9/20일에는 저희 학교에서 UMBC기독교 연합 예배가 있습니다.
시간되시는 분들 와서 함께 찬양해요~ ^^
지난 학기에 300+명의 사람들이 왔다고 하는데
이번엔 더 많은 사람과 더 많은 은혜가 있길 기도해주세요 ^^

There will be a united worship service at UMBC

Where: UC building ballroom

When: 09/20 6pm

For what: To worship God. and unity under God

Who: all the children of God

Please come and worship altogether ^^

please bring your friends, too.

Twenty years ago, UMBC sought a greater academic reputation and a deeper sense of community. It advanced both goals under the leadership of President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III.

By Richard Byrne ’86

Giving name to your aspirations is often the first step to achieving them. And back in 1995, the words that campus leaders summoned to encompass their hopes for UMBC were “An Honors University in Maryland.”

The university was just shy of its 30th anniversary and only three years into the tenure of its fifth president, Freeman A. Hrabowski, III. UMBC already possessed institutional strengths, including its stellar faculty, the pioneering spirit that comes with being a young university, and an increased dynamism and connection with its closest cities – Baltimore and Washington, D.C. – bequeathed to it by Hrabowski’s predecessor, Michael Hooker. (See “Up on the Roof”)

What UMBC needed at that moment was an audacious imaginative leap: an identity that would help the campus seize upon the university’s strengths, elevate them, and create a more deeply knit community.

“I think the campus agreed,” Hrabowski recalls, “that we needed to attract more students who could take advantage of what we had to offer – even as we worked to think about the learning process and engage students in research.”

Twenty years into Hrabowski’s presidency, UMBC has undergone a profound transformation. The university is now renowned for nurturing young minds in an environment that values excellence, innovation, and diversity. Its investments to retain and attract top-notch faculty have paid off not only in rising prestige and research funding, but also in a reputation for providing undergraduates with a superlative environment for learning. UMBC’s physical campus has been transformed in ways that have improved the university’s teaching and research infrastructure – as well as its aesthetic appeal and overall quality of life.

This metamorphosis at UMBC has been lauded by a national media that loves an unexpected success story. The university’s achievements have been praised in outlets including CBS’ 60 Minutes, Time magazine, The New York Times and The Washington Post. And while Hrabowski’s leadership is often spotlighted in these stories, Hrabowski likes to point out that UMBC’s successes often have been proposed, nurtured and pushed forward by UMBC’s faculty, students and staff in an atmosphere of shared governance.

John Jeffries, Dean of UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and a former president of the Faculty Senate, observes that “shared governance has always been vital and important at UMBC. It’s been a fundamental part of the health and progress of UMBC in the past two decades.” Jeffries adds that Hrabowski “meets regularly with the Faculty Senate president, brought the Faculty Senate president and Academic Planning and Budget Committee chair onto the Budget Committee and President’s Council, and works with the Faculty Senate. Shared governance has played a fundamental role in the progress of the academic programs.”

Looking back, the principles undergirding UMBC’s rise to prominence seem clear. Elevate academic excellence. Create spaces and opportunity to forge community. Bring the entire university into the processes of academic research and creative endeavor.

But how, exactly, did it all happen? As the campus celebrates two decades of Hrabowski’s leadership, it is now possible to trace more fully the arc of that evolution.

TAKING THE HONORS

UMBC’s efforts to attract the best students from Maryland and elsewhere had gathered steam by the end of the 1980s. Average SAT scores for freshmen entering UMBC in 1989 climbed above the national average – and subsequently those scores have skyrocketed to almost 200 points over the average.

Yet it took a certain degree of audacity to proclaim UMBC “An Honors University in Maryland” only six years after reaching that important milestone. But stating the university’s aspirations publicly was a key step in UMBC’s transformation.

“It was the marketing initiative that taught us that we had become known as a place for serious academic study,” recalls Hrabowski. “A university attracting more students from high school honor societies. A university that was sending a disproportionate number of students to graduate and professional schools. And, most important, that we were a public university that openly valued the life of the mind. All these things were part of the honors university concept.”

