In just over 40 years, UMBC has progressed from a fledgling university to a nationally renowned institution of higher education. And when it comes to areas such as undergraduate teaching or encouraging diversity in scientific and technological disciplines, UMBC is now regularly mentioned in the same breath with Harvard University, MIT and Stanford University.

But that growth didn’t happen without a lot of help. And an important element in helping UMBC rise in national prestige has been the university’s successful Exceptional by Example campaign.

This year, the board of UMBC’s Alumni Association has recognized the key role played by its alumni in the campaign by awarding Gene Trainor ’86, health science and policy, the 2010 Distinguished Service Award. Trainor will receive his award at the university Alumni of the Year awards ceremony in October.

UMBC embarked on its very first sustained capital campaign in 2006, in the same year that the university celebrated the 40th anniversary of its founding. Among the goals of the campaign was to engage the university’s alumni more directly in philanthropic giving to UMBC.

Trainor agreed to serve as the chair of the Alumni Campaign Committee. Among his tasks in that role were serving as chairman of committee meetings and training exercises, sending out regular e-mails to committee members – and even holding a campaign event at his own home. Thanks to his unflagging support of the campaign, UMBC’s alumni not only met but surpassed their goal of raising $3 million to support the university’s various initiatives.

“Gene dove into the role of UMBC Alumni Ambassador, and enthusiastically reached out to alumni locally and across the county,” says Greg Simmons, M.P.P. ’04, who serves as UMBC’s vice president of Institutional Advancement. “His candor, enthusiasm, and leadership have helped change our expectations of how alumni can work alongside faculty and staff to help UMBC achieve our short-term goals and our long-term vision.”

When it comes to vision, it’s no surprise that Trainor was a perfect fit. He’s built a career in supporting and facilitating the efforts of venture capital firms. Throughout his career at companies such as Cramer Rosenthal McGlynn, New Enterprise Associates, and, most recently, Foundation Capital, Trainor has trotted the globe helping firms grow and expand their offices – and ensure their futures through succession planning.

“I am not an entrepreneur per se,” says Trainor. “But I believe in and have a passion for entrepreneurship. I realized I wanted to be closer to that side of the world.”

Trainor sees himself as the proverbial “man behind the curtain,” handling the day-to-day operations that are critical to a firm’s success. Successful navigation of this difficult behind-the-scenes work, he observes, allows a firm’s investing partners more flexibility and time to do their job: seek out bold new ideas and provide the creative minds behind them with the necessary funding to develop and sharpen their ideas and eventually bring them to the marketplace.

“Most of the innovation in the world is driven by venture-backed companies,” he says. “My role is to run the internal operations of the firm so the investing partners can do what they do best.”

Through his willingness to engage in philanthropic work and service, Trainor has also brought that spirit of discovery and adventure to another marketplace of ideas: UMBC.

“I was a commuter student during college, so I didn’t build up a vast network of friends,” says Trainor. “It was neat to have the opportunity to come back to UMBC and meet alums from various years while working on the campaign to create awareness for the University.”

When Trainor talks to people about making an investment, he says that he asks them to consider where their resources – time, money, or effort – can have the greatest impact.

“There are very few places where I think you can get a better bang for your buck than UMBC,” he says. “All you need to do is look at the progress UMBC has made in the last ten to 20 years. Even with limited resources, it has made incredible progress not just regionally but nationally.”

— Meredith Purvis

“People know what NPR sounds like,” says Vikki Valentine ’96, English. “But they don’t really know what it looks like. And on the Web, it’s what you look like that’s important.”

That’s the daily challenge for Valentine, who is a senior editor in NPR’s science division – and recipient of the 2010 UMBC Alumna of the Year Award in the Humanities. Public radio is changing at light speed; so much, in fact, that National Public Radio isn’t even National Public Radio anymore. In July, the name became simply NPR.

“The core product of NPR will always be audio storytelling,” says Valentine. “But people aren’t buying radios anymore. If you listen to NPR, you’re streaming it on your computer, you’re listening to it through your iPhone or your iPod…. NPR is trying to branch out and figure out what NPR is in that digital space.”

Valentine’s career trajectory has followed that rise in digital storytelling. UMBC professor of the practice in English Christopher Corbett helped guide her to a print journalism job with Baltimore Style after graduation. But within two years, Valentine was lured to The Baltimore Sun to work on the newspaper’s website – learning the ins and outs of the new medium on the job. “I knew nothing about the Web when I went to the Sun,” she recalls. “The only thing I had formal training in was reporting. UMBC gave me this great foundation in learning and asking questions and how to ask about things.”

A lifelong interest in science eventually took her from the Sun to Discovery magazine’s website, where she wrote daily science news. When that magazine shut down Valentine’s department after the dot.com bubble burst, she ended up at NPR. Over the last nine years, and in a variety of jobs, Valentine has helped reshape the way the organization tells its stories. In a medium that’s constantly changing, she says that flexibility and a knack for telling stories are key elements in her task.

“Most often someone comes to me with a story idea and we sit down and talk about that story and flesh it out,” she says. “Then we figure out what’s the best way to tell this story.”

