On a windy April day, President Valerie Sheares Ashby arrived at UMBC at the Universities at Shady Grove (USG) for her regular student office hours on the Rockville, Maryland, campus. Established in 2000, USG unites nine public universities in one convenient location, creating Retriever degree pathways for folks who might not otherwise be able to make it around the beltway for classes in Catonsville. James “Jimmy” Seavey, Jr. sits across from the president today. Seavey is a second-generation firefighter in the D.C. area in his first semester at UMBC-Shady Grove studying political science. Seavey, who comes from a long line of public servants, discusses the growing importance of public service and education with President Sheares Ashby.  

James Seavey: So, like I said, my name’s Jimmy.

President Valerie Sheares Ashby: By the way, Jimmy. My dad was James. My brother is James. My nephew is James. My son is James. And Jimmy is what my oldest brother goes by. So, the name means something to me.

Seavey: That hits right at home because I’m a junior, my father and I were named after my great uncle. James goes back seven generations in my family.

Sheares Ashby: I love it, and I will take it one step further. My mother’s maiden name was James. So she was Shirley James and my dad was James Sheares. So it just goes on and on. Tell me about yourself.

Seavey: I’m an adult full-time student, and I work as a lieutenant for a fire department in the D.C. Metropolitan area. Outside of that, I have volunteered locally for over twenty years. I have found sincere passion in advocacy work, primarily on occupational cancer death benefits and basically expanding rightful benefits for public safety officials overall. 

I came to UMBC from Montgomery College. I’m on a little more of a slow roll than a conventional student because of my full-time job. In public safety and sometimes in academia too, I feel the weight of assumptions about who we are and why we do things. Do you feel that as president?

Sheares Ashby: I really consider this role to be two things—which may seem like opposites but are not really. One: It is a privilege, because for me, leadership is service. What you do, that service—it is a privilege to serve a community. The second thing, I keep telling people, “I just have a job, like you do.” Those things are both true. It is a privilege to lead, and it’s just a job.

Seavey: I can certainly understand the weight of that privilege. Outside of my profession, there’s not many times that people will open their door and blindly tell you, “Please come in and help me.” When an Amazon package comes to your house, they leave it outside. When you order delivery, it gets left outside. But if there’s a problem in your home—electrical fire or medical issue with a family member or yourself—immediately you’re encouraging someone like me to come inside. There’s a large amount of responsibility not readily visible.

Sheares Ashby: They are trusting you. They are trusting that you are going to be what the role says. You’re going to be respectful, caring, a person of integrity, somebody with some professional expertise.

Seavey: My father always felt like he had something to prove, because he went into public safety rather than alternatively higher paying careers. But as a junior to his senior going into work in the same vocation, I definitely knew that I needed to work harder and make sure that my name separates in a good way. But losing my dad, unfortunately, six years ago was a key change in my life to say, “You know what? The money in my current career provides for me, but it isn’t everything which I find currency in.” And that’s when I started looking into what else brings joy to my life and found advocacy, which led me back to education.

Can I ask, what does public service mean to you as the university president?

Sheares Ashby: It literally means that we serve the people. It means when I wake up every day, I have to be asking: How are we serving the people of Maryland? And here is the key, not the people who are my students, but the whole state of Maryland. Because the people of Maryland actually pay for the university—we get state dollars. We are serving the people of our state and the nation, whether they ever come to UMBC or not. The research we do should make the lives of people in the state better. The students we send out into your communities, who are going to be the lieutenant of the fire department, those students should go in there and be extraordinary for that community. I literally work for everybody in Maryland. And by the way, everybody in Maryland thinks I work for them too. And that feels good to me, because you actually feel like it is the people’s university. 

I particularly love that UMBC has a home here in Shady Grove. We are in a place where students do not have to pay room and board, because we are embedded in the community. That is cutting the cost of education in half already. Think about people who have full lives, full families, full jobs—it is hard to make education happen on top of that. And then I think about the composition of the student body here—it is a reflection of the composition of this community and the surrounding counties. 

