First-Year and New Transfer Students can make $10.00 for taking a 45 minute online test in the Library as part of an assessment of information literacy skills.  Registration and more information about Project SAILS can be found here:  http://aok2.lib.umbc.edu/sails/.

We hope you will join us and thanks for your help.

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

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

— Richard Byrne ’86, English
Editor, UMBC Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you get through UMBC?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Richard Byrne ’86

Splash! UMBC is a one-day Saturday program for high school students to explore college life and the UMBC campus. The day will be filled with "courses" taught by UMBC students about any subject imaginable (e.g. hobbies, interests, sports, study skills, academic topics, etc.). The Sailing Club may teach a class on how to sail a boat, or the Woman's Rugby Team may teach a class on how to play rugby...it's all about the experience of being on campus in the classroom environment and having fun!

The event will take place on Saturday, April 9 from 8am - 4pm.

CRIMSON ACCOLADE

On a bright and sunny late May morning in Cambridge, MA, UMBC’s president Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, received one of the most prestigious awards offered in American higher education: an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Harvard University.

Hrabowski was one of a group of 10 recipients that included Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Cech, retired U.S. Supreme Court justice David Souter and Oscar award-winning actress Meryl Streep.

In her remarks on the occasion, Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust called Hrabowski “a galvanic force in his university’s ascent, spurring success against the odds. A leader whose wellspring of energy and insight has plenished pools of talent in science and beyond.”

Reflecting on the award a few weeks after the ceremony, UMBC’s president says that “I consider that award as an award for the institution. It comes as a result of the respect our colleagues there have for the academic enterprise here.”

Hrabowski adds that the festivities – and the chance to talk with academic leaders at Harvard – revealed to him the depth and breadth of that respect.

“The point made to me over and over again was that the UMBC product is superb,” says UMBC’s president. “And that the students who have graduated from here and gone to Harvard – across a range of disciplines – have done extraordinary work and come from a wide range of racial and ethnic and economic backgrounds. So we have become a symbol of inclusive excellence in American higher education.”

— Richard Byrne ’86
Image: Staff Photographer Justin Ide/Harvard University

ALUMNI ACHIEVERS

Last year, the UMBC Alumni of the Year awards moved back to campus and were scheduled to coincide with the university’s Homecoming celebrations. It was such a smashing success that it’s happening again on Thursday, October 14, 2010, with a new crop of alumni award winners picked by UMBC’s Alumni Association Board of Directors. This year’s recipients are:

• Michael George ’87, information systems – a vice president at Amazon.com – is the Engineering and Information Technology Alumnus of the Year.
• Vikki Valentine ’96, English – a science editor at National Public Radio – is the Humanities Alumna of the Year.
• Michael Nishimura ’80, M.S. ’84 and Ph.D. ’89 – Vice Chair of Research, Department of Surgery at the Medical University of South Carolina – is Natural and Mathematical Science Alumnus of the Year.
• Chad Cradock ’97, psychology – director of aquatics at UMBC and leader of the university’s highly successful swimming teams — is Social and Behavioral Sciences Alumnus of the Year.
• Dean Alexander ’88, visual arts – award-winning photographer – is the Visual and Performing Arts Alumnus of the Year.
• Gene Trainor ’86, health science and policy and economics – chair of the alumni committee for UMBC’s Exceptional by Example campaign – will receive the Distinguished Service to the University and the Alumni Association Award.
• Aaron Merki ’05, political science – an associate at Venable LLP – will receive the Young Alumni Rising Star Award.

— Richard Byrne ’86

U.S. News: UMBC IS STILL NUMBER ONE

Getting to the top is hard. But ask any competitor, and they’ll tell you that staying there is much harder.

That’s why UMBC’s repeat appearance at the top of the list of “Up-and-Coming National Universities” in the U.S. News and World Report America’s Best Colleges Guide this year is an acknowledgment that UMBC has raised itself to prominence in discussions about best practices in higher education.

How do we know that? Well, the “Up-and-Coming” list is what’s known as a “reputational survey.” U.S. News canvasses a wide range of academic leaders (college and university presidents, provosts and admissions deans) and asks them which 10 institutions “are worth watching because they are making promising and innovative changes.”

In short: the more those leaders are talking about you, the higher your ranking. UMBC’s place at the summit of the list for a second straight year means that the university has people talking – and in a good way.

UMBC’s commitment to undergraduate education was also highlighted once again by the university’s placement on the annual guide’s list of the top 16 national universities “where the faculty has an unusual commitment to undergraduate teaching.” Other universities on that list include Dartmouth, Princeton, Brown, the University of California-Berkeley, Stanford, and Yale.

In a joint letter to the campus community, UMBC’s president Freeman A. Hrabowski, III and provost Elliot Hirshman wrote that “needless to say, we are extremely proud to be recognized for our commitment to our students and to be seen as a national leader in higher education.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

HIGH ASSESSMENT

Books about higher education attract policy makers and academic leaders, but they also increasingly find readers among parents and students making tough decisions about where to spend their tuition dollars.

One book about America’s colleges being widely discussed this autumn is Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids And What We Can Do About It. Co-written by Queens College professor Andrew Hacker and New York Times columnist Claudia Dreifus, the book has been serialized in The Chronicle of Higher Education and is stirring up spirited debate.

The big news for UMBC is that Hacker and Dreifus’ assessment of the university squares significantly with the plaudits for overall excellence and undergraduate teaching that UMBC has received from U.S. News and World Report and other media outlets.

“Of all the research universities we’ve visited, [UMBC] is the place that has most capably connected research with undergraduate education,” Hacker and Dreifus write. The authors cite a number of UMBC success stories in undergraduate education – and a palpable overall enthusiasm among students – observed in a campus visit made as they researched their book.

While Hacker and Dreifus also noted the Meyerhoff Scholars Program’s immense success in increasing minority presence in the sciences and engineering, their conclusions about UMBC and its president focused keenly on an issue that many students and parents value most highly in selecting a university:

“[Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski, III] sets a tone from the top that says teaching undergraduates is important, and the faculty knows he means it.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

Back to Top

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

By Richard Byrne ’86
Photos by Howard Korn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FINDING BALTIMORE’S VOICE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAKING SENSE OF MOTHERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Richard Byrne ’86