At his San Francisco museum, UMBC alumnus Jerry Cimino ’76 makes sure the world is still hep to one of America’s greatest literary movements.

By Jenny O’Grady
Photos by Mirissa Neff and Brittany Powell

The Beat Generation was a uniquely American movement – producing pockets of poetry and art across the land. You could find them in 1950s New York City in their early days clustered around Columbia University – or down in the cafes and jazz clubs of Greenwich Village. Some of them found refuge at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. And they drank and declaimed in juke joints across the Midwest and the Southwest.

That restless urge to explore great spaces is at the heart of Beat verse and prose. But if you had to pick an epicenter of the movement, you’d likely choose San Francisco’s North Beach – and specifically the crossroads of Broadway and Columbus Avenue.

That’s where you’ll find one of America’s great literary meccas: the checkerboard-floored City Lights Books, which was founded by poet/ publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953. Right next to it is the Vesuvio Café, a popular watering hole of poets like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. And just up the street, at 1562 Grant Avenue, young writers spent hours smoking dope on a crooked stairwell called “Poet’s Corner” – and then headed to the press next door to check galleys of the latest chapbook.

North Beach is also where you’ll find Jerry Cimino ’76, history. From the book-lined open air porch of the Beat Museum, which he founded in 2003 at 540 Broadway to pay homage to a generation of writers and artists who continue to inspire him, he takes in the rich history of this historic section of the city. He savors it. And he can’t help but share it with anyone who will listen.

“What we like to say is: ‘Welcome to the center of the universe,’” enthuses Cimino, with the flair of a modern day P.T. Barnum. “Because you’re at Broadway and Columbus right now – and everything that happened with the Beat Generation happened right here at this intersection.”

The museum’s walls reflect this, exploding with colorful posters, books, author photographs, drawings and videos covering every surface. One wall is devoted completely to editions of Kerouac’s On the Road from around the world. Another shows an early version of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” complete with scrawling edits by the author – enough to make even the biggest bookworm giddy.

More than 60 years after the Beats’ heyday, the culture has found a true evangelist in Cimino, a determined man driven by respect for the inclusive, nonconformist ideals the Beat authors represented. With a little elbow grease – and some recent attention from Hollywood – he’s on the road to making a lasting tribute to his heroes.

“IT KNOCKED ME OUT”

Cimino grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, the son of a WWII vet-turned-postal clerk. His first encounter with the music and movement of the Beat writers came when a teacher read poems from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s classic collection A Coney Island of the Mind to his eighth-grade class.

“That whole book of poetry literally changed my life…it knocked me out,” says Cimino, who to this day can recite the book’s fifth poem, “Sometimes During Eternity,” from memory.

“You know, 1968 is when it all happened,” Cimino recalls. “Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed. Martin Luther King was shot and killed. The Vietnam War was raging, and all of us kids were looking at each other and saying, ‘What in the hell are we inheriting?’”

When Cimino arrived at UMBC in 1972, he was among the few students actually living on campus at the time, splitting time between what were then called “Dorms 1, 2, and 3.” He says that many of the bonds that he formed in that era at UMBC – including friendships with older students freshly scarred from serving in Vietnam, and with closeted gays who trusted him with their secret – would forever change his own way of thinking. He also enjoyed some time on stage with the theatre club, sharing the bill (but, sadly, never the stage) with one-time UMBC student Kathleen Turner in a 1975 campus production of Antigone.

“For the first time in my life, I was interacting with a lot of people who weren’t like me,” says Cimino. “And that’s what the Beats were all about – coming together and really celebrating your differences… they were about tolerance and compassion and having the courage to live the most authentic life you can.”

Jonathan M. Cooperman, who roomed with Cimino at UMBC before finishing a degree in physical therapy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, recalls a thoughtful, passionate friend who also had more hair back then.

“He is very much the same guy to me now as he was then,” says Cooperman, who is now a member of the Beat Museum’s board. “If you walked into his room at three in the morning, the door would be cracked open with light pouring out into the hall. If you walked inside, Jer would be sipping tea and reading a book – usually Kerouac.”

Although he loved history and other subjects he’d studied at UMBC, Cimino graduated without a clear career path to follow. So he went with the flow in which he found himself, relocating to California and forging a successful career in sales for both IBM and American Express.

VOICES THAT SPAN GENERATIONS

Over the years, however, Cimino and his wife, Estelle, started craving something more than a career in business. His continuing affection for the Beat literature he had read as a young man led him to befriend John Cassady – the son of Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady, who is immortalized in the character of “Dean Moriarty” in On the Road.

Cimino also began building a collection of Beat generation memorabilia which eventually became “The Beat Museum on Wheels” in 2003. And just as Dean Moriarty took off across the country with Sal Paradise (the character representing Kerouac himself in On the Road), Cimino and Cassady drove “the mighty beatmobile” across America’s highways in October 2005 – even parking it overnight in Commons Circle at UMBC.

Cimino says he reveled in the chance to share his growing collection with UMBC students and see his old campus. And faculty members were happy to have a bit of the Beats in Catonsville.

“The students enjoyed visiting the museum on wheels, with all kinds of interesting, hard-to-get publications and memorabilia, and just hanging out with Jerry and John,” says UMBC associate professor of English Piotr Gwiazda, who helped organize the appearance.

The Beats cast a spell over today’s students now just as much as ever, Gwiazda says.

“Whenever I teach ‘Howl,’ students respond with interest,” he says. “There still seems to be something magnetic about the work of Beat Generation writers: the idea of community it embodied, its counter-cultural aspects, its philosophical dimensions, and of course its sheer verbal power and vitality.”

STAR POWER

Of course, interest in the Beats has never been limited to college students reading in circles on the grass. A new Hollywood treatment of Kerouac’s On the Road – which features Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame and Viggo Mortensen from the Lord of the Rings films – is traveling the festival circuit now and scheduled for general release later this year.

Cimino couldn’t be happier about what the new film means for the legacy of the Beats – and for the future of his own museum.

“It’s just great, have you seen it?” he says, cueing up the movie trailer on a screen above the museum’s entrance. Since filming began in 2010 under director Walter Salles, Cimino says members of the film’s cast have visited the museum and asked questions about their characters.

The cast and crew even dropped off a surprise prop from the film at the museum. Just to the right of the museum’s check-in desk sits a dusty maroon 1949 Hudson Hornet used during filming and driven to its resting spot in North Beach by none other than the movie’s star Garrett Hedlund (“a really delightful young man,” says Cimino), who portrays the ever-restless Dean Moriarty.

Beside it stands a sign: “Walter’s only request of us was that the dust and grime – accumulated on the car during the 5,000 miles he and Garrett spent traveling the country making the film – remain undisturbed. Walter considers this ‘the Holy Dirt of America.’”

“You know, every fingerprint has a story,” says Cimino. “It’s important to keep that history intact.”

That’s a major part of Cimino’s job as curator: making the story of the Beats accessible and fun for anyone who might wander in. He loves every second of his evangelism for the movement and its great writers.

“The museum is successful because it represents a significant part of American culture and American literary history,” says Cooperman. “The opening of the movie On the Road demonstrates how this literature is still relevant.

“Of course, the fact that Jerry is probably as knowledgeable of the Beats as any academic doesn’t hurt either,” he adds. “He’ll ultimately be successful because he has a passion for what he does.”

NOW AND LATER

Passion is one thing. But, if you’re wondering how a start-up museum makes it in such difficult economic times, here’s your answer: It ain’t easy.

But the Beat Museum now survives and thrives thanks to Cimino’s magnetic business sense and a lot of hard work.

Just above Cimino’s desk hangs a complicated organizational chart showing a collage of boxes representing duties spanning everything from marketing to merchandising to fixing the guest toilet. One line connects them all.