The other piece is that because of proximity to D.C., a lot of students are attracted to this location. So many Marylanders have lost their jobs in the federal government—these changes have definitely had the greatest impact on the state of Maryland. One of the things I am proud of that UMBC is doing is we have launched something called Paws and Pivot through the Division of Professional Studies and our Career Center, providing resources for all these folks, particularly our alums, who are needing to actually pause and pivot. Some of these people have not interviewed in decades, so we are thinking about resume assistance, job opportunities, and certificate programs. I am really proud that we were able to be responsive to that. There is so much that a university does beyond just the four-year degree. 

Seavey: Arguably, I would not be a student at all, much less potentially re-endeavoring to complete another degree if I had to pick a university with a traditional location outside of my community. I really wanted to continue studying political science. But I kept asking myself, “Well, am I going to be able to do that at rush hour? Am I going to be able to do that on my days off? What sacrifice will my family need to endure? Is the faculty going to be understanding of an adult student?” So having the flexible schedule we have here, and plainly, the school being exactly where it is, afforded me that opportunity.

As a Marylander, and as a public servant myself, it was about it being realistic and available. So the availability here made it realistic. Imagine the people that have the fire inside them right now that want to do it. Then they say, “But I can’t get there.”

Sheares Ashby: That is the work that we have to continue to do—to take away the financial barriers, the geographic barriers, whatever it may be—to take that barrier down.

“You’re listening to WMBC, UMBC’s freeform student radio station. And you’re in the 2000s right now, thanks to the radio time machine.” 

Four years ago, hearing those words would have been impossible. UMBC’s radio station, WMBC—now a bustling hive of musical joy, live concerts, and record painting parties—had been silent after a lack of student staffing and resource issues, leading the student group to hang up their headphones. 

But recently, music is on the airwaves again as students and staff work around the clock to breathe new life into the station. After combining operations with The Retriever, UMBC’s long-running student newspaper, and Bartleby, UMBC’s Creative Arts Journal since 1972, WMBC found a new home in the University Center, and a fresh start as part of the newly chartered Student Media Center.

Legacy media outlets

Retrievers have been media-conscious from the university’s inception. Within the first month of classes at UMBC, a newsroom was established, and the first issue of the student newspaper was published on September 19, 1966. Ever since then, the tradition of reporting student and campus life continued to expand and evolve. 

By 1979, the student-run radio station, WMBC, was founded. Originally called the WUMD Radio Club, the station began broadcasting over carrier current circuits, enabling students to tune in from their dorms and at a couple of dining areas on campus.

In recent years, these media outlets, which depend on the ever-changing student body, took a hit. But students weren’t willing to give up their media platforms so easily. 

In 2022, WMBC had been inactive for roughly four years. Before COVID even, the student group was having trouble staffing the station, but the org really lost its footing—and its physical space—during the pandemic. Sean Stultz ’24, computer science, WMBC’s station manager his senior year and their chief engineer prior to that, was storing the station’s equipment in his Hillside apartment in Breton, until the station found a permanent place for it.

Around the same time, The Retriever, the student-run newspaper, ran into similar complications. They were working without a dedicated advisor, and the weight of managing everything from organizing meetings to pitching and writing stories, publishing and distributing both in print and online, marketing/running social media accounts, and much more became too much for students to handle alone. 

That changed at the end of 2023, when Ann Tropea, the assistant director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Life, was hired as the newspaper’s media advisor. The Retriever members say she has helped immensely with finding advertisers, organizing documents, and advocating for them as a student organization. 

“I began working with students from The Retriever and WMBC to create a shared structure that went beyond the two groups simply sharing space in our suite of offices in the UC,” says Tropea, who has a background in law and communications. 

The student-run creative arts journal Bartleby joined the other media groups in 2024, and after a year of planning, SGA recently approved a new charter organization—the Student Media Center. The group’s stated mission is to “create a more engaged, informed, and civically empowered student body, and assert First Amendment freedoms at UMBC through the active production of student-run media.” 

The Student Events Board (seb) is the only other charter organization at UMBC, so this is historic, says Tropea. And the new structure ensures the longevity and continuous operations of not just WMBC, but The Retriever and Bartleby as well, Tropea adds, who during this planning period was directing her efforts into assisting with WMBC’s revitalization. 

