PORTLAND, Maine (AP) A Maine professors’ union says a public university’s decision to enact tighter controls on pop-up courses will penalize students.

The University of Southern Maine is instituting the controls over pop-up courses following a course that proposed giving students credit for protesting against Republican Sen. Susan Collins. One of the changes is that funding for pop-up courses will only come from internal sources, and not grants.

That move meant terminating a subcontract with the Associated Faculties of Maine related to grant funding for pop-up courses. AFUM said in a statement Tuesday that the union would have preferred the issue “could have been resolved without the elimination of a program that was clearly popular with our students.”

The retired professor who offered the Collins course has been barred from teaching at USM.