The concept of an honors university might have been new, but its foundations had been laid in previous years.

One essential element in UMBC’s reimagination of itself was the creation of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program by Hrabowski (who had been recruited to UMBC in 1987 as vice provost by Michael Hooker) and philanthropist Robert Meyerhoff. The program aimed to increase the number of minority students pursuing graduate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines – and its success in doing so has made the program an international model for fostering excellence and diversity. The program’s more than 700 graduates have subsequently earned 81 Ph.D.s, 25 M.D./Ph.D.s and 92 M.D.s. – and many more of its graduates are still pursuing advanced degrees.

The Meyerhoff Program also created wider ripples at UMBC. Its formula of recruiting talented students and forging shared and structured intellectual communities was adopted (and adapted) elsewhere at the university. New programs including the Linehan Artist Scholars Program, the Sondheim Public Affairs Scholars Program, the Humanities Scholars Program, and the Center for Women In Technology (CWIT) were created to extend the values of academic excellence and shared enterprise across disciplines.

Such programs would not exist without a significant investment in UMBC’s innovation from a myriad of donors – including an increasing number of UMBC alumni who give back to their alma mater. UMBC’s first two capital campaigns for the university, which concluded in 2002 and 2011, each exceeded their goals by at least $15 million.

Baltimore businessman and philanthropist Earl Linehan was a co-chair of that first capital campaign – and also a longtime chair of UMBC’s Board of Visitors. When he was first invited to visit the university by Hrabowski, Linehan says that he was immediately impressed by the UMBC president’s “unbelievable energy and personal connection with the students.”

Yet Linehan says that he and the other donors who helped fuel UMBC’s transformation in that era also saw an institution that was ripe to make a big leap. “A lot of us initially were attracted by Freeman,” he continues. “But then we got to know the institution. Even then, the reality of the place already outshone the perception of it. We became inspired by the whole ethos of the place.”

And as UMBC found resources to advance its ambitions, its progress toward becoming an honors university was extended into every corner of the school by faculty and staff members who served on an Honors University Task Force that issued its final report in May 2000.

The task force aimed to extend “the rigorous ways of learning that are options for students in select programs at UMBC to a wider student body,” and identified changes to significantly strengthen and broaden both the curriculum and student support services. The task force offered crucial advice on implementing those changes, and its work has given talented students attracted by the honors university concept more pathways and support to achieve academic excellence at UMBC.

GIVE US TREES

Improving UMBC’s aesthetic appeal and creating new spaces to foster deeper community were on Hrabowski’s agenda from his earliest days as president. He fondly recalls his first meeting with the late William Donald Schaefer, who was Maryland’s governor when Hrabowski was named to the job.

“[Governor Schaefer] said to me, ‘What can I do to show people how proud I am of you and of the university?’ And I said, ‘Give us trees,’” Hrabowski recalls. “Because people said that this place would look better and better as the trees grew. And he was absolutely delighted to give us support.”

A year before Schaefer’s passing in 2011, Hrabowski invited Maryland’s former governor back to campus. “I reminded him of those trees,” he says. “He was amazed by how much we had developed, and moved that we were giving him credit for helping us to develop.”

Green campus spaces such as the Beuys Sculpture Park (just southeast of the Retriever Activities Center) are a tangible sign of UMBC’s aesthetic upgrade. And with a strong push from UMBC’s faculty, green spaces became part of the university’s research infrastructure when its Conservation and Environmental Research Areas (CERA) – contiguous to the long-planned bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park – were created in 1997.

In the midst of those green spaces, other sorts of growth took place. The addition to UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library that opened in 1995 was underway when Hooker left the university.

And under Hrabowski’s leadership, 13 new buildings and 12 major additions and renovations to UMBC’s campus have been completed in the past two decades.

Much of this flurry of new construction – and the state funding that supported it – advanced both the research and teaching missions at UMBC.

“When I think about this growth,” says Hrabowski, “I think about the confidence that the state has in us as a major institution of learning. And I think about the areas that have been strengthened academically as a result. The physical transformation reflects a trend of growth in the academic program.”

