Please join us on Thursday May 3rd at 12:00 in the Library Gallery for a closing reception for our comics exhibit, "All Lurid, Unsavory, Gruesome Illustrations Shall Be Eliminated." Professor Arnold Blumberg (English) and exhibit Co-Curator, Steve Ammidown, will each give a talk about the exhibit as well as the history of comic book censorship.  Refreshments will be served. This is a great opportunity to see the exhibit before it closes on May 16th!

Fred L. Pincus, Professor of Sociology, will retire at the end of the semester after spending 44 years at UMBC. He came to Baltimore from UCLA as a 26-year-old instructor in 1968, the third year of UMBC’s existence. In addition to all the committee work needed to build the department and the university, Pincus taught courses in race relations, social psychology and introductory sociology. He also became very involved in the movement against the war in Vietnam and promoted campus policies to increase the number of African American students on campus. He was an early supporter of Black Studies and Women’s Studies.

In 1972, Pincus visited the People’s Republic of China. He was excited to see a non-capitalist country and for the next dozen years he learned all he could about China. He developed a course called “Social Organization in the People’s Republic of China,” wrote several articles about Chinese education and served on the editorial committee of New China, a magazine published by the US-China Friendship Association. He also became the China writer and later the education writer for The Guardian, an independent radical newsweekly published in New York.

In the late 1990s, Pincus joined the steering committee of UMBC’s (then) new Language, Literacy and Culture (LLC) doctoral program. He became interested in diversity in the United States in terms of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. He took over the graduate seminar “Constructing Race, Gender and Class” and developed the undergraduate course “Diversity and Pluralism: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.”

Over the years, Pincus published four books and monographs and several dozen scholarly articles on a wide range of topics including the role of community colleges in higher education, race relations, affirmative action, conservative education policy and diversity. Over the course of his career, he has taught between 6,000 and 7,000 undergraduates and several hundred graduate students in applied sociology, LLC, public policy and intercultural communication.

For the past several years, he has also been working on a memoir and has taken creative writing classes through the Gotham Writers Workshop based in New York City.

UMBC thanks Fred L. Pincus for his tremendous service to our community and to the field of higher education over the past 44 years.

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Have a memory of classes with Dr. Pincus? Share them in the comments below!

This originally appeared in UMBC Insights.

The Occupy Student Debt Campaign, an offshoot of the Occupy movement focusing on student debt and urging students to pledge not to repay their loans if other borrowers join them, planned several events Wednesday to commemorate the total amount of student debt passing $1 trillion reports Inside Higher Ed.

My colleague Ashwini and I happened to be in New York during one of the planned demonstrations at Union Square (all photos from that event). New York serves as the headquarters and regional offices of the student lender Sallie Mae. Unless the U.S. Congress intervenes, interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans are set to double from 3.4% to 6.8% on July 1. Additional rallies occurred at colleges across the country, including the University of Chicago, Brooklyn College, Cooper Union, Hampshire College, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Student also continue to rally in Quebec, Canada (going for 11 weeks strong) to protest a proposed 75% tuition increase at public colleges there.

Democracy Now! provided coverage of the US events along with an interview with Pamela Brown, a Ph.D. student who helped launch the Occupy Student Debt Campaign "Pledge of Refusal." See the interview below.

Finally, President Obama weighed in on the issue on a visit to UNC-Chapel Hill and recorded a comedic take on the issue with Jimmy Fallon.

Related Resources:

• The AASHE Bulletin has an "Affordability & Access" section. Check out past stories in the Bulletin database, and subscribe to the Bulletin to keep informed about such matters and campus sustainability in general.

• AASHE's Higher Education Occupy Project - AASHE put together a photo essay based on submissions from various individuals from all over North America to better understand the connection between higher education and the Occupy movement.

The Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department wishes to extend its congratulations to Dr. Tim Oates for his promotion from associate professor to full professor.

In 2001, after receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Dr. Oates began teaching at UMBC. His course repertoire includes Introduction to Machine Learning, Discrete Structures, Data Structures, and the ever-popular Robotics.

