Holding a student leadership position provides you with an opportunity to make a meaningful impact in the UMBC community.

As a student leader, you’ll be able to gain valuable professional experience (that you’ll be able to add to your resume), develop new friendships and make great college memories!

While there are countless ways to get involved in student leadership roles, including holding positions in student organizations, we’d like to highlight some unique “peer advisor” positions on campus that will give you the opportunity to share your experiences and wisdom with new students and students in transition, and play an important role in supporting student success.

Orientation Peer Advisor (OPA) – Be a part of a close-knit team of students who welcome new students and their families to campus during the summer and winter terms during New Student Orientation.

Welcome Week Leaders (Woolies) – As part of the Woolie team you will serve as a resource to all incoming students during Welcome Week, supporting students in their transition to campus and helping them connect to events and upcoming opportunities. Application for 2019 will be available in early March!

IHU Peer Facilitator – IHU Peer Facilitators are an integral part of all Introduction to an Honor’s University (IHU) courses, assisting instructors in course preparation, lesson implementation and serving as a resource to students throughout their time in the course. Application for 2019 will be available in early March!

OAPA Peer Advisor – *Shameless plug for our office, the Office for Academic & Pre-Professional Advising!*

We will be taking applications in late February/March from students interested in helping to staff our front desk, providing informal advising to students, and assisting in the planning and implementation of various office-sponsored events, primarily targeting students who are exploring majors or who are interest in allied health professions.

Undergraduate Admissions A-Team – Do you have an interest in sharing your UMBC spirit with prospective and incoming students? The Office of Undergraduate Admissions has a variety of positions for students interested in promoting UMBC and helping students navigate the admissions process.

Resident Student Association (RSA) – Be a part of a student-run, representative organization that works alongside Residential Life staff to advocate for the needs and well-being of students living on campus, as well as encouraging students to engage in their housing community.

Transfer Student Network (TSN) Leaders – TSN Leaders will assist prospective, incoming, and current transfer students with their transition into UMBC by leading workshops and other programs, and serving as the face of OCSS at the front desk. Application will be available at the end of the semester via UMBC Works!

In a recent interview at the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Bob and Elizabeth Dole Series on Leadership, UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski shared his perspective on leading diverse and inclusive communities in today’s political environment.

Hrabowski grounded his talk in his own experience with the civil rights movement. He also drew listeners back to the founding of UMBC, noting, “It’s only been since the 1960s that we have said in the most clear manner that we need to bring more people into the mainstream.” He pointed out, “When the university was founded in the 1960s, we really were the only university in the state where kids of all races could come.”

More than 50 years later, UMBC still takes pride in its diverse community, which Hrabowski noted includes new immigrants and first-generation Americans with families from more than 100 countries, and first-generation college students, as well as students from military and intelligence families in the Washington, D.C. region. Hrabowski also pointed to UMBC’s socioeconomic diversity and the brain power of public research universities, saying, “You don’t have to be wealthy to succeed intellectually.”

How does this diverse group feel about the current heated political rhetoric? “People are angry, as you might imagine…people [at UMBC] believe in our country and they know we can be better than this,” said Hrabowski.

Reflecting on his conversations with students, Hrabowski told the audience, “young people will ask those of us of other generations ‘why haven’t you made it better than this?’…this is where the role of a teacher or mentor becomes most important.” He wants students to understand that “democracy is messy,” but change is possible, and we are empowered to make our communities and our country what we want them to become.

Hrabowski said he is “very proud” of how the UMBC community handles difficult conversations about policy and political issues, working across differences in perspective and opinion. He noted that “sometimes students need a chance to be upset with each other and have those conversations to find common ground.”

The key, Hrabowski suggested, is finding constructive ways to “help people not to give in to the anger of the moment.” He explained that educators have an important role in helping students learn how to effectively analyze complex issues, including ideas they disagree with, and to “understand the need to agree to disagree agreeably, with some civility.” By doing these things, Hrabowski said, students learn how to engage in respectful, productive public discourse.

Just as he views UMBC as a model for inclusive excellence in public higher education, Hrabowski sees Maryland as a model for bipartisanship and civility in state government. “[O]ur state is one of the few I see where you have more bipartisan agreement. We have a Republican governor who is supporting education, and a Democratic legislature, and they are working to make things happen… They are working together in a way that America needs to look at.”

The full interview is available through the Bipartisan Policy Center on SoundCloud.

This story was written by Mary Ann Richmond ’93, history. Featured image: President Hrabowski and UMBC students in a group discussion in the Dresher Center for the Humanities.

Preminda Jacob, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, UMBC

For two hours each evening, an Ivanka Trump lookalike has been vacuuming a hot pink carpet at the Flashpoint Gallery in Washington, D.C.

As she appears to be on the cusp of completing the task, spectators soil the carpet with bread crumbs. She vacuums them up. The audience tosses more crumbs onto the carpet. The pattern repeats itself.

Jennifer Rubell’s installation, titled “Ivanka Vacuuming,” has already elicited a response from the subject.