Creating a shared mission

Michelle Ibino, a biological sciences junior, who is the events manager for WMBC, says, “Sharing a space and a mission has been positive as it allows for students to cross over into each club. Members of the station have found and gone on to write/work for The Retriever and vice-versa.”

The Retriever has been able to seamlessly work with WMBC to produce stories that provide coverage about the station’s events, and it’s also common to see members of The Retriever enjoying WMBC’s events, which turns the newsroom into a Tiny Desk Concert vibe. “The WMBC/Retriever space is small, but turns out to be a really cool music venue if you just rearrange a few chairs and tables!” says Tim Rogers, The Retriever’s music columnist. 

“We might be known as a commuter school, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a rich student culture just like any other university. The efforts of The Retriever and WMBC bring life to campus,” says Rogers, a sophomore.

When it comes to on-campus events, WMBC hosts concerts, album listening parties, zine creations, record painting, and other activities. WMBC puts together bills that showcase student artists, as well as local bands from the surrounding Baltimore area.

While the newsroom can accommodate only a few dozen people, WMBC is able to organize large-scale events in different places around campus. “WMBC has put together a bunch of really cool music events, some in collaboration with Retriever Music Society (RMS) and others run entirely by the club,” says Rogers. The station’s previous spring music festival was a collaboration with RMS, taking place in the UC Ballroom.

When planning events, Ibino knows how crucial it is that the students have both on-campus and off-campus options. “The off-campus concerts we run are especially important because they allow UMBC students to connect with the large local Baltimore/DMV music scene. As a school in the Baltimore area, I think it is especially important for us to encourage students to explore, interact, and support the Baltimore community, and these concerts are a great way for students to start building connections to do that. Further, our events help like-minded students find each other,” she says.

In addition to events, the integration of the groups has positively impacted campus-wide projects. This has helped both groups to become better advocates for the student community. “Advocating for different groups is an important job that both organizations share as part of the Student Media Center,” says Ibino. “Collaboration is what helps us better represent the diverse voices and interests of the UMBC community.”

Musical connections

Although he’s graduated—and no longer housing the station’s equipment—Stultz has stayed connected with WMBC and appreciates watching it thrive. “The overall campus is thankful for a lot of the stuff that we do,” says Stultz. “We’re equally thankful back to the people on campus who support us and everything because we wouldn’t be able to do any of this without them.”

In addition to being the events manager for WMBC, Ibino is one of the many DJs who broadcast a show through the station. Currently, there are about 40 different shows, and the station is on air weekly from Monday through Friday. With her show “Reverie,” Ibino connects with other students and educates anyone interested in the goth subculture.

Left: NYC-based band Lyoko at The Ottobar in Baltimore at a WMBC-off campus event. Right: Audience members watch Omanti perform at WMBC’s Great Pumpkin concert in the Student Media Center. Photos by Erin Bennett ’25.

This platform has been valuable to her and has made her feel more grounded within the community. “One of the core principles of the goth community is to be involved and contribute to the subculture,” says Ibino. “Getting to do that through my show has made me feel more connected within the scene. Creating a space where people feel welcome to explore and embrace goth culture has helped me grow more confident in my identity and strengthened my connection to the broader alternative community.”

Another DJ, Daniela Salguero, a junior psychology major, has also used her show as a way to explore her cultural identity. Her show, “Luna Roja Radio,” focuses on alternative Latin American music, and she provides commentary as to what certain songs represent in a wider political context. She explains, “Every week, I pick a theme to hone in on, and I think it’s a really great way for me to just get my feelings out there and to connect more with myself.”

The media organizations have enriched campus life by helping students to get more involved with the Baltimore community. They have also served as an inclusive space for everyone.

The door to the Student Media Center is almost always open. With the station broadcast aired on the office speakers, students are there, working and socializing under the band posters and stories that dot the walls—they’re making and sharing media but they’re also continuing a legacy for the next generation of Retriever writers, editors, and DJs. 

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