History professor George Derek Musgrove spoke The Greene County Democrat for aSeptember 26th story entitled “Newswire: Cong. Maxine Waters cleared of House ethics charges.” The story concerned Congresswoman Maxine L. Waters (D-Calif.) and her recent acquittal on violating ethics codes in the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Waters ws investigated by the House Ethics Committee for advocating for inclusion of minority-owned banks in the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) while her husband Sidney Williams was still invested in one such bank, OneUnited Bank.

Musgrove, a ’97 alumnus of UMBC, recently published the book Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics: How the Harassment of Black Elected Officials Shaped Post-Civil Rights America, which examines the history of governmental investigations of black elected officials in the United States after the 1960’s and those politicians’ allegations of state and media bias against them.

The professor said that the case could have ramifications in terms of future ethics probes being muddied by partisan applications. “Based on our current political climate, it is all but certain that conflicts like this, both real and imagined, will come up in the future that both political parties will try to use them against the opposition and that voters will find themselves in a difficult position yet again, trying to figure out whether their member really does deserve sanction or if they’re just doing the same thing that everybody else is doing,” he said.

Kathy O’Dell, the associate dean of the college of arts, humanities and social sciences, has been appointed to the Maryland State Arts Council.

The Council is an appointed body of 17 citizens. Thirteen are named by the Governor to three-year terms, which are renewable once. Two private citizens and two legislators are appointed by the President of the Senate and Speaker of the House.

“The newly appointed councilors represent broad arts expertise across a diversity of Maryland communities and professional backgrounds,” said Theresa Colvin, executive director of the MSAC. “Under the leadership of our new chair, Barbara Bershon, they will be a great asset to the arts in Maryland.”

O’Dell chairs the Arts Education in Maryland Schools Alliance’s Higher Education in the Arts Task Force, and is a member of The Maryland State Department of Education’s Fine Arts Education Advisory Panel. O’Dell is on the Exhibits Committee of Howard County Center for the Arts and has served on the boards of Maryland Art Place, Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and the Contemporary Museum.

The Maryland State Arts Council, an agency of the Maryland Department of Business & Economic Development, Division of Tourism, Film and the Arts, is dedicated to cultivating a vibrant cultural community where the arts thrive. The mission of the council is to encourage and invest in the advancement of the arts for the people of Maryland.

Kevin A. Wisniewski, first year Ph.D. candidate in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program, was named a 2012-2013 HASTAC Scholar.  Dr. Craig Saper, Director of the LLC program, was selected to serve as Wisniewski’s HASTAC Mentor. 

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, pronounced “haystack”) is a virtual organization of over 7000 individuals and institutions inspired by the possibilities that new technologies offer for shaping how society learns, teaches, communicates, creates, and organizes at the local and global levels. It was founded by Cathy N. Davidson, former Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and co-founder of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, and David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California’s state-wide Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI),

The HASTAC Scholars program is an annual fellowship program that recognizes graduate students who are engaged in innovative work across disciplines.  Among their duties, HASTAC Scholars blog, host forums, organize events and discuss new ideas, projects, experiments, and technologies that re-conceive teaching, learning, research, writing and structuring knowledge. They also function as links between their home institutions and the virtual community they foster on the HASTAC site.

Wisniewski’s research investigates the future of the book and changing face of publishing in the digital world.  He will be founding a new group and forum at HASTAC dedicated to digital publishing; his blog can be found here.

Ellen Handler Spitz recently reviewed the Museum of Modern Art exhibit “The Century of the Child:: Growing by Design 1900-2000” for the online magazine artcritical.

Spitz says that the exhibit “bypasses emotion.”  “Much of the intense passion, however—the felt crises, anxieties, puzzlements, riotous humor, and delirious joys— that characterize living children both mentally and behaviorally has gone missing,” she writes.

Spitz says that through the exhibit, you come to see how children are used to advance adult ideas, and that today’s “child is as much a projection of adult fantasy and social ideology as the pale coy innocents of the pre-Raphaelites or the bedizened seventeenth century infantas of Velázquez.”

She concludes that there is “no such thing as the child but rather millions of uniquely responsive children, and adults, for whom childhood, despite varying degrees of distance, can still be occasionally invoked.”

Spitz’s piece, “MoMA and Child: The Century of the Child at the Museum of Modern Art,” appeared on the website on September 24.

Kimberly Moffitt, assistant professor of American Studies, responded to the new film “Won’t Back Down” in a September 28 Baltimore Sun op-ed entitled “Education blame game leaves kids behind.”