“And every one of those boxes has my damn name on it,” he jokes. “That’s just how it is.”

The museum’s collection has grown as fans discover it. Cimino admits that “most people who love the Beats don’t have a lot of money,” but as fans of certain writers have discovered his museum, the memorabilia contributions have flowed in steadily. There’s a plaid jacket once worn by Kerouac, and a creaky pipe organ owned by Allen Ginsberg. There’s even an original “Can YOU pass the acid test?” card from the days when Neal Cassady drove Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters across the country in a psychedelic bus – a trip immortalized by author Tom Wolfe in his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (There’s also a film version of that book in works, to be directed by Gus Van Sant.)

Over the years, Cimino also found mentors to advise him as his plans for the museum have grown. He singles out the late Kim Greer, who was president of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, until his death in 2006.

“I have people come in every day telling me what I should be doing,” he says. “But I only take advice from people who have successfully done what they’re telling me I ought to do. It’s easy to guess…but that’s not going to get you anywhere.”

Right now, the Beat Museum is just as Cimino would like it to be: full, eclectic, engaging. Not too smooth, or too uniform: that wouldn’t fit well with the artists that it celebrates. Mismatched shelves offer hand-assembled chapbooks by local poets. A claw-footed bathtub filled with dime store novels invites visitors to try something new. There’s a definite flavor to the place – a sort of San Francisco sourdough bite.

Cimino would enjoy having someone else fix the toilet from time to time. More important, however, is growing the Beat Museum so that it can stand strong for generations to come. That’s his next step.

“I started this place the only way I know how. I built it from nothing,” he says. “Now we’ve built a track record, we’ve made it succeed with the blood and sweat of a lot of people. If this thing’s going to outlive me…I’m going to have to think big.”

• VIDEO: Interview with Jerry Cimino ’76, founder of The Beat Museum
• Read Jerry’s blog from his 2005 visit to UMBC
• Read Jerry’s review of Walter Salles’s new movie, On the Road

British writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

And for many of us, that’s exactly how the beeps and pings and connecting dings that keep our schedules, steer our cars to the right destination, and even maintain our bonds with family and friends over great distances seem to work. Like magic.

But to the humans behind the technologies – including Silicon Valley-based UMBC alumni at Apple and Google – it’s anything but abracadabra. It’s a combination of hard work, entrepreneurial drive and visionary imagination at its geekish best.

Let’s meet some of the minds behind the magic of our technologies.

by Jenny O’Grady
Photos by Gabriela Hasbun

Stroll down the yellow brick walkway that leads to Building 43, and a trio of girls on colorful bikes rides by, dinging their handlebar bells and singing “Hello!”

Take a right, and you’re in a garden of busts that depict everyone from Lloyd Bridges to Jacques Cousteau. Beyond that, a T-Rex skeleton feasts on helpless plastic pink flamingos. There’s a delicious savory breeze – does it come from one of the free cafeterias or the employee-run herb garden? – and a burst of laughter from a group of young engineers playing beach volleyball nearby.

Oh, right: and today’s free haircut day. That’s life in the Googleplex for you.

Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, is often depicted as a Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory of high-tech geekdom. It’s frequently listed on Top 10 lists of amazing workplaces. But what’s it really like to work at a company with a product so popular that it’s become a verb?

“It is very good to foster a culture where people are engaged, want to be at work, and that allows you to concentrate your time on what you’re trying to do in the day,” says Jeffrey Burgan ’83, computer science, director of network engineering for Google Access, which delivers high speed internet. “People work very hard here, so if the place can take the burden off in other areas – like get an oil change or a haircut, or to have washers and driers so people can do their laundry – it definitely helps.”

Google is known as much for the sheer difficulty of its confounding job interviews as it is for the replica of SpaceShipOne in its lobby. The secret to the company’s success seems to lie in its careful balance of work and play, and other UMBC alumni at Google agree that its unique culture pushes them to be more creative and constructive.

Jeetendra M. Soneja M.S. ’04, computer science, is the tech lead for Google Analytics API. He works in an outlying office, but finds the company culture persists across Google’s many campuses.

“One thing that is common across all the Google offices all over the world is the friendly and helpful nature of the fellow Googlers,” he says. “This leads to a very healthy working environment and is one of the best things why I love working here. The work environment is also fun and relaxing, and yet focused and one that promotes and rewards innovation.”

Robert Banz ’95, computer science, has worked as a site reliability engineer at Google for four years. (“We make sure Google is ‘always on,’” he says.) Before that, he worked at UMBC, which gives him a bit of special perspective about what’s extra cool about working at the Mountain View campus.

“Everyone says it’s the free food options, so I’ll go with something else. I’d say I was surprised how much it felt like a university campus,” he said.

Banz also believes the atmosphere of Silicon Valley is a significant influence on the famed Google culture. “Silicon Valley and San Francisco, but really the entire Bay Area, has this amazing critical mass of passionate creative, scientific, and engineering talent,” he says. “These groups mix socially; mutual curiosity leads to unique ideas. I think that’s the secret to the creative engine, and the source of very engaging and entertaining conversation.”

Sandor Dornbush M.S. ’06, computer science, sometimes runs to work with his black lab, Coltrane. Other times, he takes the free Google shuttle. Today, he wheels his bike into a meeting room playfully covered in a soft padded material. Photos of the Burning Man festival hang nearby.

“Despite all the games, and the food and everything, I honestly don’t think I’ve played a single game of pool in my six years here,” says Dornbush, an engineer for Google Play, who knows his work ultimately comes first.

“People talk about the Google 15 (because of the free food), but I’ve actually found the opposite,” Dornbush says. “For the first time, many people have access to really good food, and they have access to the gym, and they see people around them taking care of themselves, and they start to drop pounds. So despite the fact that there’s all this free stuff, people work really hard. And it’s a culture that encourages that.”

British writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

And for many of us, that’s exactly how the beeps and pings and connecting dings that keep our schedules, steer our cars to the right destination, and even maintain our bonds with family and friends over great distances seem to work. Like magic.

But to the humans behind the technologies – including Silicon Valley-based UMBC alumni at Apple and Google – it’s anything but abracadabra. It’s a combination of hard work, entrepreneurial drive and visionary imagination at its geekish best.

Let’s meet some of the minds behind the magic of our technologies.

by Jenny O’Grady

Photos by Timothy Archibald. Illustrations by Meredith Nelson.

* * * *

How a UMBC alumnus found more than (voice) recognition for his work on the iPhone’s enigmatic Siri technology.

Sometimes, Harry Chen needs to get away. Far away.

When he’s surrounded by the sands of Death Valley, California, even the GPS can’t find him. He can’t check his email, or video chat with his parents in Hong Kong, or stream music from his favorite Pandora station. And he likes that solitude.

“Sometimes you’ve got to go to the desert,” says Chen, a UMBC computer science alumnus (B.A. ’98, M.S. ’00, Ph.D. ’04) who helped develop Siri, the voiceresponsive “personal assistant” found inside the latest Apple iPhones.

“You stay out there, and when you come back, you see such a big contrast of civilization,” he continues. “And it makes you appreciate life a lot more. Everything we created – one way or another – is kind of superficial, but also kind of essential.”

In a world where computing has left the desktop and lives in the clouds, Chen is a bit of a tech superstar. The work that he and his colleagues have done makes it easy for everyone from tweeners to grandfolks to whisper wishes into the palms of their hands to find the closest pizza, send an email or solve a math problem.

Reflecting on his short-yet-impressive career, the energetic 35-year-old software engineer is quick to note the importance of the nearly ten years he spent at UMBC. He says that the people and the environment of discovery at the university helped shaped him into the kind of thinker capable of seeing models and years ahead to the next cool thing.