One of features that Valentine has created at NPR.org is the Tiny Desk Kitchen. Inspired by the DIY spirit of NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts, these videos examine the science behind popular notions about food (Does honey really have healing powers? Is grass-fed beef better for you than corn-fed beef?) and cap it off with a taste test in an improvised kitchen set up in an NPR cubicle.

In 2009, she was among a team of editors to win a National Academies of Science Award for excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering and medicine. The award honored “Climate Connections,” a year-long multimedia series of stories looking at the complexities of the interplay between humans and the climate. It’s the sort of hybrid project – reported stories underscored by sound, web graphics and video – that shows the power of web journalism to unlock stories at multiple levels.

More recently, Valentine has worked with veteran storyteller Robert Krulwich on a series of science video and animation stories. For instance, a story of a group of space enthusiasts who manipulate and trade images from the Hubble and other space telescopes is accompanied by jaw-dropping images of a developing galaxy. Another story describes the crowded insect highway above our heads (around 3 billion insects strong) with a whimsical animation that visualizes the scientific details of spiders and beetles at 6,000 feet.

In September, Valentine will expand her responsibilities when she becomes the senior editor leading NPR’s environment, climate, and energy beat across all platforms.

“It’s a really fun time to be here,” Valentine says. “NPR is always saying to its staff: ‘Come up with something interesting, come up with something innovative.’ I’ve had lots of opportunities to do lots of different things, which keeps it interesting.” Whatever radio becomes, will Vikki Valentine be one of the journalists who will take it there?

“Hopefully,” she says. “That’s what I’m trying to be. I’ll let you know in ten years.”

— Mark Trainer

After a stellar basketball career at UMBC, Rick Moreland ’83, interdisciplinary studies was drafted in the ninth round of the National Basketball Association’s annual draft by the Washington Bullets.

And though he never made a basket or grabbed a rebound for the Bullets (renamed the “Wizards” in 1995), Moreland eventually made the team in a different way – and he’s lasted 25 years with them.

“I have had a longer career than most of the NBA players,” says Moreland, who is the team’s senior vice president for corporate marketing and executive seating. Moreland’s job with the team is to make sure that the corporations and other big customers of the team have an ideal experience when they come to see the Wizards play at the Verizon Center in downtown Washington, D.C.

His mantra? “Find something you really enjoy doing and find a way to make money at it,” says Moreland, sitting behind his desk at the Verizon Center. He observes that some of the Wizards’ younger employees, after taking in his 6’ 7” frame, ask him if he ever played hoops. Moreland enjoys telling them that he was good enough to be drafted by the team back in the day.

Moreland played at Surrattsville High School in Prince George’s County before arriving at UMBC, which was still a Division II school at that time. He left the university as the leading scorer and rebounder in school history – tallying 1,728 points and grabbing 931 rebounds at UMBC.

Chris Farrell ’84, health science and policy, entered UMBC with Moreland in 1979 and played point guard for the Retrievers. “He was an excellent player and an excellent teammate,” says Farrell, who now works for a software company near Philadelphia. “He worked as hard as anyone on the team. I focused on assists and he made it so easy for me.”

Another teammate on the Retrievers teams of that era was Bill Larash ’82, economics, who works as a certified public accountant in Annapolis. Moreland “was offensively the best player I have ever seen,” he says. “He was unselfish on the court. I joke with him now that he could go out and play for the Wizards.”

Page Elliott ’82, health science and policy, was a co-captain with Moreland on the 1981-82 UMBC team. The two had previously played against each other in the Maryland state semifinals – when Elliott was a senior at Thomas Johnson High in Frederick – before becoming teammates. “It was a close-knit group,” says Elliott, who now lives in New Jersey. “[Current men’s basketball coach] Randy Monroe is doing a great job of keeping our team involved with the program.” says Elliott.

Moreland attended the Bullets’ training camp after being drafted in the spring of 1983, but did not make the team. So he switched gears and started looking at other career options in the business of sports.

Moreland had already honed his administrative skills at UMBC, working in the athletic department as a sports information director, an assistant athletic director, an assistant basketball coach, and as an acting athletic director. He started working for the Bullets in 1988 in the team’s public relations department, capitalizing on his experience as an intern at WJZ-TV in Baltimore during his college days.

“I wanted to stay in sports,” he says. Moreland also took charge of handling the game-day operations of the games that the Bullets played at the Baltimore Arena when the team was based in Largo.

Moreland assumed his current position in 1995. One of the highlights of his tenure with the franchise was a chance to work with NBA superstar Michael Jordan, who won six NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls before ending his retirement and joining the Wizards as a player and team executive for two seasons in 2001. “Michael Jordan, who after you get past the celebrity, is a great guy,” notes Moreland.

Moreland and his wife, Susan, have three grown children and live in Davidsonville. Their daughter, Ali, was a senior guard this past season for the women’s basketball team at McDaniel College.

— David Driver

Blair. P. Grubb ’76, biological sciences, is a distinguished professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Toledo’s College of Medicine. He was also a recipient of UMBC’s Alumni of the Year Award in 1994. But Dr. Grubb – who is one of the world’s foremost authorities regarding syncope (or “fainting”) and disorders of the autonomic nervous system – is also a widely published essayist. UMBC Magazine asked him to share his thoughts on the confluence of medicine and literature.