As the director of UMBC’s Cognition, Robotics, and Learning (CoRal) Lab, his research centers on machine learning. The vision of the lab is to “understand how artificial systems can acquire grounded knowledge from sensori-motor interaction with their environment that enables cognitive activities like natural language communication and planning,” says the lab’s website. More about his research interests can be found in his research profile.  

In addition to his academic work, Dr. Oates contributed to the department last year as chair of the ABET Assessment committee. He is also the advisor for UMBC’s student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.

Violence and sports never seem too far apart. After all, football often seems like formalized warfare and hockey like boxing on skates.

Still there are certain acts of excess physicality that still alarm the professional sports world. One took place in the NBA recently.

NBA player, Metta World Peace, formerly known as Ron Artest, is serving a seven game suspension for striking a vicious blow to the head of competitor, James Harden.

Beside the concern over Harden’s condition (he received a concussion from the blow) there is this other concern… Professional athletes perform in front of large audiences, often on national television, and consequentially become role models for many of the world’s younger spectators.

It is not uncommon for many pros to act rambunctiously off the court, but sports fans expect that athletes at least handle their jobs graciously and with sportsmanship while they are performing.  So it’s hard to understand why so many players lose control of their temper even when they have the spotlight shining on them.

Athletes such as Zinedine Zidane, Andrew Bynum, and Mike Tyson have all had moments where their composure crumpled, forever tinting their careers with disgraceful acts of brutality.

Surely these professionals knew they were being held to higher standards, so what caused them to lash out in the midst of competing.   They knew they would be caught and scrutinized, but they still acted like wild children on a playground.  Did stress cause them to break?  Or irritation?  Perhaps a foul demeanor inherited during childhood?

This was not Metta World Peace’s first time running rampant during a professional game.   Back in 2004 when he was known as Ron Artest, Metta acted like a raging bull in one of the most shocking catastrophes in sports history.

He then went through a transformation, which included the name change, and emerged as one of the NBA’s best role models.  In the 2011-12 season he donated a large sum of his salary to mental health awareness charities, as well as auctioning off his 2010 championship ring, in order to raise proceeds for charities nationwide.

The recent ugly incident has led many to question whether Ron Artest still lurks somewhere in the depths of the reformed Metta.  It’s disheartening to watch a seemingly rehabilitated player, relapse into his former violent tactics.

Why do professional athletes lose their temper during games?  How do they affect younger audiences would they behave maliciously?  Should they be forgiven for their actions?

A highly attractive shot of Cusack and Kimmel after their celebratory shot of Purell. (Image from www.gossipcop.com)

If you’re looking for a new self-purifying ritual, we here at USDemocrazy can help you narrow your search.

We highly recommend not following the example that a few teens in California are setting.  Since 2010, there have been 60 reports of California teens getting what must be an incredibly desperate need for alcohol by drinking hand sanitizer.

Just in the past few months, six teens in the Golden State were hospitalized for imbibing this highly alcoholic sanitizing liquid.

Actor John Cusack and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel decided to give this latest teen fad a shot on Kimmel’s show. A doctor in the audience warned them that it  probably wasn’t such a good idea, and we feel obligated to reiterate to our readers that the doctor was probably correct in his assertion that taking hand sanitizer shots (that’s 120 proof, people) is, in fact, a pretty bad pregame plan. Seriously though, it’s a really bad idea.

After their daring experience, Kimmel and Cusack appeared to be fine, but both agreed that the sanitizer tasted quite “terrible,” and Kimmel reported the following:

“ I feel cleaner inside. And I also feel like I’m going to die.”

But if those California teens experienced any initial symptoms like these from the first shot, it apparently did not deter them from chugging a few more–at least not until their Purell consumption sent them to the hospital.

Maybe there’s a somewhat logical reason for this. Perhaps they were trying to do an inner body cleanse–maybe they were concerned that they’d contracted a disease from some crazy cow in their home state.

Eh, there’s no use trying to justify it. We can all agree that those teens really were just absurdly desperate to get clean drunk.