Building The Basics

Like many blossoming tech geeks in the early 1990s, Chen first contemplated the inner workings of computers as a teenager, sitting at home in Hong Kong, his thumbs occupied by the bright red buttons of that era’s ubiquitous Nintendo controller.

“While I was playing, I’d get so curious. How did all those characters come about? I started thinking about how some games would make very predictable moves, and why some are not predictable at all,” he says. “Later on, my dad bought me a computer…and the games on that were sort of like the ones with a snake going in different directions. It made me very interested in understanding more about computer instructions.”

When Chen left home for Towson University in 1994, the world of web-based computing was just beginning to blossom. At the urging of his parents, he began a course of study in pharmacy, but a job opening at the campus library allowed Chen to help customers with computers. He started building simple websites with his friends. After taking a few classes, Chen discovered he had an aptitude for programming.

Suddenly, the future – including a transfer to UMBC – seemed obvious to him. It didn’t take Chen long to make himself at home in the university’s computer science department, where he turned artificial intelligence algorithms into Java code for computer science research projects, won highly-sought internships at Hewlett-Packard, and generally wowed his peers.

“One thing we always liked so much about Harry is that he liked to charge into things,” says Dr. Tim Finin, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering who specializes in artificial intelligence and who served as Chen’s Ph.D. advisor. “He was not afraid to just drop in and start working on something.”

At the time, many of UMBC’s computer science researchers focused on pervasive computing – which aims to unobtrusively connect and share data between the many devices in our lives. Chen took to it like a teen to texting, and reveled in collaborating with fellow students to test new ideas.

“Harry was, and probably still is, very good at that level. He could very effortlessly turn ideas into working prototypes,” says Finin. “It’s a really significant skill to be able to have an idea and then very quickly test it out…to be able to implement enough of it to get some feedback to know whether it’s a brilliant idea, whether it’s something that will pan out.”

The Smartest Room in the Building

Many computer science students at UMBC take jobs right after they finish undergraduate studies. But an iffy job market in the late 1990s and then the dot.com bubble’s burst a few years later kept Chen in school.

Chen’s decision to wait to test the market turned out to be a good one. He used that time to develop a concept that helped shape his future research.

Imagine a room that answers your questions, or anticipates your needs and then fulfills them. Chen imagined that room – and then figured out how it might be brought to life.

“The graduate student’s life is really about exploration and to be free to identify your interests,” he says. “It’s almost like an accident when you find something you really like to work on and you just know it.”

Chen had spent some time interning at the Hewlett-Packard Labs, which were – at the time – at the forefront of mobile computing research and development. So when Chen returned to UMBC, he figured out what he wanted to design: a conference room broker. This system would retrieve and translate data from the devices within the room itself to solve problems for occupants while also considering user-privacy issues.

“So you walk into a meeting room,” Chen explains, “and the room understands how many people are in that room, what those people do…so the room says, ‘Oh, there’s a projector,’ and the projector would say, ‘I want to show a PowerPoint presentation. I can do that.’”

The smart room would also locate the presentation on Chen’s phone, download it, and show it – after automatically darkening the room. It might know that one of the meeting attendees wants a copy of the PowerPoint, and then simply download it to their phone. The room might even detect that an attendee’s hotel room is several miles away – and offer to call them a taxi.

“The idea is that people will use technology without thinking about it, which is just like you pick up chopsticks or a utensil and you just use it, you don’t think about it,” he says. “So that’s an idea, to try to encourage people to build technology for everyday people, to solve everyday problems.”

Imagining this room would help Chen shape his later work.

Taking Chances – and Detours

Following graduation from UMBC, both Chen and his wife Gigi Yim, who earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in information systems from UMBC in 2004 and 2007, pursued jobs in the Baltimore area. They even bought a house.

But the lure of Silicon Valley – and the fast-paced, creative life it offered – called to Chen.

“At one point, I thought: life is too short. I woke up one morning and I wrote my wife an essay and I said these are the reasons why we should just move to the West Coast,” he says, smiling. “Kind of like writing a paper: these are my reasons. I sent the email in the morning, and in the evening, I come home, and she says, ‘OK. Let’s do it.’”

Within days, they were looking for new jobs and making plans to move west. Yim took a job at Netflix, and Chen wound up at a vaguely-named startup working on a secret project involving voice recognition. (This startup – Siri – would later be bought by Apple.)

Right away, Chen felt confident they had made the right choice.“There’s a mentality here among a lot of people…a sort of hunger drive to make something” in Silicon Valley. “I always feel like you capture people’s smartness in thin air here,” he adds. “Somehow, you just breathe in people’s knowledge.”

“Harry, from day one, was pretty clear. Silicon Valley was where he wanted to end up,” says Dr. Anupam Joshi, a professor of computer science and another of Chen’s graduate school advisors. He observes that some students simply crave the risk and reward of the Silicon Valley environment.

“Some of it could be – for all we know – genetic hard wiring,” Joshi says. “That is why some people become race car drivers and others, like me, drive five miles below the posted speed limit.”

Valley Life: 101

Drive down Route 101 from San Francisco, and you see signs of our burgeoning tech civilization everywhere.

Billboards touting the latest cloud software. Silver-sided buildings in seemingly endless business parks that are home to startup upon startup. Even the street names themselves – like Apple’s famous Infinite Loop, or the punningly named Disk Drive in San Jose – conjure images of innovation and dreams.

Strolling around the manicured Apple campus in Cupertino, California, Chen speaks quickly. Excitedly. He says Silicon Valley is a place where ideas can be imagined without fear, where innovation is rewarded.

“People here have a passion for technology and innovation,” he says. “They want to change the world. They take risks. Most of the time they fail, but sometimes they succeed. So they step out, dream up some crazy idea and say ‘If I fail, fine. I’ll dream another one.’”

Even so, Chen acknowledges that nothing happens overnight. If you think about the gadgets that have occupied your pockets over the last 10 years, the technology required to power them crawled more than it leapt. The palm-held organizers of the mid-’90s, for example, were little more than tiny personal computers; today’s equivalent relies on web networking and interaction with other devices. Who knows what tomorrow’s devices will look like?

“Especially in the [artificial intelligence] research field, you can’t just jump to the dream right away,” Chen says. “You kind of have to think about yourself climbing a mountain. You have to do the work to get up there…you can’t just shoot straight up because that’s impossible. And once in a while you will have to make a detour, and because certain technology or culture has changed, you have to adapt to that.”

Back at UMBC, Joshi acknowledges that Chen’s metaphor is rooted in the reality of how creativity works. “That’s part of the fascination of this field, I think, going back to the creative process,” he says. “So much is yet not done. So much power is available through the computational process…we just have to channel it. We’ve barely scratched the surface.”

For Chen, it’s often enough just to see these products in use by the people he loves. When he was an undergraduate student, he communicated with his parents in Hong Kong by hand-written letter; today, he uses FaceTime to video chat with them whenever he wants.

Chen isn’t able to discuss what he’s working on now at Apple – a company known for keeping a tight leash on its ideas and products until they are introduced. But when you ask Siri a question on your new iPhone and get an answer, consider yourself at the doorway of Chen’s smart room, engaging with his work.

“It feels surreal,” Chen concludes, “because the things I talked about four or five years ago seem like a dream, and today, it doesn’t seem like a dream anymore.”

Read about UMBC alumni working at Google here.