In the midst of the current debates on the future of American health care, a much less discussed crisis has been brewing: the growing estrangement of physicians from the very people they seek to treat.

As a doctor, I know well that modern medicine can do more than ever before to diagnose and often cure illness. But the patients we treat report an ever increasing sense of alienation and disenchantment with those who provide medical care.

And the patients are not alone. Physicians also report a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the current practice of medicine. This disenchantment is underscored by some grim statistics: among professions in America today, physicians now boast the highest rates of suicide, divorce, alcoholism and substance abuse. It is estimated that 300 to 400 physicians in the United States take their own lives each year, a number that is only projected to grow in the near future.

While the cause of these problems is both varied and complex, I have come to feel that part of the reason lies in modern medicine’s progressive dehumanization of both patients and the physicians who serve them. Once sacred bonds linking physicians and patients are now increasingly disrupted by market forces touting the “bottom line.”

To some extent, I believe we have forgotten that medicine is neither a science nor a business; rather it is an art that uses science and business as tools to aid in healing, and not as ends unto themselves. The increasing distance between medicine and the humanities only serves to aggravate the aforementioned issues. For if we think of the humanities as those activities that most reflect what it is to be a human, it could be argued that medicine is one of the humanities’ most prominent fields. What is more human than the act of healing? A patient is not merely a broken machine but rather a unique individual shaped by his or her family, environment, heritage and culture.

Over time, I began to realize that every patient tells a story, a unique narrative that is critical to understanding not only his or her illness, but how that illness had affected his or her life. I also came to realize that sharing in each patient’s story deeply enriched my own life. I began seeing myself less a mechanic and more a partner in the healing process. More and more, I saw my patients’ struggles as reflections of the human condition itself, and our confrontations with fear, hope and mortality.

I began to write down these experiences in stories that tried to convey the lessons that I had learned from each patient. It was a process made difficult by an almost complete lack of exposure to the humanities throughout the entirety of my previous education.

Yet as I continued to write these stories about the patients I had treated and the “nobility of the spirit” that they showed in their struggles with illness, I found myself carried into the great repositories of wisdom found in literature, poetry, art and music. I discovered the Bible, the Divine Comedy, Maimonides, Camus and Buber. I listened to Mozart, Verdi and Glass, and stared in wonder at the works of Turner, Michelangelo and Rothko.

It was an exploration accelerated by my own confrontations with severe illness and loss, and those of my family.

What I have found in the humanities is a quest to understand the depths of the human condition, and a willingness to venture into places where pure science cannot go. No one turns to their chemistry book in times of deep emotional crisis.

I have come to believe that one way to address the growing frustrations of both physicians and patients is to reconnect medicine with the humanities, and allow both parties to the act of healing to see themselves more clearly as part of the ongoing human drama in which we each play a role. The humanities can help train the keen eye of the artist on the problem of illness, and aid in acknowledging the shared humanity of both those who suffer disease and those who seek to help them.

If we achieve this reconnection, a greater number of physicians can once again see ourselves not as mere biomedical technicians, but rather as “healers” in the truest sense of the word.

Are rulings by judges the best way to settle hot-button social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion? Maybe not, argues Georgetown University law professor and UMBC alumna Robin L. West.

By Richard Byrne ’86
Illustrations by Chris Buzelli

Justice is a concept that can enflame our passions and animate our actions. The urge to seek redress for wrongs is woven into the fibers of our government, our economy and our culture.

Courts of law are the main venue in which citizens seek justice. So it puzzles UMBC alumna Robin L. West ’76, philosophy – one of America’s preeminent legal scholars – that our nation’s legal establishment and its law schools have largely devalued and dismissed the concept of justice itself.

“In Paper Chase-type movies and in stereotypical accounts of law school,” West observes, “first-year students will often make an argument about a case being just or unjust. And they’ll be shot down by a professor for having said something overly emotional or childish, something inappropriate or not sufficiently thoughtful, or not sufficiently grounded in theory.”

As the Frederick J. Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy and an associate dean at Georgetown University Law Center, West has pursued her interest in legal justice in law and in literature through a dizzying array of books and papers. She now ranks among the most prominent and prolific legal scholars in the nation.

West’s investigations of the philosophy and history behind American legal justice have also prodded progressives to rethink their reliance on courts as the ultimate decider on hot-button issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion.

In books like Reimagining Justice (2003), West argues that contemporary ideas of legal justice have a historical and institutional tilt toward conservatism and libertarianism. In their place, she proposes a vision of American justice that creates greater social cohesion and acknowledges the positive and essential roles that government and politics play in public life.

A weak concept of legal justice “becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if nobody ever thinks about it, if nobody develops ideas about it, if nobody ever argues about it,” says West.

Justice on the Cutting Room Floor

That law schools and the legal system itself are dismissive of justice seems counterintuitive. Don’t Supreme Court judges answer to the formal title “Justice?”

But West observes that this state of affairs has both a long history and a powerful ripple effect in American culture: “The bad rap that justice has dates back to the late 19th century, when the various approaches to law that were competing for credibility in the legal academy both – for different reasons – dismissed justice.”