The new buildings on campus created new opportunities for innovation across disciplines: a new Physics building, a new Public Policy building, two new Information Technology/Engineering buildings, and, just this autumn, a new Performing Arts and Humanities Building (See “The News”). UMBC also undertook major renovations of key structures in the natural sciences, overhauling the Biological Sciences and the Meyerhoff Chemistry buildings. And the opening of bwtech@UMBC in 2002 – a research park that is now home to nearly 100 companies that generate over $200 million annually in total business – created even closer collaborations with industry and commerce in the region.

UMBC’s building boom also focused squarely on creating deeper community on campus and encouraging students to call the school their home during the academic year.

The centerpiece of this effort was the 2002 opening of The Commons, a new university center that swung the center of campus closer to the residential heart of the school. And that heart has seen a boom of its own: two new apartment complexes, two new dormitories, and the refurbishment and expansion of other existing student residences.

“The development has emphasized the importance of community,” Hrabowski says. “Spaces like The Commons, and even the benches that we have on campus, are spaces that invite conversation, reflection and community – and the feeling that the university is becoming more residential.”

The creation of new community spaces and the growth campus housing have supported UMBC’s gradual shift from a predominately commuter school into a substantially residential university. When Hrabowski assumed UMBC’s presidency in 1993, the percentage of students who lived on campus had finally risen to 30 percent. Today, the number has moved closer to 50 percent in total. Even larger strides have been made with incoming freshmen: Fully 75 percent of those enrolled at UMBC as freshmen now live on campus.

Yvette Mozie-Ross ’88, health science and policy, has seen the changes at UMBC over the last 20 years as an undergraduate and as a staff member who now serves as associate provost for enrollment management. She says the biggest change she has seen is “the recognition that the institution has attained. I remember as a student, and then as an admissions counselor, you’d say UMBC and people would say ‘UM-what?’ Now you say UMBC and they can name all sorts of accolades we have received, and tell you about people they know who have gone to UMBC and done great things.”

In addition, Mozie-Ross believes that the physical transformation of the campus – and the construction of communal spaces where students, faculty, and staff can gather – have helped spur the rise of students living on campus. “They have played a critical role,” she says. “There are now places where the process of gathering as a community happens more naturally.”

DELIGHT IN DISCOVERY

One of UMBC’s strengths from its founding was its faculty. Key faculty members across disciplines arrived in the university’s early years, and stayed on at UMBC through the 1970s and beyond.

These professors and researchers – and those who have joined them in subsequent decades – have propelled UMBC’s transformation through their research and innovations in the classroom.

The numbers tell part of the story. When Hrabowski became interim president of UMBC in 1992, the university’s total research and development expenditures stood at $7.6 million, with nearly $5 million of that amount coming from the federal government. Only ten years later, in 2002, that total had grown to $36 million, with $29 million in federal research dollars. And that astonishing growth has continued over the second decade of Hrabowski’s presidency, as total expenditures have almost tripled to $91 million and federal funding has doubled to $61 million.

Beyond the numbers however, are two decades of developing dynamic and high-powered research partnerships, including deep and continuing research relationships with NASA, IBM, Princeton University, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The university has also excelled in disciplines where research isn’t measured in dollars but in cultural and societal reach. A 1997 study by Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond, published as The Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era, ranked UMBC scholars in the arts, humanities, and related social sciences as 13th among all U.S. public university faculties in the attainment of prestigious awards. And UMBC faculty members in those disciplines continue to receive prominent grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and numerous other institutions.

As UMBC’s Provost Philip Rous pointed out in a recent interview: “External funding is a measure of excellence in many disciplines. But we have to be careful not to generalize that observation as far as defining the excellence piece of it, because there are many disciplines where large amounts of external funding are not available or not really appropriate. Yet a person working in those fields can be a world-class scholar in exactly the same way as a scientist or engineer who is bringing in millions of dollars…. The difference is in the disciplines, not in the excellence. And excellence is our common goal.”