Andrew J. Sherman ’83, political science, has forged a career that is bursting with achievements. He is a senior partner in the global law firm of Jones Day, a faculty member at Georgetown University Law Center and an adjunct professor at both the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University and the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland College Park. He is also the author of 21 books including Harvesting Intangible Assets: Uncover Hidden Revenue in Your Company’s Intellectual Property and Mergers and Acquisitions from A to Z, as well as a motivational title: Road Rules: Be the Truck. Not the Squirrel.
What ties all of this activity together in Sherman’s view of his career is his passion for education. “That is my true purpose in life,” he says. “To educate, whether in a client’s board room or in the classroom.”
Sherman’s path to a UMBC education was hardly traditional. Growing up in the Philadelphia area, he expected to spend his entire life there. However, when he was in 11th grade, his father moved to Baltimore. That same year, the family homestead burned down, and his mother and siblings headed out to Los Angeles. “It was a matter of going a few miles down I-95 or moving 3,000 miles away,” says Sherman. “I opted for Baltimore.”
Needing a single course to obtain his high school degree, it was suggested to Sherman that he apply for early admission to college. Fully acknowledging that he didn’t have the strongest credentials, Sherman bought a clip-on tie and talked his way into UMBC.
The entrepreneurial 20-year-old dropped out of the university after only two years when Aerobic Tennis, a fitness and training program he developed for tennis players, landed on the cover of Baltimore magazine. That success was heady stuff at first, but after a couple of years of operating in an economy with bad inflation and a volatile capital market, Sherman finally returned to UMBC to finish his degree in political science.
“I am very proud to be a UMBC alum,” says Sherman. “I came having barely been admitted to a school that does not have a business major and have become one of the top business minds in the country.”
Sherman’s message to students mirrors the one that is implicit in his own story: academic pedigree can be overrated. “Don’t think of yourself as a second-class citizen because you didn’t go to Harvard or Stanford,” he notes. “If you study the leaders of many companies, you will see people who did not rest on their academic laurels, but relied on their work ethic, emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills.”
Encouraged by George R. LaNoue, a professor in UMBC’s political science department, Sherman headed to American University School of Law, graduating from that school in 1986.
Even as a first-year law firm associate, Sherman was already branching out into the publishing world, authoring a book titled One Step Ahead, which focused on the business and legal aspects of business growth. “While in law school I had written a monthly column for Nation’s Business, the magazine of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,” recalls Sherman. “The book came about when I was approached by a New York publisher to gather my columns into a book [with a release date that] coincided with the 1986 White House Conference on Small Business.”
The opportunity that presented itself so early had its upsides and its challenges, Sherman observes. “I unintentionally came out of the gate as a ‘published expert,’” he says, “and then spent the next 30 years working to become that leader.”
Sherman’s client list these days includes large corporations such as Caterpillar, Apple and Walmart. But he still concentrates much of his attention to working as the legal and strategic adviser to rapid growth companies. “Many of the companies I work with had a rapid growth path that went dormant,” he says. “They had big growth plans, but then realized they needed the right advisers to make things work.”
Or, put another way, all of Sherman’s writing and teaching are tied back to the basic principle of helping companies avoid some of the speed bumps along the way to sustaining success. He aims to insure that they expand and flourish, not – as he puts it – “grow and blow up.”
Sherman acknowledges that his own greatest challenge is time management. He has a hard time saying no to things that interest him. Saying yes to an invitation to join the advisory board of a Washington, D.C. non-profit, for example, leaves Sherman trying to figure out how to get everything done.
“I have a demanding law practice,” he says. “But I love being a lawyer, teaching and writing… when you stop loving what you do, it is time to change course.”
— Mary Medland

Andrew J. Sherman ’83, political science, has forged a career that is bursting with achievements. He is a senior partner in the global law firm of Jones Day, a faculty member at Georgetown University Law Center and an adjunct professor at both the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University and the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland College Park. He is also the author of 21 books including Harvesting Intangible Assets: Uncover Hidden Revenue in Your Company’s Intellectual Property and Mergers and Acquisitions from A to Z, as well as a motivational title: Road Rules: Be the Truck. Not the Squirrel.

What ties all of this activity together in Sherman’s view of his career is his passion for education. “That is my true purpose in life,” he says. “To educate, whether in a client’s board room or in the classroom.”

Sherman’s path to a UMBC education was hardly traditional. Growing up in the Philadelphia area, he expected to spend his entire life there. However, when he was in 11th grade, his father moved to Baltimore. That same year, the family homestead burned down, and his mother and siblings headed out to Los Angeles. “It was a matter of going a few miles down I-95 or moving 3,000 miles away,” says Sherman. “I opted for Baltimore.”

Needing a single course to obtain his high school degree, it was suggested to Sherman that he apply for early admission to college. Fully acknowledging that he didn’t have the strongest credentials, Sherman bought a clip-on tie and talked his way into UMBC.

The entrepreneurial 20-year-old dropped out of the university after only two years when Aerobic Tennis, a fitness and training program he developed for tennis players, landed on the cover of Baltimore magazine. That success was heady stuff at first, but after a couple of years of operating in an economy with bad inflation and a volatile capital market, Sherman finally returned to UMBC to finish his degree in political science.

“I am very proud to be a UMBC alum,” says Sherman. “I came having barely been admitted to a school that does not have a business major and have become one of the top business minds in the country.”

Sherman’s message to students mirrors the one that is implicit in his own story: academic pedigree can be overrated. “Don’t think of yourself as a second-class citizen because you didn’t go to Harvard or Stanford,” he notes. “If you study the leaders of many companies, you will see people who did not rest on their academic laurels, but relied on their work ethic, emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills.”

Encouraged by George R. LaNoue, a professor in UMBC’s political science department, Sherman headed to American University School of Law, graduating from that school in 1986.

Even as a first-year law firm associate, Sherman was already branching out into the publishing world, authoring a book titled One Step Ahead, which focused on the business and legal aspects of business growth. “While in law school I had written a monthly column for Nation’s Business, the magazine of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,” recalls Sherman. “The book came about when I was approached by a New York publisher to gather my columns into a book [with a release date that] coincided with the 1986 White House Conference on Small Business.”

The opportunity that presented itself so early had its upsides and its challenges, Sherman observes. “I unintentionally came out of the gate as a ‘published expert,’” he says, “and then spent the next 30 years working to become that leader.”

Sherman’s client list these days includes large corporations such as Caterpillar, Apple and Walmart. But he still concentrates much of his attention to working as the legal and strategic adviser to rapid growth companies. “Many of the companies I work with had a rapid growth path that went dormant,” he says. “They had big growth plans, but then realized they needed the right advisers to make things work.”

Or, put another way, all of Sherman’s writing and teaching are tied back to the basic principle of helping companies avoid some of the speed bumps along the way to sustaining success. He aims to insure that they expand and flourish, not – as he puts it – “grow and blow up.”

Sherman acknowledges that his own greatest challenge is time management. He has a hard time saying no to things that interest him. Saying yes to an invitation to join the advisory board of a Washington, D.C. non-profit, for example, leaves Sherman trying to figure out how to get everything done.

“I have a demanding law practice,” he says. “But I love being a lawyer, teaching and writing… when you stop loving what you do, it is time to change course.”

— Mary Medland

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

Q. What books have you been reading of late? And how do you prefer to read: ebooks or paper?

— James Polchin ’89, political science
Founding Editor, Writing in Public

A. One thing that I’ve been reading lately is Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 by David Kennedy, who is a professor at Stanford University (Oxford University Press). This period in American history fascinates me, and both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt fascinate me. She was very helpful in pushing the involvement of women, of blacks, and of artists in the American recovery.

Artists were particularly important. It was customary at that time to say: “We are in the middle of a depression. Why would we be doing anything to help the arts?” Yet there were people in leadership positions – including the Roosevelts – who understood that we need the arts in difficult times. Even more so, perhaps, than in times when we are thriving. We need them all the time. The arts reflect who we are. They make us whole. They express the human condition.