The film, inspired by true events, tells the story of America’s public school system through the story of two women from disparate socioeconomic backgrounds who find common ground when both are faced with the task of finding better public school alternatives for their  children with learning differences.

Moffitt relates the tone of the movie, with it’s heroes and villans, to the discussion around Baltimore’s public schools. “Where we go wrong is in focusing on fault and blame when it comes to the failing schools (charters and traditional) in our district. If we allow ourselves to  remain in the contentious ‘us versus them’ state depicted in ‘Won’t Back Down,’  it will be a missed opportunity for our fair city. We must avoid unproductive debates and instead focus on the models that foster success.”

Moffitt ends her piece with a call to “rally the troops, not to take over schools but to contribute our time, resources  and ideas to offer the world-class education all of our children deserve.”

Lee Boot, associate director of the Imaging Research Center, is featured in Convergence, a new book from theNational Academy of Sciences that highlights the academy’s exceptional and growing art collection.

Boots contribution includes a commission he created for the collection last year is included in the book and an essay by him pointing to new directions in the collaboration between artists and scientists. Boot’s essay is one of only fourteen in the book.  The book alsi includes essays from art and science thought-leaders as E. O. Wilson, Roald Hoffmann, Anne Collins Goodyear, Andrew Solomon, and Lucy Lippard, and artwork from well-known artists such as Tim Rollins and the Start Twins.

The entire book is available online free of charge; Boot’s contribution can be seen here.

Washington City Paper has been covering a story about D.C.’s Certified Business Enterprise (CBE) contracting system and today responded to Mayor Gray’s statement that he’ll soon announce “a number of reform efforts” to the CBE. Gray has not provided details about those reforms, though they might involve additional staffing at the Department of Small and Local Business Development, which currently has no employees dedicated to investigating fraud in the CBE program, despite perceptions of fraud.

Where should they look for expertise on how to fix the program? UMBC political science professor George R. LaNoue told the paper, “I don’t know of anybody who has looked at the D.C. program.” Expressing concern over the dearth of data he continued, “These are very complicated issues, and for the most part people haven’t studied them.”

In the October, 2012 issue of the Chesapeake Bay Journal Karl Blankenship writes:

“Farmers in the Potomac headwaters will get help restoring stream buffers that improve coldwater fish habitat. Landowners in Pennsylvania’s Franklin County will be encouraged to convert turf to forest. And on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, workers will remove a dam and restore floodplains to open 13 miles of high-quality habitat for imperiled river herring and American eel populations.”

Blankenship goes on:

“Some projects go beyond restoration and seek ways to accelerate the implementation of runoff controls. For instance, a $324,000 project by the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education [CUERE] at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, will install pervious pavement at the Maryland Science Center as a demonstration project as well as explore institutional barriers to such innovative stormwater practices and how they can be overcome.”

The principle investigator on the CUERE grant is Stuart Schwartz. 

Alumnus Gregory Cantori ’84, geography (cartography), was named the new president for Maryland Nonprofits beginning October 1st, according to an article in Maryland Reporter published September 25th.

Cantori will head an organization that includes roughly1,400 nonprofit organizations and 300 associate members in the state, of which many are used by statewide and local government agencies to provide social, health, housing and educational services. The new president has significant experience with such efforts, having worked in various capacities at the Downtown Sailing Center, the Marion I. & Henry J. Knott Foundation, and the Light Street Housing Corporation among others over the years.

Speaking with reporter Len Lazarick, Cantori said that he’s, “always looking at innovative ways to raise money,” adding that “I feel like like I’m going to be a funder without the funding.” Nevertheless, he also feels that this is a particularly good time for nonprofits and their futures in Maryland right now.

UMBC political science professor Roy T. Meyers commented in today’s Baltimore Sun story, “Leopold attorney bills taxpayers almost $21K for two weeks.” Anne Arundel County has so far been billed $20,743 by a private lawyer to defend County Executive John Leopold in a discrimination lawsuit, raising questions about who should pay the growing tab.

Responding to the case, Meyers asked, “What level of defense is a county executive entitled to?” questioning whether the county would act similarly on behalf of other employees. He noted, “The question to ask is whether a mid-level supervisor, say in the public works department, accused of the same pattern of behavior would have received the same level of defense.”

Meyers also appeared on ABC7 this week, criticizing ads that promote and decry Maryland’s upcoming gambling referendum by misusing data on the impact of casinos. Meyers said, “They are used to show a larger effect to the public—either positive or negative—than what an objective economist or jobs expert would calculate.”