Yet another key value in the university’s rapidly expanding research footprint has been the way in which UMBC’s undergraduates have been brought into the process of discovery. Faculty members have found numerous ways to encourage students to participate meaningfully in research labs and field work and the artistic process. Innovations to improve the undergraduate learning experience have also been a key element in the past twenty years at UMBC, including the creation of new classroom environments such as the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS)’s Active Science Teaching and Learning Environment – better known as CASTLE – and the Chemistry Discovery Center, as well as the imminent revamping of the English composition curriculum.

The fruits of this effort can be seen not only in UMBC’s lofty U.S. News and World Report ranking in undergraduate education (4th in the nation in 2011), but also in the university’s annual celebration of an Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) that recognizes the shared journey of exploration for new knowledge by faculty, students, and staff.

UMBC’s journey of discovery began almost 50 years ago, and has only accelerated in pace and intensity over the two decades of transformation under Hrabowski’s leadership. The scope of the university’s progress has inspired alumni who have returned to see what’s changed.

Gene Trainor ’86, economics and health science and policy, the chief operating officer at Foundation Capital, recalls being profoundly moved by the changes at the university when he reconnected with UMBC on a visit more than a decade after graduating.

“It was exciting to have a conversation with [President Hrabowski] and hear the vision,” recalls Trainor. “And then to see how that vision was executed across the board – in the humanities and the sciences. So many exciting things were happening, and they were happening with limited resources.”

Trainor was so inspired that he became chair of the Alumni Campaign Committee for UMBC’s second capital campaign. “I wanted to be involved with something where I could make the biggest impact and the biggest difference,” he continues. “I look back on it with great pride and know that I was part of something great. As an alumnus, it makes you happy to stick your chest out.”

Twenty years into his presidency, Hrabowski agrees that the biggest change he has witnessed at UMBC is that growing sense of the university’s belief in itself and where it’s headed.

“There is much greater pride and emphasis on the unique strengths of this campus,” Hrabowski observes, “and a much greater recognition that we are admired nationally for our undergraduate experience and our growing strength as a research institution.”

– Read more about The Hrabowski Fund for Innovation

This article appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of UMBC Magazine.

Financial Services’ Contract and Grant Accounting Manager Aimee Howell conducted a NCURA sponsored Departmental Research Administration Workshop in Portland, Oregon last week. Geared specifically for the departmental administrator who must have knowledge of pre- and post-award functions, this was an opportunity for Aimee to share her vast expertise by leading participants through an examination of the foundations of research administration in the context of departmental administration—the transactional level. Thanks to Aimee’s enthusiasm and dedication to knowledge sharing, participants left the workshop with an increased understanding of how to apply best practices to a department administrator’s day-to-day activities.

Can Alli Houseworth ’03 save American Theatre? She’s Trying: One Tweet at a Time

by Richard Byrne ’86
photos by Marlayna Demond ’11

The annual Theatre Communications Group (TCG) conference is one of the far-flung U.S. theatre community’s biggest stages for talking about the industry. And at the 2011 TCG Conference in Los Angeles, Alli Houseworth ’03, acting, grabbed the spotlight without using a microphone.

She did it on Twitter.

At the time, Houseworth was the director of marketing and communications at Washington D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company – one of America’s best regional theatres. And the laughter that she heard during a session on the social media habits of millennials irritated her enough to weigh in on Twitter in real time.

“I really wish this audience would stop laughing at the behaviors of gen y,” Houseworth tweeted. Her intervention caused an instantaneous online sensation, kicking up enough fuss that her tweet was read out during the panel itself.

Houseworth struck again when she heard artists at another TCG session belittle marketing, tweeting: “I’m so over this conversation surrounding #newplays that implies all marketing directors are stupid and evil.” The clamor created by that tweet carried on far past the panel itself into a few days’ worth of intense discussion – on and offline – among theatre professionals.

Washington Post arts writer Maura Judkis also attended the conference. She noted on the Engine 28 arts blog that Houseworth “achieved an odd distinction…. She was able to redirect the conversation in two sessions by voicing her objections to panel discussions on Twitter.”

Reflecting on her insurrectionary behavior a year later, Houseworth says acknowledgement of how technology has changed theatre – and discussion about it – is long overdue. “All these shifts have happened since the early 2000s,” she says. “I don’t think theatre recognizes that – or the complexity of that.”