The theme of leadership in that era – which was expressed in FDR and in Eleanor Roosevelt – was optimism. People back then said: “The country’s going down the tubes.” They used the same language we use today. Wall Street versus Main Street. Legislation that was pushed through was being questioned by the Supreme Court, and many Americans wanted to see it overruled.

But the language that was used in recovery and the legislation that was passed spoke volumes about our values. In no case was that more true than the Social Security Act. Before that act, the vast majority of people struggled after their working years. There was no retirement. But that act said that we care about people in their time of need.

For me, the optimism and the values we embraced during that era suggest the hope that we can embrace in the period we are in right now.

As far as how I read, I do prefer books. We have every bit of technology you’d want on UMBC’s campus and at my house. But when it’s all said and done, I enjoy the book. I want to smell it. I want to turn the page. I want to turn the corners of the pages. And I like seeing where I am in relation to the end of the book. You don’t get that without the book itself.

Q. As someone who’s been called upon to make a number of commencement addresses at other universities, what is your approach to offering this important reflection for new graduates?

— Richard Byrne ’86, English

A. First, I want to know the history of the institution. And I want to know what students want to know about.

Last year, one of the most significant experiences for me was speaking at the University of Mississippi commencement. So I studied the history of Ole Miss, and discovered that this beautiful grove, with magnolia trees, where we had thousands of people gathered, had been the site where the men of Ole Miss – students and faculty – had set off for the Civil War. That group of men suffered 100 percent casualties in the Civil War. Regardless of what one feels about the Civil War, the thought of those children and men dying is sad. It’s as sad as the war itself.

And then, knowing that 100 years later, this was also the most violent site of desegregation in American higher education. Ever. Four people killed. And there I was speaking to a predominately white audience. I wanted to talk about Mississippi history as part of American history. And about how the problems of Mississippi were – and are – American problems.

The challenge to every graduating class is “What can I do to make some impact on people who don’t have what I have?” That’s what I want to say, whether it’s at Ole Miss or at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, where I will speak this year.

To send a question to President Hrabowski, click here.

TAKE A SEAT

The first phase of UMBC’s Performing Arts and Humanities Building is on schedule for its Fall 2012 opening. Soon, the departments of English and theatre will move into the building – along with the James T. and Virginia M. Dresher Center for the Humanities, the Linehan Artist Scholars Program and the Humanities Scholars Program.

It’s a big event in UMBC’s history, but did you know that you can already put your personal stamp on the university’s newest building?

UMBC is offering chances to name a seat in the building’s state-of-the-art proscenium theatre. The new theatre is the anchor of the project’s first phase – and as the new home for the university’s award-winning theatre department, there are more than 200 seats available for naming. Those who participate in the campaign will have a plaque engraved with their name (or other text of their choice) affixed to a seat in the theatre.

The $500 gift required to place your name on a seat will directly benefit arts and humanities programming at UMBC through an endowment that will ensure that arts productions and other programs are available for future generations.

The new Performing Arts and Humanities Building is the capstone of UMBC’s recent efforts to highlight the arts and humanities at the university, which also includes a new campaign –“think.create. engage” – which has spurred greater attendance at campus events and communicated UMBC’s arts and humanities efforts to the wider community.

For more information on how to put your name on a seat, check out the new building’s website: www.umbc.edu/pahb/

— Richard Byrne ’86

UPWARD TRAJECTORY

In March, UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III announced that Philip Rous had been selected to fill the university’s most senior academic administrative position: Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs.
“UMBC is very fortunate to have someone of Dr. Philip Rous’s impressive experience and talent to serve as Provost,” Hrabowski observed, “and I know he will do a superb job.”

Rous, a professor of physics, gained much of that experience at UMBC, where he has risen through leadership positions in the faculty and then in university administration over more than two decades in Catonsville. He arrived at UMBC as an assistant professor of physics in 1990, and served in a number of faculty leadership positions – including chair of the physics department and president of the university’s faculty senate.

In 2008, Rous was named interim dean of the university’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences. He was named dean of the college in 2010. Last year, after the departure of former UMBC provost Elliot Hirshman, Rous was named interim provost of the university.

In his time as a faculty leader and an administrator, Rous has been a key figure in advancing the university’s drive to become a first-rate public teaching and research university. He helped create the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences’ Active Science Teaching & Learning Environment (CASTLE) which has garnered national attention for its innovative student engagement practices.

Rous received his B.Sc. degree in Physics (First Class Honours) from the University of Bristol, and his Ph.D. from the University of London’s Imperial College of Science and Technology. His tenure as Provost begins officially on July 1.

— Richard Byrne ’86

See “Over Coffee” for an interview with UMBC’s new Provost.

NUMBERS AND KNOWLEDGE

As national leaders in promoting diversity on campus, UMBC’s academic leadership and its faculty know that increasing diversity in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields at the highest levels doesn’t just require determination to make change. It also requires hard data and informed discussion.

That’s why it’s significant that UMBC is one of 21 graduate schools across the nation to participate in a new study organized by the Council of Graduate Schools to study completion and attrition among underrepresented minorities in STEM doctoral programs.

The study is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). It will compare data on completion and attrition among all underrepresented minority students in STEM doctoral programs culled over the past 20 years from a diverse set of institutions. The council is also developing a web-based survey for students.

That’s the data part. The study will also examine STEM doctoral programs at participating universities in depth, assessing their policies, practices and interventions that may have had an impact on completion and attrition among doctoral candidates. Schools in the study will also host visits from council program staff and take part in national discussions on Ph.D. completion.

Why study completion and attrition in such depth? The council and the NSF hope to identify and understand the factors that contribute to Ph.D. completion and help reduce attrition in these key academic programs.

The study – and its answers to those questions – will be released in June 2014.

— Nicole Ruediger and Richard Byrne ’86

AWARD OF A CENTURY

Make way, Warren Buffett. Slide over, Rihanna.

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, joined both of those figures and 97 others on the 2012 TIME 100, Time magazine’s annual list of “the 100 most influential people in the world.” (See Hrabowski’s listing here.)

Hrabowski was the only college president to make this year’s list, and in the magazine’s piece on UMBC and its president, Time observed that: “When you think of the top science universities in the U.S., schools like MIT and Caltech may jump to mind. But perhaps the most envied science program in the country is at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.”

Making the Time list also meant an invitation to a gala celebration at New York City’s Lincoln Center in April. In a toast written for the occasion, Hrabowski celebrated the aspirations of his late mother, Maggie Hrabowski, the way that his family placed “faith and education” at the center of their lives, and his love for his wife of 40 years, Jackie Hrabowski.

Hrabowski also spoke about the philosophy that has helped propel UMBC to national recognition.

“I am fortunate to work on a college campus where people are excited about the life of the mind – in fact, we are passionate about chess and serious theater and biochemistry. We take pride in telling students, ‘You don’t have to be rich to be brilliant.’ At UMBC, we say, ‘The party is in the library.’ I could never have imagined, as I marched in Birmingham in 1963, that one day I would be president of a research university with students from 150 countries.”

— Elyse Ashburn and Richard Byrne ’86

On July 1, Philip Rous will become provost at UMBC after serving for a year as the interim provost. In his 22 years at the university, Rous has filled key leadership positions – including president of UMBC’s faculty senate and dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS). UMBC Magazine spoke with him about his view of the university.

Q. UMBC is known for its exceptional undergraduate education experience. How has the university earned that reputation?

A. The importance attached to undergraduate education has been here ever since the founding of the university. Those who came to teach here at UMBC did not just come to be professors or to do research but to found a new university.