Those movements were called “legal formalism” and “legal realism.” Both philosophies are significant building blocks for today’s jurisprudence.

“The formalists gave us the case method – one of the modern ways of legal reasoning,” West says. “Basically they viewed justice as unnecessary; they thought that law was sufficient to answer all legal questions. You could do it all through deductive reasoning. The realists thought that where there were gaps in legal reasoning, the gaps should be filled with the social sciences, which were just emerging as a major way of thinking about political issues at the beginning of the 20th century. So for these different reasons, both camps put justice on the cutting room floor.”

West observes that these movements also aligned with a third notion: the idea that a lawyer’s education should reflect the proper role of law in society and focus on the courts as opposed to the legislatures which create laws. The concept of law as a defender of the individual right against political power has deep roots in the Enlightenment and is manifest in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

“We inherit these ideas about the state potentially being the overreaching Leviathan, and our needing common law and judges to clamp down on it,” says West. “That then gets blended with our constitutional ideas. Separation of powers, individual rights, and so on. What you get out of this by the middle of the 20th century is a lot of rhetoric and ideology and philosophy about the role of law as that which constrains politics. Why does the rule of law clamp down on the state? It’s in order to free the individual to do what they’d do if the state wasn’t there.”

This is a narrow view, argues West, which not only casts the state as a perpetual bad guy, but also negates any useful role for politics.

“Oftentimes the law serves other and nobler and life-enhancing purposes,” she observes, “where the state has to step in and protect people from pernicious private power – or protect people against natural disaster or inevitable tragedy. You don’t get that sense of law intruding into the social world for good ends from the rhetoric of law as the counter to the evil state that emerges from the common law period.”

West suggests that one corrective is for law schools to “open up the subject of what legislatures ought to do to inquiry and study and teaching…The question of the common good has been left out of legal education for the most part. Why? Because the common good, the social good, is what legislators do.”

Courts as a Dead End?

As a legal theorist, West has expended a great amount of energy puzzling through a conundrum: If the dominant notion that law exists largely to police the state for its infringements on individual rights has such a profoundly libertarian and conservative tilt, then why have progressives embraced the courts as a primary vehicle for social change?

West’s work points to a number of problems with that tactic. The first? Courts are far from immutable. They do change – and largely as a result of politics. One example, observes West, is the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this year in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – which struck down a key provision in federal campaign finance law which limited corporate expenditures in elections.

“The main way to think about that case among [progressive] constitutional scholars is to say that the case is just wrong,” says West. “And I have no quarrel with that. But it also is representative of the dominance of constitutional thinking on liberal political action that comes out of law schools. It’s a bit of getting hoisted on your own petard. You have several generations having gone through the legal academy thinking that the Supreme Court is the vehicle for progressive policy, and that the way to go about it is to have the Supreme Court do something that clamps down on the political branches. OK. So here you have the Supreme Court doing something that clamps down on the political branches. And the result is pretty much a disaster across the board.”

West argues that choosing to litigate social change has boxed in progressives. “Somehow we’ve gotten into the position – we, meaning, basically progressives and liberals – of constantly turning to the Supreme Court to decide these questions of fundamental political choices,” she says. “You keep going to the courts to represent things like social welfare, and you’re just wasting your time. The time would be better spent organizing people.”

The problem manifests itself clearly in legal wrangling over same-sex marriage and abortion.

In the case of same-sex marriage, West observes, the conceptually attractive notion of “formal equality” – or “treating like cases alike” –which dominates current legal thinking tends to run aground on the issue of how to decide what constitutes a married couple: traditional male-female pairings only or stated desire by two people to be married, regardless of gender.

“We have not thought very deeply or thoroughly about the politics of marriage per se,” West observes. “Instead, we take marriage as a given, and then ask why these people are treated like these people. It’s a classic ‘treating likes alike.’

“But what’s gotten completely dropped from that conversation is whether marriage – as presently constructed – well serves people,” West continues. “Obviously, it serves some people really nicely. Other people it doesn’t serve so well at all, particularly, for example, folks who want to parent and are poor. Why? Because if they want to parent but can’t access marriage – can’t find someone they want to marry – they’re disadvantaged quite substantially by virtue of not being married but wanting to parent.”

Rights aside, West points out, the stakes remain high: “The number of privileges and economic goodies that married partners have simply by virtue of being married number in the thousands. It’s an extraordinary statistic.”

Marriage’s role as a de facto social safety net may have made sense in the 19th century, she adds, but the present world of single parenthood and extended life spans present different challenges for today’s families.

“When you constitutionalize something like same-sex marriage,” she says, “you’re limited to talking about whether this couple is like that couple, rather than opening up the question of what’s being served by virtue of the state’s role in marriage. Some of it may be worth retaining. Other parts of it may be worth thinking through and doing differently.”

Abortion rights are another issue where West sees the courts as a dead end for progressives. She points out that the Supreme Court’s 1972 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion has been under steady assault since the day the ruling was announced. Now, it may hang on a single vote.

“I think it was unfortunate that that issue was constitutionalized,” West says. If keeping abortion rights legal is a progressive goal, she continues, “Roe v. Wade and its aftermath are not doing a very good job right now. The list just goes on and on of the undermining of Roe through state legislation.”

