permanent appointment.

"Brian is the right person for this position," Hamilton said. "And this is the right time to appoint him. I cannot justify an expensive, lengthy national search involving multiple candidates that would, I'm convinced, lead me to the person I have on the job right now."

In Maine, the chancellor leads the entire state university system; each campus is led by a president. In Alaska, it's the reverse. The university system, with three major schools, is led by a president. There is a chancellor at each of the major campuses -- Anchorage, Juneau and Fairbanks. Rogers' responsibilities involve the main campus in Fairbanks and six branch campuses. Its range includes community college through doctoral programs.

Some branch campuses in remote places like Dillingham and Bethel have as few as 200 students. The school serves about 6,000 students in Fairbanks. (The University of Maine in Orono has about 9,000 students. UMaine Farmington has about 2,200.)

Unlike any of the Maine campuses, the University of Alaska-Fairbanks has centers that cannot be reached by road -- only by boat or plane.

Those centers provide basic education in subjects like management, accounting and health -- "the things every community needs to help the people there," Rogers said.

Rogers said one strength of the university is relatively small classes so students, even freshmen, "can get to know real faculty members, not graduate students," and, he said, the university is involved in research that is important to Alaska and the country.

"This is an incredible research enterprise, typical of an institution three times our size."

The Fairbanks school is internationally respected for education and research in geology, geophysics, marine science and -- as one would expect -- in Arctic biology, Rogers said.

He said the university is becoming recognized for growing strength in energy research and biomedical sciences.

"Every aspect of climate change affects Alaska," he said, citing changes in vegetation, fishing, ocean and atmospheric temperatures and coastal erosion that has forced entire villages to move. "Drier summers mean more forest fires," Rogers said.

Rogers said much of life in Alaska reminds him of Maine -- "so many things are similar" -- but there are major differences, too.

"First is the scale of things -- the idea that you could live in a state that has two-thirds of the U.S. coastline and still be 300 miles from the coast," he said.

And, of course, it's cold.

"It does get to 50 or 60 below zero, but it's very dry and there's little wind here," he said. When the snow falls, it stays. "Even when it's 20 or 30 below, we bundle up and we go out. You can do a lot" outside all winter, he said.

For him, that means skiing, snowshoeing and sea kayaking on Alaska's lakes and rivers.

Rogers and his wife, Sherry Modrow, live on the Fairbanks campus and are involved with students at university events -- he seldom misses a hockey game -- and with the community. His wife is from Nome and earned both bachelor's and master's degrees in Fairbanks. They have two sons. Chris, is a journalism graduate of the university. Tracy graduated from the University of Maryland and is now a graduate student in Fairbanks. Soon after Hamilton named Rogers chancellor, the president announced that he planned to retire. There was speculation that Rogers might be a candidate to succeed him, but the new chancellor said he is not interested.

David B. Offer is the retired executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel. He is spending a year as the C.W. Snedden chair in journalism at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.