Many of those characteristics present at the university’s founding have remained through the years. If you look at photographs of the campus back in the 1960s and 1970s, what you notice is that when you see students, you also see faculty with them. In the classroom. In the lab. Faculty and students working together.  That was very much a characteristic of the people who came here. They wanted to be closely involved with students.

That tradition and objective of a high-quality undergraduate education in a public setting – and access to it – has remained through the years. And we’ve continued to recruit faculty and staff who are similarly committed to that objective. It is a fundamental value of UMBC.

Another value here at UMBC is that we’ve always been innovative and entrepreneurial – and we always want to do better. So if you look at developments here broadly, in research and education, over the years, it’s really a story of staff and faculty working together and with students to develop new approaches to teaching, learning and scholarship with the fundamental objectives being to support student success and to be at the forefront of the discovery of new knowledge.

What specific changes in undergraduate education have occurred over the past 22 years that you have been at UMBC?

The way I look at it is that we’ve gone from a view of the educational endeavor as teaching to a view of education as learning.

There has been a gradual move away from the standard “sage on a stage” type of teaching to a more student-centered learning approach. Most recently this has been happening a great deal in the sciences, but it’s important to remember that when you look at many courses in the arts, humanities and social sciences, this type of focus on active student engagement was already there.

But the big lecture theatre format – with 300 students in the class – that was typical of a physics class when I arrived here is changing. That doesn’t mean we’ve eliminated all the lectures or that the lecture format cannot be effective. But now we have we have developed other new and interesting ways to support student learning that are now a vital part of how we approach our educational mission.

What I saw when I came here, for instance, was the development of tutorial centers on campus. The development of the Learning Resources Center (LRC) to support students, for instance. And then, as you move to the late 1990s, there was a movement toward making our lecture classes more interactive so that we could get students more engaged. So you had the introduction of “clickers” on campus as a way of being able to interact with students in the lecture theatre classroom. And we actually still use them today.

So what I saw when I looked out across campus was that faculty in all of the colleges were trying to innovate within their current facilities and classrooms to improve student learning. The clickers are a good example. Or the creation of discussion sections, which evolved into students solving problems with the support of the teaching assistants and the faculty.  That was the foundation of everything. The faculty was invested in the success of their students.

And what’s happened more recently is that we’ve been able to take that to the next level.

First, we asked what do we need to take it to the next level. In the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS), we have the Chemistry Discovery Center, which is actually a special environment designed to help faculty facilitate what they are trying to accomplish.

These activities are very much in line with what I was hearing from the faculty:  Can we think about the classroom environment now? How does that support student learning? Can we leverage technology in that area? And what about our writing courses and digital humanities?  The outstanding efforts to redesign introductory psychology and the new state-of-the art writing labs in the new Performing Arts and Humanities Building are just two examples. We’re also talking about design and engineering – including spaces like the CNMS Active Science Teaching and Learning Environment (CASTLE) and the Chemistry Discovery Center.

So we’re taking a more deliberate institutional approach to student success. The environment – such as classrooms – is an important part of that. But the effort that it takes to design state-of-the-art facilities like the new writing labs in the new Performing Arts and Humanities Building, environment is nothing without faculty who are able to do all the hard work to understand the research in the field of teaching and learning, revise their curriculum to reflect how students learn, and then carefully assess what they’re doing.

That’s why we’re starting the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation – a new fund for innovation in teaching and learning at UMBC. There will be a competition across campus to actually propose and try out new ideas – and then to assess them to see if they work.

UMBC has increased its research footprint as well. How does that match up with teaching undergraduates?

Often people look at education and research as two separate activities – and it’s even somewhat reflected that way in UMBC’s mission statement.

But in my view, these are both very highly integrated in the research university like UMBC. Research is, essentially, discovery. It means creating new knowledge. But the creation of knowledge and education are very closely tied together and that is why we want our faculty to be at the frontier of their discipline. People who work at the frontier of their field are the best able to educate our undergraduate and graduate students. And faculty engaged in research or scholarship or creative activity can also work with our students so that they can engage in the process of discovery and understand the intellectual foundation of their own curiosity.

There’s also the fact that research is the discovery of new knowledge. And that’s a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. If you could pick some things that are fundamental to our own humanity, curiosity would certainly be one of them. We are compelled to understand our own humanity and the natural world around us. From my perspective, great universities are a fundamental expression of human curiosity and the preservation and nurturing of that ideal.

Part of the growth of UMBC as a research institution can measured in numbers: The university is flirting with a total of $100 million in external research funding per annum – and is now awarding 100 Ph.D.s each year. Where are we headed next as a research university?

My view of where we are going as a modern research university is rooted in the particular context and history of our university. We were founded, primarily, as an undergraduate institution with a liberal arts base but we rapidly developed a very strong reputation for research and graduate education. As we have evolved, we have sometimes looked at large research institutions…. and wondered if that is what we will become. We have also looked at the model of the small liberal arts university, and thought that maybe that’s where we were going.

The important thing is that everything we have done over the past 40 or 50 years has earned us the right to establish for ourselves where we are headed and what we will become.  And my personal perspective is that we will become the new model of a public university that continues to pursue excellence and innovation in education and scholarship without either taking anything away from the other.

External funding, for instance, is a measure of excellence in many disciplines. But we have to be a careful not to generalize that observation as far as defining the excellence piece of it, because there are many disciplines where large amounts of external funding are not available or not really appropriate. Yet a person working in those fields can be a world-class scholar in exactly the same way that a scientist or engineer who is bringing in millions of dollars. Indeed, in order to pursue world class research in the STEM fields, you generally need to have external funding, because they are technology-based. And that is expensive.

The difference is in the disciplines, not in the excellence. And excellence is our common goal. We continue to attract world-class scholars to UMBC – and we are going to continue on down that path.

What upcoming initiatives or plans at UMBC excite you the most as you assume the office of provost?

We’re moving to the next stage of the university’s strategic plan that will follow on from UMBC’s Strategic Framework for 2016. We’re four years ahead of that date but we’re already carefully thinking and beginning conversations about the university’s next strategic plan.

Over the next year, we’re also going to talk about what we have learned through our previous planning exercises. Much of what we’ve accomplished has far exceeded the vision laid out in the 2016 framework. Other things we have not done – or we have not managed to do them effectively. Why is that?

My role in these discussions is to facilitate. I am trying to help our community identify and reach goals which the community itself sets. Part of my role is also to make sure that we have a vigorous discussion about these goals and these ideas over the next few years. So that we have a clear vision about how we are going to grow – and a common vision of the university. I am looking forward to that process.

Another part of my job is to think a lot about the values of our university, and how we put those values into action. Not that we aren’t doing that already. But every one of us is busy. We are doing things that are urgent, and that are right in our face, and that have to get done.

As provost, what I have to do is to figure out what’s really important. These are things that may not be done tomorrow or next week but are critical to our university, faculty, staff and students. What sorts of larger things must we be doing to support the success of our students? What must we do to support faculty and staff reaching their professional aspirations? And also how do we develop new leaders at UMBC? We need to make sure that there are individuals who are ready to take on key leadership roles.

Your academic discipline was theoretical physics. Are there qualities that you’ve been able to transfer from that background as you’ve risen in academic leadership?

The transition to academic leadership is different for every single person who steps into such a role. When I came to the university as an assistant professor, my interest was in teaching and research. That was what I was passionate about. And I remember thinking in those days that I never ever wanted to become an administrator.

But the experience that eventually changed my mind was my involvement in departmental and university service and then having the opportunity to serve first as the vice president and then president of UMBC’s Faculty Senate. And when you are vice president or president of the Faculty Senate, you get to see a lot about how the university actually works. And though I might have thought initially that this would not be interesting, I found out that it was very interesting.