West argues that pro-choice advocates should place greater faith in politics and organizing. “I don’t think it’s true that the political process is going to yield these horrific results on the abortion side,” she says. In fact, the emphasis on the courts as a battleground for the issue has created “this huge brain drain of smart pro-choice people focusing entirely on litigation and courts, rather than on organizing in those states where it seems like a little organization might help.”

By the Book

Literature has been another wellspring in West’s work on justice. She is one of the leading figures in the law and literature movement – which gleans insight about the law from novels, plays and other literary forms.

West distinguishes between this sort of analysis and cultural studies – which examines representations of law in popular media. Her work mines novels and stories by Herman Melville (Billy Budd), Tom Wolfe (I Am Charlotte Simmons) and Franz Kafka to illuminate legal argumentation on capital punishment, war crimes and definitions of non-consensual sex and rape.

Her interest in this sub-discipline of law came from reading Kafka’s work and realizing the dualities of his occupations as writer and as a lawyer.

“I was reading a biography of Kafka and about his career as a law student, and then as a lawyer,” West recalls. “He was a workman’s comp lawyer, processing workman’s compensation claims. So he knew a lot about law. It wasn’t just a day job. It was a pretty demanding day job. It’s not one that you could just do in your sleep. And it turned out that he did think a lot about law.

“So it dawned on me that you might be able to read some of these parables and short stories he had written – as well as The Trial – and see what Kafka said about law itself,” she says, “and not just law as a metaphor for something else like ‘the father’ or ‘religion.’”

West’s work consciously harks back to the law and literature movement’s heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, when the scholars who worked in it sought to recapture and reevaluate philosophical ideas about the nature of law expressed in great works of fiction. What can lawyers – and even the larger public – take from the conflict between competing notions of law and conscience in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd? That novella’s depiction of its title character – tangled in a knot of false accusations and murder that leads to his execution – raises many of the same compelling questions about justice and law that West investigates in her work.

“A lot of Herman Melville’s work has to do with law,” West observes. “People have been thinking about what Melville had to say about law in Billy Budd since its publication. And it’s interesting to trace the different critical theories about what Billy Budd is about through the decades, because you can really see political differences.”

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III takes your questions.

Q. This past spring, the Baltimore Sun caused a bit of clamor on campus when an editorial celebrating the success of UMBC’s championship chess team suggested that UMBC change its name. Can you discuss your reaction to the idea and the discussion that it set off, and explain why a name change isn’t likely at the present moment?

— Richard Byrne ’86, English
Editor, UMBC Magazine

A. My first reaction is that the Baltimore Sun respects the quality of the educational experience at UMBC, They’re saying that we are a first-rate research university.

My second thought was “Here we go again.” Students, as they arrive at UMBC, sometimes bring up the same point that the Sun did.

I’d simply echo the response of one of our faculty members, Sheldon E. Broedel Jr. ’84 M.S. and ’90 Ph.D, biological sciences, whose letter to the editor in response to the Sun made this point: Why would we change the name when we’ve gotten such a great reputation? Why change a brand that is now associated with high quality? I was very encouraged by that response. It was the response that was most appropriate.

Also, few people understand the millions of dollars it would take to change UMBC’s name. It’s not a simple matter. It’s extraordinarily expensive.

The good news is that our brand – the UMBC brand – is associated with high quality and authenticity. We are who we are. And that’s a good thing.

(Broedel Letter: http://bit.ly/bAy1vQ)

Q. The path to success and achievement is often paved by those who came before us who offer us a hand-up. Our institution appears to be reaching a point of maturity in that we have graduated many alumni to positions of influence in our society (university presidents, business leaders, elected officials, teachers, etc.). What evidence do you encounter that suggests that our students and recent graduates are benefiting from the common connections of their Alma Mater?

— Jason Chamberlain ’97, economics
President, UMBC Alumni Association

A. Our students are being hired as full-time workers and as interns. Often, it is our own UMBC graduates – in national agencies such as the Social Security Administration or in companies like Legg Mason or T. Rowe Price, or in the school systems of our region and elsewhere – who are coming back to UMBC to find talent.

Graduates are serving as mentors for our students as well. They serve on advisory groups on campus. And they’re also giving us feedback on how our students are doing.

In the school systems, for instance, we have a number of graduates who are working in teaching or administrative roles. And they talk about the UMBC experience. When I travel around the state, these graduates introduce themselves and say, “I’m proud to be a UMBC graduate.” They are proud of the education they received.

Bad news travels fast. It’s much harder to get good news out. As the years go by and we have more success with our graduates and with our research and our publications, people are taking the time to think about and understand the value of the UMBC experience. So it’s great when alumni are proactive in saying that they got a great education and that they like getting graduates from UMBC into their workplaces – across the private and the public sectors.

And I hear this not only from our graduates, but from leaders in the community both here and around the country. People respect the quality of the UMBC education. And as more people talk about it, our success breeds success. People say this is a first-rate university – and the results speak for themselves.

Have a question for Dr. Hrabowski? Please visit retrievernet.umbc.edu/askthepresident

* * * * *Comments? Write a Letter to the Editor

How did you get through UMBC?

