Evan Avila’s goal is to work on Capitol Hill, advocating for immigrant communities’ access to financial security and economic equality. He has now been recognized as a finalist for the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, affirming his path to a career of leadership in public service. 

The Marshall Scholarship is awarded annually to up to 50 students from the United States to pursue graduate study at a university in the United Kingdom, following an intensive application and interview process. Avila, a Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar majoring in economics and political science at UMBC, was selected as a finalist for his long record of public service as well as his experience developing economic policy proposals. At the final stage, Avila was not among the students chosen to receive the scholarship. However, he still plans to pursue graduate study in Washington D.C. next fall as a Harry S. Truman Scholar. 

How does UMBC identify students to nominate for this prestigious scholarship? “We prioritize a student’s ability to demonstrate strong potential as a change agent in their chosen field, based on their leadership and intellectual skills,” explains April Householder, director of undergraduate research and prestigious scholarships. “Evan emerged because of his exemplary commitment to public service, and his ability to work with diverse groups of individuals. We felt that he has great potential as a policymaker and social change agent.”

Avila is the fourth UMBC recipient of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship. He was chosen in the spring of 2019 for one of just sixty scholar positions out of 840 candidates nationwide. 

The award grants Avila $30,000 toward a competitive graduate school of his choice. In addition, scholars gain access to continuous leadership development programs, such as the Truman Scholars Leadership Week and the Summer Institute. Scholars also benefit from mentorship by top leaders in government agencies, nonprofit organizations, public and private educational institutions, and advocacy organizations. Following a master’s degree, Avila plans to pursue a J.D., to specialize in taxation and employee benefits law.

Building a public service career 

Avila has dedicated his time at UMBC to developing his knowledge of financial systems and applying his studies to work with people in need of financial services and expertise. This includes years of service with UMBC’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program. Avila recently shared, “My driving ambition is to combine the intersections of financial services, taxation, and employee benefits” to address the significant challenge of wealth inequality faced by workers, families, and students.

Laura Hussey, associate professor of political science and director of the Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar program, has witnessed Avila’s longstanding commitment to serving communities. Hussey is quick to point out that it is not just Evan’s résumé, but also his character, that exemplifies Sondheim Scholar ideals. His time spent at the Esperanza Center, which provides educational, legal, medical, and other services to immigrants in Baltimore, is a meaningful example of his work. 

“In choosing the Esperanza Center for his Sondheim Scholar service-learning, Evan sought to leave his comfort zone and address his complicated relationship with his family’s immigrant heritage,” explains Hussey. “Though intimidated by the one evening per week he would spend there, given his limited Spanish proficiency and tutor training, Evan described his service at Esperanza Center as ‘truly joyous’ and a ‘deeply personal and spiritual experience.’”

Avila has also been recognized for his work on retirement planning for today’s young adults. In June 2018 he won the iOME challenge with the policy proposal Rethinking Millennial Retirement: Policy Recommendations for a Gig Economy. Cindy Hounsell is president of the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement (WISER), which sponsored the competition. She shared, “We are impressed by Mr. Avila’s response to the more complicated challenges and deterrents millennials face in preparing for their future retirement.”

UMBC has a strong tradition of supporting applicants for the Marshall Scholarship, as well as other prestigious awards. Loren Siebert ‘93, computer science, earned his master’s degree in computer science at the University of Manchester as a Marshall Scholar. He then invented LinguaStep, a language learning software, and is now a technical advisor to entrepreneurs in San Francisco. 

Naomi Mburu ‘18, chemical engineering, was UMBC’s second student selected for a Marshall Scholarship, in 2017, but she declined the award to become UMBC’s first Rhodes Scholar. Mburu is currently pursuing a doctorate in nuclear fusion at Oxford. She offered Avila advice in preparation for his Marshall interview.

Avila looks forward to continuing that tradition after his graduation in the spring, offering support to future UMBC students who are reaching for their dreams.

Banner image: Avila at his internship at the United States Census Bureau. Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 unless otherwise noted. 

By Jason Loviglio, founding chair and associate professor of media and communication studies, UMBC

From its start half a century ago, National Public Radio heralded a new approach to the sound of radio in the United States.

NPR “would speak with many voices and many dialects,” according to “Purposes,” its founding document.

Written in 1970, this blueprint rang with emotional immediacy. NPR would go on the air for the first time a year later, on April 20, 1971.

NPR is sometimes mocked, perhaps most memorably in a 1998 “Saturday Night Live” sketch starring actor Alec Baldwin, for its staid sound production and its hosts’ carefully modulated vocal quality. But the nonprofit network’s commitment to including “many voices” hatched a small sonic revolution on the airwaves.

As a radio historian, I have written about the medium’s unique blend of intimate voices and public address. As the 50th anniversary of public radio draws near, I’m interested in NPR’s contradictory legacy of sonic innovation and monotony.

This is NPR

One of the first voices to become associated with NPR’s flagship evening news program was Susan Stamberg. Hired in 1971, she soon became the first woman to co-anchor a national nightly newscast on radio or television in U.S. history.

William Siemering, the network’s first program director and the author of “Purposes,” wanted the voice of the network to communicate curiosity rather than authority.

Stamberg, 31 when she was hired, brought youthful exuberance to the job. And, in another departure from newscasting’s baritones, with their supposedly neutral midwestern accents, Stamberg’s voice was “nasal, quizzical, and unashamedly female,” as Lisa Phillips put it. It came she said, “with a hometown – New York – and an ethnicity – Jewish.”