For me, the most interesting aspect of these positions was discovering that everyone here on campus is here because they want to make a difference – students, faculty and staff. And somehow I felt that my interest transitioned from making a difference through the research and teaching I was doing to being able to make a difference to our university community. And I also understood that it wasn’t because I – as an individual – would make a difference, but because I somehow sensed that I could work with people and bring people together around things that they were passionate about.

My approach to leadership is not standing on a mountaintop, waving a big flag. It’s to facilitate what our community wants to do and put our shared values into action. To bring people together who have ideas and want to do the work to get it from an idea to something that we can achieve. That is very satisfying.

“What I draw from my physics background is what most people draw from their discipline. It’s analysis. And that’s not just a skill that physicists or mathematicians possess since rigorous analytical skills are required by all disciplines. Nevertheless, navigating the current environment  in higher education does require a high degree of analysis ­ a background that gives one the ability to take a look at and ask questions of the data.

That background also lets me ask myself, and other members of the UMBC community, to think about the reasons for what¹s going on and what we see in the data. It¹s also a valuable approach to continuous improvement through assessment. We need to ask if an approach really worked. And, if it did, can we explain it?

In your biography, you mention that during your time as a theoretical physicist, you liked to shift from question to question within the discipline. How does that curiosity play out in your role as an academic leader at UMBC?

The reason I did that, I suppose, was curiosity. The desire to learn new things. The greatest thing about being an academic is that you get to learn for the rest of your life.

I never particularly liked the idea of getting into one narrow field and doing that for the rest of my life, however. I like the idea of taking knowledge and applying it to new situations. And very often science works like this: by taking knowledge and expertise from one field and looking at a question in a different field from that perspective.

The other thing this sort of curiosity does is let you think about working on bigger and more complex problems, rather than simply having one particular expertise. Going out and finding bigger problems that you might be able to approach with your perspective.

For me this is one of the most exciting things about what I do. I’m rather attracted to this kind of work and I hope to use that approach to facilitate and enhance what we do together at UMBC. That is why I feel so honored and privileged to be UMBC’s new Provost.

– Richard Byrne ’86

UMBC Magazine welcomes your letters to the editor on any issue related to the content of the magazine. Readers can email comments to byrne@umbc.edu. Faxed comments are accepted at 410-455-1889. Readers can also send letters to “Letters to the Editor,” UMBC Magazine, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Administration Building, Baltimore, MD 21250.

THE NAKED TRUTH

Our article in the Winter 2012 issue (“Blow Up”) drew a number of terrific responses.

It is amazing that photographs of dancers taken 42 years ago are an issue to be examined again in 2012. It is likely that these photographs still might offend the Maryland Senate as the subject is a man and woman together and nude. Certain concepts of what is permissible in a university publication are slow to change.

It was not an issue at the time but the dancers were a couple, they did not react in a sexual manner, they were dancers expressing emotions, feelings, through movement. I tried to capture those feelings, their relationship with each other. It seems natural that they were unclothed. If anything, I look at these images now and see the intimate bond and the caring that existed between them.

Neither Peter Caruso nor I had any idea at the time that those images would be so explosive, or even be discussed.

On a side note, years later I met the faculty advisor to the magazine who told me that he had been fired because of the photographs and he thought that I was dead. He was not too happy to learn that I was alive and standing in front of him.

— Robert Stark
Susquehanna Studio

Editor Richard Byrne replies: Stark’s photographs from that era will be featured in an exhibition at Keystone College this October – and much of his work can be found online at susquehannastudio.blogspot.com/

I was a student at UMBC in 1968, and graduated from there. I knew the whole cast of characters, including “Glenn” Blanchard, and not “Gary”! He was a brilliant man. His talents included being a playwright, poet, and musician. It would be a tribute to him to publish his play in the UMBC Magazine.

— A. Virginia Wolff ’73, psychology

Editor Richard Byrne replies: Thanks for correcting the error. Readers can find
early UMBC literary magazines online by searching “Dialogue” in the digital
collections of the Albin O. Kuhn Library: contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/index.php

I was at UMBC as a student at the tail end of that Dialogue implosion, but it was great getting the back story on the journal’s slow slide into cancellation. Given the events of the time, it was more than a little surprising to read of Chancellor Albin O. Kuhn’s defense of the journal and what it finally took for him to pull his support. Had we truly realized the extent of his attempts to calm things down, I’m sure it wouldn’t have changed things much, given the spirit of the times, but the article certainly changed my memory of his tenure.

What I really wanted to see at the conclusion of the piece, though, was a “to be continued” that promised a look at the founding of Bartleby – the journal that replaced Dialogue.

At 40 years old, Bartleby is one of the longer running campus literary journals in the country. The demise of Dialogue didn’t bode well for us getting funding for yet another adventure in literature that would likely outrage the administration. That we got the money, saw the project through, and didn’t incur any significant backlash is still pretty amazing to me, but more amazing is the fact that Bartleby remains in existence all these years later.

As we’ve gotten a great history of the turmoil of literary publishing on campus in its earliest days, can the rest of the picture be far behind? Operators are standing by.

— James Taylor ’73
Co-founder, Bartleby

HOMEFRONT HELPERS

During World War II, millions of Americans kept snapshots and letters from loved ones deployed overseas. In the last decade’s wars, military families have had many more options to stay connected: email, cell phones, Skype, and (when the Pentagon says so) Facebook.

Thousands of military families also have acquired Flat Daddies: life-sized, laminated, waist-up photographs of absent fathers (and, less commonly, mothers).

Flat Daddies, which were first marketed in 2003, have come in for a certain amount of ridicule. (Esquire magazine honored them in its “Dubious Achievement” awards in 2007.) But Rebecca A. Adelman, an assistant professor of media and communication studies, believes they deserve serious attention. “These objects are actually functional and practical in their way,” she says “They help ease anxiety that young children won’t recognize their parents when they come home.”

That is not to say that Adelman is uncritical of Flat Daddies: She views them as part of a process in which military families learn to discipline themselves to support the war effort – and perhaps even avoid certain kinds of questions about their situation.

In an essay that will be published next year in the journal Photography and Culture, Adelman analyzes hundreds of testimonials published on the Flat Daddies website. Those testimonials may not represent the experiences of all Flat families – the company presumably wouldn’t publish letters from unhappy buyers – but they are appealingly raw and unvarnished.

“Our baby gets so excited when she sees him she squeals and kisses all over his face,” reads one statement. “It has also helped me deal with the separation as well. He sits at the table for dinner and we go around the table to discuss our day.”

Adelman says that exploring the presence of visual representations in American lives is a key element in her work. “Rather than just looking at visual representations of war,” she explains, “I want to focus on how people use those visual artifacts in their own lives, how they interpret them.”

Adelman earned her doctorate at Ohio State University in 2009 and arrived at UMBC that same year. Her Flat Daddies study is part of a larger project about how Americans have created and interpreted the visual culture of the War on Terror.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Flat Daddies, Adelman says, is that they upend some of our usual expectations about photography. “We usually read photographs as documents of absence and records of the past. But Flats are about presence, and their families use them in anticipation of a happy future.”

The images have other meaning as well. For some families, Adelman believes, the unwieldy, outsized nature of the Flat Daddy serves as a symbol of the burdens that the family is shouldering. She also argues that the Flats serve as a totem through which military families can manage their feelings of fear, anger, and ambivalence.

“Flats expose and then repair the fractures that deployment opens,” she writes, “channeling negative feelings quietly toward the Flat (rather than, for example, toward the state or war that necessitates it), whose stoic and smiling face acknowledges and then defuses them.”

— David Glenn
Image: AP Photo, Bill Lackey

GRRL POWER

American theatre today is abuzz with debate about increasing opportunities for women in the footlights – both as playwrights and as actors.