Many UMBC alumni do it the hard way. Working day jobs (or the night shift) as they earn their degrees. They didn’t just thirst for knowledge; they broke a sweat to make sure that they got it.

Count two alumnae featured in this issue – Robin West ’76, philosophy and Tootsie Duvall ’75, theatre – among that group. West is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and one of the nation’s most prolific and provocative legal theorists. And Duvall’s acting career has spanned four decades and includes network sitcoms and the HBO series, The Wire.

Both women worked their way through school, and reminisced about it in interviews with UMBC Magazine.

“I worked through UMBC as a waitress,” West recalls. “You could still do that back then, and come out of it with virtually no debt.”

Duvall also worked her way through school. She recalls that UMBC theatre professor Bill Brown and other UMBC faculty “taught me how to live. Because I was pretty much on my own by the time I was 18. They really took me under their wing.” Brown even helped Duvall secure a scholarship that allowed her to finish her degree.

West and Duvall also agree about the quality of their UMBC education. “I still have very strong and positive memories of educational experiences at UMBC that were tremendously important to me,” West says. “I felt very nurtured at UMBC intellectually.”

Under the tutelage of Brown and other professors, Duvall obtained the skills and the visibility to leap from UMBC to the ABC sitcom Angie. “Brown started the summer theatre program,” she recalls. “That’s where I originally got seen and where I could meet [All in the Family star] Jean Stapleton, who was my mentor as a comedy and character actress.”

This is why assisting students with the costs of attending UMBC is a top priority in the university’s philanthropic efforts. Helping students who are willing to work hard and stretch themselves financially to get their degrees is an investment that pays off. The successes of West and Duvall are cases in point.

UMBC Magazine at UMBC Homecoming! This year’s UMBC Homecoming (October 13-16) promises to be the best ever! (Check our calendar at www.umbc.edu/homecoming.)

UMBC Magazine is sponsoring an “Arts and Humanities Afternoon” on Saturday, October 16. Hear bestselling faculty author Christopher Corbett (featured in the Summer 2010 issue) spin yarns of the Wild West at 2 p.m. And playwriting’s the thing at 3 p.m., with staged readings of works by UMBC alumnae Kara Corthron ’99 and Kathleen Warnock ’80, followed by a discussion with the playwrights – and a preview of future UMBC Theatre productions. We hope to see you there!

— Richard Byrne ’86

American Studies professor Kimberly Moffitt felt like a stranger when she moved to Baltimore. But her research on public attitudes about the gritty HBO crime drama brought the city closer to home.

By Richard Byrne ’86
Photos by Howard Korn

When assistant professor of American Studies Kimberly Moffitt arrived in Maryland and moved into the Liberty Heights neighborhood in the northwest section of Baltimore four years ago, she had an almost immediate aversion to the place. For Moffitt, Charm City wasn’t so charming.

“I’ve lived in a number of major cities,” she says. “New York, Boston, Chicago and D.C. And this one seemed to rub me the wrong way.”

So Moffitt sought to resolve her dilemma as many academics do: Make her strange new environment the subject of pedagogy by creating a course on Baltimore in film.

“It forced me to learn about Baltimore,” Moffitt recalls. “This is going to be home. So how can I embrace it in ways that fit my own interests? And how we bring film and other media into how we understand America is precisely what I’m interested in.”

Moffitt stocked her course with works by the best-known names who had used the city as a setting for their films. But she balked at first when a colleague insisted that she include the critically-acclaimed HBO series The Wire – which tracks the intersection of the drug trade with the decline of American cities and institutions.

“He said it was the most contemporary example using the city as a landscape,” Moffitt recalls. “And he asked: What were the chances of the students knowing John Waters or Barry Levinson or even Charles Dutton in their age group? You have to talk about The Wire because that’s what they know.”

Moffitt picked up on The Wire in its fourth season – which included a masterful excavation of the problems facing urban schools. And like many viewers, she got hooked. And not merely as a fan of the show, but also as a scholar who saw an opportunity – through the show’s unblinking gaze on the grit and graft of Baltimore – to analyze how the city’s residents and others saw themselves and their metropolis.

FINDING BALTIMORE’S VOICE

Moffitt observes that academics in various disciplines such as sociology, urban planning and political science were already mining The Wire for their research. “The voice I felt wasn’t being talked about was the perspective of Baltimore itself,” she says. “People who live and work here day-to-day. Do they love it? Do they hate it? Is it a bad reflection on their city – or truth telling that needs to be heard?”

So Moffitt set out to find them. She initially wanted to create focus groups with various constituencies represented in The Wire (teachers, journalists, law enforcement), but ran into some yellow “Do Not Cross” tape – particularly with Baltimore’s finest.

“It was hard to get police officers to talk about The Wire, period,” says Moffitt. Her efforts extended to walking unannounced into precincts and approaching squad cars, but availed her little in the way of scholarly insight.

“The thing I heard back from the [Baltimore Police Department] public affairs office was, ‘We do not participate in entertainment research,’” Moffitt recalls. So the UMBC professor pursued another avenue to obtain her data: a web survey. The full survey featured 55 questions, including 14 targeted specifically at local residents.

Moffitt’s sample grew quickly from current and former Baltimore residents to a cohort that included Wire viewers from across the United States. She even put up links to the survey on a Facebook page devoted to the series.