Following the Feb. 1 opening, Ivanka Trump tweeted, “Women can choose to knock each other down or build each other up. I choose the latter,” to which Rubell parried, “I would encourage you to see the piece and form your own direct response. … Not knocking anyone down. Exploring complicated subjects we all care about.”

As a historian of contemporary art, I wanted to learn more about this headline-grabbing work. So I followed Rubell’s directive and saw it myself.

The piece certainly pops: It’s pink. Very pink. And the Ivanka double has a plastic sheen that borders on surreal.

It took a moment to adjust to the saccharine visuals. But it soon became apparent that Rubell was drawing from a rich tradition of performance art. She seems to be compelling viewers to think about the huge numbers of women who perform invisible labor – all in exchange for a few crumbs from the great American pie.

Repetitive, relentless work

The work of art has been staged at the back of the gallery, in a space surrounded by three white walls. In the foreground, there’s a white cube, approximately three-and-a-half feet high and topped with a two-foot mound of Panko bread crumbs. Text invites the viewers to scatter the crumbs onto the pink carpet to keep the Ivanka doppelgänger busy.

Fortunately, the night I visited, Rubell was in the gallery observing the performance. She told me that she has witnessed the live performance in Washington, D.C., a few times. Otherwise, she’s been watching it on a live feed from her home in New York City.

The Ivanka lookalike is a model whom Rubell hired through an agency. In my brief conversation with Rubell, she mentioned that although she had to make some minor adjustments to the model’s hair color and makeup, it was relative easy to mimic Ivanka’s look because she is already so doll-like.

Rubell cited pioneering performance artist Vito Acconci as an inspiration for her interest in the medium. You can see his stamp on “Ivanka Vacuuming” in works like “Step Piece.” Over a performance period of one month in 1970, Acconci documented himself, each day, stepping on and off a stool in his apartment at the rate of 30 steps per minute until he was unable to continue. He wanted to highlight the absurdity of certain repetitive tasks.

Invisible female labor

In her work, Rubell is also tackling the seeming endlessness of mind-numbing labor. But she’s doing it in a way that aligns herself with artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, who co-founded the California Institute of Arts’ Feminist Art program.

In 1972, Chicago and Schapiro collaborated with other feminists to create installations, performances and discussion groups concerned with the invisible labor performed by women, especially in the home.

Titled “Womanhouse,” this influential exhibition criticized prevailing attitudes towards femininity and domesticity that had been instilled through a range of cultural messages, from advertisements for home appliances, to toys like the Barbie doll.

The exhibition was set up in a dilapidated Los Angeles mansion. A group of 23 artists refurbished the residence prior to installing their work to make the familiar spaces of the home seem strange. For instance, the walls of the kitchen were pockmarked with fried egg sculptures that resembled eyes or breasts, while the shelves of a linen closet were merged into the body of a life-size mannequin doll.

In “Ivanka Vacuuming,” I also see echoes of New York-based artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In 1973, Ukeles got down on her hands and knees to scrub the floors and steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum museum. In another famous work, Ukeles shook the hand of every New York City sanitation worker.

Like “Ivanka Vacuuming” and “Womanhouse,” Ukeles wanted to bring attention to the drudgery of everyday tasks that are crucial to our well-being but go largely unrecognized and unrewarded.

The viewer as enabler

There’s a twist to “Ivanka Vacuuming,” however: It requires audience participation. In order to complete the work, viewers must grab from the pile of crumbs sitting on an abstract cube in the darkened half of the gallery and toss them into the brightly lit performance space.

Rubell’s invitation to viewers made me think of Yoko Ono’s famous “Cut Piece” from 1964. In it, Ono sat on the floor with her legs folded beneath her body and a pair of scissors by her side. Viewers were invited to approach the artist, one by one, and cut off a piece of her dress. The performance continued until the artist was almost naked.

I was also reminded of the 1990 work “Untitled (USA Today),” in which artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres piled a large mound of candy wrapped in red, blue and silver foil against the corner of a gallery and invited visitors to help themselves. Torres was prompting the viewer to think critically about the sugary news dished out by mainstream newspapers like USA Today and the way many readers uncritically gobble it up.

Rubell’s work likewise, challenges her audience to engage and to think critically.

Vacuuming isn’t inherently degrading or abject. But it’s difficult to imagine Ivanka, at any point in her privileged upbringing, wielding a vacuum.

The artwork is jolting in the way that it juxtaposes Ivanka’s public image – pristine, professional, camera-ready – with tasks performed by the maids and housekeepers who labor in Trump’s homes, hotels and resorts.

But Rubell slyly subverts the dynamics of control. Who’s in charge? Is it the wealthiest one percent whose needs power the vacuums, start up the hotel laundries every night and turn on the kitchen fryers at 4 a.m.?

Or, perhaps it’s us – the public, the spectator – who keep the crumbs coming, participating in a system that privileges the few at the expense of the many.

* * * * *

Preminda Jacob, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

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

Header image of Preminda Jacob by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC Magazine.