The statistics – especially for playwrights – are grim. According to a 2009 study by Emily Glassberg Sands, a graduate student at Harvard University who conducted her research as an undergraduate at Princeton University, women playwrights accounted for a mere 12.6 percent of Broadway plays in 2008-09. (A hundred years ago, in Broadway’s 1908-09 season, women wrote 12.8 percent of the plays.)

So the woman playwright in the United States has not come a long way, baby. Yet. But over the past seven years, Susan McCully, a senior lecturer in UMBC’s theatre department, has helped move the discussion forward by creating Grrl Parts – the university’s annual celebration of new plays written to highlight roles for female actors.

Like many innovations in pedagogy at UMBC, Grrl Parts got its start by improving the student experience at the university. McCully and her colleagues were having a difficult time finding plays with enough roles for women to keep all their female students active in productions.

McCully’s solution was to generate new plays featuring such roles – and offer them a home at UMBC. And as Grrl Parts has grown over the past few years, it has attracted a number of award-winning playwrights, including Tina Howe, Naomi Wallace, Ellen McLaughlin and Timberlake Wertenbaker.

“I have been surprised by how much it has resonated with the larger conversation happening about the importance of telling and hearing women’s stories,” McCully observes. “I was used to and prepared for a culture of resistance. I thought it would involve pushing boulders uphill to convince writers to participate, to get university support and to excite the students about the possibilities. But, to paraphrase the great white male dramatist Victor Hugo: One can resist armies, but there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

That Grrl Parts’ time has arrived is clear. The 2012 edition was not only produced on campus, but was selected for a Saturday performance at Center Stage in Baltimore that attracted an even larger audience. McCully also has an anthology of the Grrl Parts plays in the works.

Grrl Parts also demonstrates that the university itself can have a significant effect on a debate that is challenging the entire U.S. theatre community.

“I think this entire movement can be traced to universities,” says McCully. “The major female American playwrights of the last part of the 20th century – Paula Vogel, Marsha Norman, Maria Irene Fornes, and Tina Howe – have been at the forefront of this movement, not only as writers, but as professors and heads of preeminent university playwriting programs. When I stop to think about it, those women have trained many of the playwrights (male and female) produced in professional theatre today. They have trained a generation of smart and talented women writers who are fighting to be heard and expect to be heard. Their male peers studied in these same programs, and I think they too ‘get it.’ So UMBC’s project is part of a culture shift in training future artists. I know our students ‘get it.’”

— Richard Byrne ’86

TRAVELING DRY

Visualize some tiny yellow crumbs on a kitchen countertop. Now, imagine some crumbs of that same size on an asteroid, hurtling through the galaxy. Suddenly, a planet looms in the asteroid’s path.

There’s a crash. The yellow crumbs are scattered. And if they happen to land near water, those crumbs suddenly become something much bigger – life on another planet. Life on Earth, even.

Sound like science fiction? A team led by Kevin Sowers, a professor of marine biology at UMBC, says that there’s more science than fiction to the scenario. Those little yellow crumbs are real: dried-out versions of Methanosarcina barkeri, a methane-producing bacterium. In research funded by NASA, Sowers and his colleagues have found that the bacteria can remain in their dried-out state for at least 25 years and, who knows, possibly more.

“These bacteria have innate ability to survive extended periods of desiccation,” says Sowers. “And when they’re in that desiccated state they can survive in what would normally be lethal conditions.” Sowers and his team propose that this ability is a type of survival mechanism.

To determine the bacterium’s survival time in the air, which is normally toxic to such microorganisms, Sowers and his team removed the water from the bacterial cells, exposing them to conditions that simulated the driest known conditions on Earth. Researchers discovered that the bacterium could survive for 30 days in the air with negligible loss of viability.

Then, says Sowers, “I knew I had some 25-year-old desiccated cells of Methanosarcina thermophila [closely related to M. barkeri] in the lab, so once we developed the method for quantifying survival with freshly dried cells, I included the old material.”

Sure enough many of these cells also came back to life when rehydrated. “That experiment,” says Sowers, “enabled us to look at the long-term survival of cells.” Unfortunately, he adds, “I cannot take credit for planning the experiment 25 years ago.”

Sowers and his team think that the prolonged survival of these cells in a dried-out state, which could occur in environments such as drained rice paddy soils, might allow the bacteria to travel long-distances here on Earth. “Soil can be picked up by the wind,” says Sowers. “We actually have these atmospheric winds that distribute microorganisms from one continent to another.”

And space travel? Sowers says that such desiccated bacteria could possibly be carried on an asteroid to another water bearing planet, such as Mars, where they might survive. Researchers think there is water below the surface of Mars, and in theory, these bacteria would be able to survive the dry periods.

The next step in Sower’s research is to examine which genes are important for the cells to survive being dried out. Sowers and his team already know that these bacteria undergo cellular changes that prepare them for the transition from a hydrated to desiccated state. “We want to find out what the actual mechanisms are that allow these organisms to adapt and survive in that state,” says Sowers.

— Nicole Ruediger
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A LOT TO LEARN

Ask Richard Blissett ’11, bioinformatics, about the vacant lots that blight Baltimore and other cities, and he argues that enlisting an army of “superhero” volunteers to swoop in, clean up, and swoop out is not a sustainable way to revitalize them. The real long-term solution, he says, is for local youth to explore these sites as assets and transform them to meet community needs.

During a one-year AmeriCorps VISTA position with stepUP! Baltimore, supported by UMBC’s Shriver Center, Blissett created a service-learning curriculum at South Baltimore’s Ben Franklin High School to put this message into action.

First, Blissett taught his students about factors leading to vacancy and disinvestment in Baltimore and the health and environmental issues that affect neglected properties. He then asked them to imagine how they could turn vacant lots near the school into vibrant community spaces.

Blissett’s path to the classroom was far from typical. On his way to earning a bioinformatics degree at UMBC, Blissett says, “I came to the slow realization that every job I’ve had and enjoyed—where I’ve taken the initiative to do things myself and felt like part of who I was as a person was going into it—was within education.”

With the help of the Shriver Center, he began working in local schools. Before long, he created his own service-learning initiative: Major Inspiration. The program teaches K-12 students about the diversity of university majors and career paths.

Teaching also led Blissett to see bioinformatics as a tool to formulate best practices in education policy. “It’s about how to use data efficiently, effectively, and purposefully,” he says. His blending of quantitative training and classroom experience helped him earn a spot in Vanderbilt’s International Education Policy and Management doctoral program for the fall.

But before he gets to Tennessee, Blissett is finishing what he started on Baltimore’s vacant lots. As with any new program, there have been challenges. Translating student interest into engagement was harder than he imagined. And a change in the high school’s overall schedule reduced the number of students in the program and shrank the window for accomplishing their work.

Unsure if they’d be able to finish by the end of his AmeriCorps term, Blissett encouraged students to partner with community groups that could propel the project forward – including Civic Works, United Way of Central Maryland and the Parks & People Foundation.

Blissett also brought students to speak at the Greater Baltimore Children and Nature Conference, and he calls their presentation one of his “proudest moments” in the program.

He says the audience feedback – serious questions and recommendations – was particularly valuable. “It means something when it’s coming from me,” he shares, “but in the end they see me as their teacher. When they are hearing it coming from other people, it really sinks in.”

The seeds Blissett has planted are blossoming now. His students have begun engaging their neighbors in the project. They are even talking about adopting additional vacant lots.

“I think consistently keeping them connected to people from the outside reinforces that this is not just a small school project that they are going to do now and then forget about later,” Blissett says. “It’s something people are going to remember.”

— Dinah Winnick