After receiving queries from the United Kingdom (where The Wire was being aired a few years behind its U.S. showings) and elsewhere, she opened up the survey to anyone with an interest in the show. Eventually, Moffitt received 800 completed responses.

Opening up the survey did result in less than 25 percent of the responses coming from the target audience. But it did reveal the depth and breadth of the show’s popularity – and how those outside the city viewed Baltimore after watching The Wire. (Season Four, by the way, was the fan favorite of all five seasons.)

“I’m happy with the survey,” says Moffitt, who is now doing follow-up interviews with Baltimore-area survey participants who agreed to be interviewed at greater length about their perceptions of the interplay between the city, various professions and the show. She’s hoping that those interviews will lead to other local residents that the web survey didn’t pick up.

“The voices I hear are loving the city, loving the realism of The Wire, but worrying about its effect on tourism,” she concludes.

Part of what Moffitt hopes to do in the follow-up interviews is “to cultivate greater diversity in the voices.” In particular, she says, the fact that more than two-thirds of the web survey respondents were white means that she has some work to do to encompass the city’s full ethnic weave.

“The city is not 68 percent white,” she says. “I want to get a greater sense of racial and ethnic diversity in response to the show. I really want to hear the voice of Baltimore.”

MAKING SENSE OF MOTHERS

While her own ambivalence about Baltimore sparked her initial scholarly interest in The Wire, Moffitt’s latest work is now plunging headlong into the politics of gender and race depicted in the series.

“I have issues with the show,” Moffitt says. “I think it’s fabulously written, but I do have issues with it… especially how it can perpetuate the ways in which we look at certain people.”

In particular, Moffitt says that she is drawn to the topic of how black mothers are depicted on the show. “Personally, I was very taken aback by these moms,” she says.

Indeed, as the professor and this reporter tally up the mothers represented on The Wire during an interview, it’s agreed that only two women could be considered “good” mothers – one is a white police officer and the other is an older black adoptive mother. The preponderance of black mothers on the show are abusive, neglectful and – in some cases – willing to sell out their children for the good of a larger drug syndicate or their own personal comfort.

“There’s a particular story being told,” Moffitt says. [University of Maryland at College Park professor of sociology] Patricia Hill Collins talks about there being these particular images that are constantly recycled about black women – and one of them is the bad black mother. That easily, without much effort, fits into what [series creators] David Simon and Ed Burns are doing on The Wire.”

Moffitt says that her interest in this aspect of The Wire springs from similar work she did as a scholar with Stevenson University professor Heather Harris on the films of Spike Lee. “One of the things that sticks out time and again [in Lee’s films] is how he reports on motherhood – and it’s not very flattering.”

When Moffitt’s survey asked respondents what they thought was missing from the show, a number of them – a majority of whom were white and middle-class and male – commented that they felt that their voice was missing from the series and that they did not see their Baltimore reflected in the show.

As a researcher who sought to help find her place in a strange city through a close study of The Wire, Moffitt says that she too is searching for her voice in the show as she looks for its missing good black mothers.

“As a black woman who is a wife and mother,” Moffitt asks, “where am I in this process? I live in Baltimore yet I do not see the women who look like me. Where is the face of the concerned black woman who is simply trying to succeed at keeping her family together and in good health, physically, emotionally, and spiritually?”

It’s no surprise that an Honors University in Maryland has a chapter of America’s longest-lived and most prestigious academic honor society. But hosting a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (PBK), founded in 1776 at The College of William and Mary, requires an intensive application and review process by the organization. Success is a sign of great distinction and intellectual rigor – especially at a university as young as UMBC. Jay Freyman, associate professor of ancient studies and first president of UMBC’s chapter, Anna Shields, current president and director of UMBC’s Honors College and outgoing Phi Beta Kappa chapter president and professor of computer engineering John Pinkston sat down with UMBC Magazine to talk about UMBC’S chapter which was created in 1997.

Q: I have read that it took a decade to create UMBC’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Jay Freyman: Oh, longer. We put in a preliminary application in 1979. The campus was only 13 years old. The term for that is “chutzpah.” We put in another application in 1982. That didn’t go anywhere either. But it was important that we did it. Because the executive secretary of Phi Beta Kappa invited us down to his office… and told us, “This is what we have concerns about.” One of the things that he suggested was that we start an Honors Program, which is now the Honors College.

After another 12 years, we thought we had a chance, so we applied in 1994 and were eventually approved in 1997.

Q: Students can’t apply to Phi Beta Kappa. They are chosen based on academic excellence and fulfillment of certain criteria – including 90 credits in liberal studies subjects, at least one college-level course in mathematics, and 18 credits in a structured program outside their major. How do you let students know what they need to do to be eligible?

Anna Shields: As director of the Honors College, one of the things I have my advising teams do is to let students know that Phi Beta Kappa is something that should be on their radar. That they need a college-level math course, for instance.

John Pinkston: The eligibility requirements are spelled out on our web page, but we need to do a better job of informing people about how meaningful membership is, and differentiate Phi Beta Kappa from other honor societies that have come on the scene.