The decision to stick with young and relatively unproven voices came at a cost, according to Jack Mitchell, the original director of the “All Things Considered” evening newscast.

In his account of NPR’s beginnings, “Listener Supported,” Mitchell later recalled how Siemering passed up Ford Foundation funding tied to hiring the proven and respected newscaster Edward P. Morgan, a white man originally from Walla Walla, Washington. Instead, NPR stood by the less “authoritative” and more engaging voices of Stamberg and her peers, even if they sometimes sounded “less than professional.”

“Masculine, commanding” voices were “exactly how we DON’T want to sound,” Siemering told his staff, as Stamberg later recalled in “This Is NPR: The First Forty Years.”

Early feedback on Stamberg from station managers around the country wasn’t encouraging. She sounded too New York, too Jewish, too off-putting, Mitchell wrote.

Siemering hid these negative reviews from Stamberg as she found her own broadcast voice, which helped her win many prestigious awards in broadcast and digital journalism. The network regards her as one of its “founding mothers.”

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Computers Judge What Makes The Perfect Radio Voice

Women as anchors

NPR has kept speaking with many voices that would sound out of place on the air anywhere else. Many, if not most, have been female. As hosts and anchors, correspondents and reporters, women have played a key role in giving NPR its distinctive sound.

Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts brought hard-nosed journalism and inside-the-Beltway sensibility to the fledgling network in the 1970s. In the process, these white women changed what the news sounded like.

By the time Wertheimer took over as an “All Things Considered” co-anchor in 1989, it was no longer controversial to hear women deliver the news of the day.

But on network television, most of the early stints for the women who were the first to anchor daily news programs were short-lived. Barbara Walters lasted two years in the mid-1970s as an “ABC Evening News” co-anchor. Diane Sawyer co-anchored the “CBS Morning News,” from 1981 to 1984 and Katie Couric spent five years, starting in 2006, as the sole “CBS Evening News” anchor.

Curating distinctive voices “rich with the rhythms and accents of their regions” was another explicit way in which “All Things Considered” initially sought to sonically mark its difference from what had come before, according to Stamberg.

A wider range?

NPR’s commitment to many voices included those who brought regional, as well as gender, diversity to the airwaves.

Occasional commentators Baxter Black, a cowboy poet from Texas; Vertamae Grosvenor, a culinary anthropologist born in the Gullah community of North Carolina; and Kim Williams, a naturalist, checked in during the late 1970s and early 1980s, with field reports from their corners of the country. Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian-American artist living in New Orleans, began to bring his thickly accented English and droll humor to NPR in 1983.

Putting these folks on air seemed to address the network’s vision of speaking in many voices and accents. The intent, Mitchell wrote, was explicitly democratic, to be “representative of the nation. That meant white, black, Hispanic, Asian and as many women as men.”

NPR’s growth led to the opening of foreign bureaus, even as print publications hemorrhaged these expensive positions. International coverage further expanded its vocal range.

Some of the women now working as the network’s anchors got their start as foreign correspondents. Doualy Xaykaothao spent years reporting from Asia and Lulu Garcia-Navarro covered Latin America and the Middle East for NPR.

Other women with nonconventional news voices, including Eleanor Beardsley in Paris, Sylvia Poggioli in Rome and Ofeabia Quist-Arcton in Dakar, are still overseas. Their signature approach to signing off with their name and locale is a sonic pleasure for many NPR fans.

Favorite @NPR pronunciations:

—Ofeibea Quist-Arcton saying “Dah-KARR.”

—Michele Kelemen saying “Wash…ing…ton.”

—Eleanor Beardsley saying “Paris” with that flat “a.”

—Sylvia Poggioli saying “Sylvia Poggioli.” https://t.co/SH4wA4CVlG

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) May 19, 2018

Even so, by the turn of the century, the network faced complaints about its tight control over pronunciation, cadence and accent, especially for women and people of color.

Critics denounced a sense that the voices of NPR’s female journalists sounded “alike in their sober nasal condescension,” as the writer and actor Sarah Vowell put it – hinting at a class-related critique, along with a gendered one.

NPR’s women, some of these naysayers contend, have low-pitched voices that sound too much like men and that NPR voices in general sound more like each other than everyone else. Writer Scott Sherman calls it the “NPR drone.”

Even Stamberg said in a 2010 interview that one price of NPR’s success was that listeners weren’t “hearing great voices anymore.”

Another round of criticism, this one aimed primarily at young women, identified “vocal fry,” a low creaky way of speaking, as an irritating feature of public radio voices. The critique, which came mostly from men and older folks, suggested that despite what the critics were saying, NPR’s sound was not static but evolving.

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From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We ‘Policing’ Young Women’s Voices?

NPR’s sonic palette and its range of voices has broadened in recent years, especially through its podcasts and on weekends – when Navarro, who is Latina, and Michel Martin, an African American woman, are two of the network’s main three news anchors.

Sam Sanders, an openly gay African American man, hosts a cultural talk show branded with his own name. Programs like “Alt.Latino” and “Radio Ambulante,” which are either in Spanish or in English punctuated with Spanish words, indicate that the network aims to serve new listeners.

As NPR looks forward to the next 50 years, its decisions over whose voices belong on the air will determine how well it lives up to its founding commitment to sound like America. And it is likely that criticism of how those voices sound will reflect dominant attitudes about who gets to speak.

*****

Jason Loviglio, Chair and Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Header image by Jonathan Velasquez on Unsplash.