Jay Freyman: There are two hard pieces of evidence that Phi Beta Kappa is different. First, the age. It was formed in 1776. There really isn’t anything else that comes up to that on its prestige. Second, there is the difficulty in obtaining a chapter charter.

Q: What’s the greatest misconception about Phi Beta Kappa at UMBC?

John Pinkston: The question of liberal studies can be interpreted many ways. At Princeton, where I graduated, engineers were eligible for Phi Beta Kappa. And I think there is an argument to be made that knowledge of technology is an important part of a liberal education. I was very pleasantly surprised at how receptive the UMBC chapter was to that idea.

Anna Shields: I think there’s a misconception in the culture generally that the love of learning is something that’s affiliated only with humanistic modes of inquiry. That’s not the case. You can’t turn over a rock here at UMBC without finding a passionate chemist or physicist or computer scientist. Passion and love of learning and liberal education can all go together and be perfectly coherent and important at a school that has strong STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] disciplines. Part of our job as the chapter is to explain to students how their membership reaffirms things about them that they may not have conceptualized or articulated as love of learning and passion for education.

— Richard Byrne ’86

With Esther Read, Field Archaeologist

So you’re digging a garden in your backyard, and all of a sudden the point of your trowel hits something hard. You poke around a little more, brush the soil away – probably just a rock, right? But on further inspection, the “thing” you have discovered is rather glossy, with faint drawings and a whiff of history about it. When you wash it off in the sink… Voila! You have a ceramics mystery in your hands.

Since Antiques Road Show only comes around town once in a blue moon, you might be scratching your head about what to do next: keep it, or toss it? Thankfully, Esther Read, a field archeologist and lecturer in UMBC’s department of Ancient Studies, is here to help.

— Jenny O’Grady

Step 1:
Look for decorative clues

“If you found something on the ground, the first thing you would do is look at it for its decoration,” says Read, who – with the help of UMBC students and volunteers – is in the process of cleaning, identifying and cataloguing more than 4,000 artifacts found in the backyard of an historic Fells Point home.

The first step is taking a close look at decoration and shape. Then take a closer look; was the piece painted with a brush, or does it seem like one of many copies? Feel the ceramic with your hands; was the clay molded smooth by a machine or more roughly by an artisan’s hands? Shape can also help you understand what kind of vessel the piece once was. Each detail is a key to solving your mystery.

“The decoration is going to give you a clue to what kind of ceramic it is,” says Read.

Step 2:
Use your clues to figure out historical context

Decorative style reveals much about the time period in which the piece was created. For instance, a dish with images of giraffes painted in a certain shade of purple might indicate a piece was manufactured between 1760 and 1780 – a time when images from “exotic” lands were all the rage.

“We know what kinds of designs were done during certain periods from old catalogues, from antiques magazines and articles,” says Read. Every bit of the design comes into play – from subject matter to painting style. A pastoral scene might have been manufactured during the time when Jane Austen first became popular. The use of stippling – or sharp dotting with a paintbrush – indicates another time entirely.

Step 3:
Location, location, location

One of the biggest challenges in archaeology is combining this collection of physical clues with information about where you found the object, and the context of the time period – ie., sociological, economic, or political trends. All of these things in combination are necessary to assemble a full picture of the artifact’s life as an object. That’s why Read hastens to add one very important rule for anyone interested in reassembling the puzzle: never move the artifact away from its original location.

“An artifact has a context…its place in time and space, and its association with other artifacts,” Read says. Without that context, she continues, you might miss the point of an object entirely.

“A lot of the training in doing this is not just learning the dishes, but learning past manners and how people used the material culture of the past,” adds Read. “You need to know all of these things to paint a really good picture.”

Step 4:
Check in with the experts

Read has spent more than 25 years learning everything she can about artifacts of the Mid-Atlantic region. So, admittedly, she has a brain full of details that help her identify objects much faster than the average Joe. But, she said, there are plenty of resources out there for budding archaeologists.

“It’s accumulated knowledge, it’s shared knowledge, and it’s knowing what the printed resources are and where to find them,” she says. (See “Now What?” for some of her suggestions .)

If you want to truly solve your pottery mystery, you might also contact someone like Read at a nearby university, or visit your local historical society. People there are often more than happy to talk shop, Read said.

“I get a lot of calls that start out, ‘I’ve got a rock, can you help me?’” Read says. After some clue-gathering, however, these seemingly insignificant discoveries in the backyard often lead us to better understand our nation’s history.

“We can never go back to the past,” she says, “so we have to reconstruct it from what we find.”

Now What?

Interested in learning more about archaeology? Check out these resources:

1. A Guide to the Artifacts of Colonial America by Ivor Noël Hume – With more than 100 photographs and illustrations, this book is considered the most accurate reference guide for artifacts of this time period.

2. UMBC Ancient Studies Website – The department website at www.umbc.edu/ancs includes information on upcoming travel/study opportunities and department news, as well as a list of online databases and other resources covering everything from the Bronze Age to medieval studies to nautical archaeology.

3. Local and National Societies – Visit the Archeological Society of Maryland at www.marylandarcheology.org or the nation’s oldest such society, the Archaeological Institute of America, online at www.archaeological.org, for dig news, resources and opportunities for networking.

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