Houseworth’s voluble tweets are backed up by her string of successes in pioneering new approaches to customer service and use of social media in theatre. She has formed her own company – Method 121 – to push her ideas forward, and teaching jobs at Columbia University and American University allow Houseworth to evangelize to a new generation of theatre professionals.

Among Houseworth’s converts is influential Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks, who credits the UMBC alumna with convincing him to join Twitter.

“Social media – and for me, Twitter in particular – have invigorated discussion of the theater to a point I’d call revolutionary,” says Marks. “For me, Twitter has provided deeper access to what’s on the minds of theater artists, and as a result, I think, it’s enriched my understanding and writing about the theater.”

TRYING ON ROLES

Houseworth came to UMBC in 1999 as a Linehan Artist Scholar to study acting. She commanded attention even in her initial interviews and auditions for the program and the scholarship, recalls Alan Kreizenbeck, a professor of theatre at UMBC.

“I was taken with her abilities,” says Kreizenbeck. “She was a strong, durable kind of person.”

Houseworth says that “it only took about a semester for me to realize that [UMBC] was an environment where the more I made out of it myself, the more I would get out of it in the end.”

For Houseworth, making a lot out of UMBC included stage managing a production in her freshman year, playing Lady Macbeth in a 2001 production of Macbeth and writing a popular column for The Retriever. But she says that her most important UMBC experience came not in a classroom but in Germany, when she accompanied a number of theatre faculty members affiliated with Maryland Stage Company on a trip to Berlin to put on plays by Samuel Beckett.

“I got to hang out with the faculty,” she recalls. “Wendy [Salkind] was in the show. Sam McCready was in the show. Xerxes Mehta directed the show. Greggory Schraven ’97 was there. I have these great memories of drinking beer with them in Germany when I was really young.”

Mehta’s memories are even more exact. “When the Maryland Stage Company took ‘Beckett’s Play’ to an international festival in Berlin in 2000,” he says, “I put what is Beckett’s most technically difficult and nerve-wrackingly demanding work in her tender hands. Allison was the key to its success. At the age of 19, she more than held her own in very fast company, controlling and cuing three fine professional actors, never faltering, never dropping a cue, pulling it all off with astonishing bravery and skill. Her technical control of that production was widely remarked upon in Berlin and in the Beckett press.

That experience confirmed for us all in the department that we had someone quite extraordinary on our hands.”

Houseworth took an acting degree from UMBC, but her career path eventually led her backstage, working in theatre administration at CENTERSTAGE, the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and as an assistant to the directors of New York City’s largest theatrical publicity agency Boneau/Bryan-Brown.

“[Publicity] is a really interesting job, because in order to excel at it, you have to understand the big picture,” Houseworth says. The clients at Boneau/Bryan-Brown, she adds, “were every big show on Broadway…. I was in the room and saw everything and watched everything.”

One of the firm’s directors, Chris Boneau, taught at Columbia University. He wrote Houseworth’s letter of recommendation to enter the university’s prestigious theatre management and production program.

“By the time I was halfway through my time at Boneau/Bryan-Brown,” she recalls, “I knew that I only wanted to go to Columbia and only go to the producing program. I think he sold them on the fact that I was always questioning why things were the way they were, and that I’d be going to graduate school to find out why things were the way they were.”

A DIFFERENT CLASS

Steven Chaikelson, an associate professor of theatre arts at Columbia University, says that Houseworth immediately stood out at Columbia, excelling in classes in marketing and audience development.

“She was inspired by what we were doing in the classroom,” says Chaikelson. “We could see her blossoming in the very first year, and finding a niche in social media and the Internet.”

Indeed, one of Houseworth’s Columbia projects turned her passion for asking questions about audiences into one of her most notable professional successes.

Houseworth’s project touched on a ritual that is part of the theatre going experience for thousands of people each year: the Theatre Development Fund’s TKTS discount ticket booth in Times Square, where patrons (many of them tourists) line up for cheap tickets to pricy Broadway and Off-Broadway shows.

Theatre Development Fund executive director Victoria Bailey teaches a class in audience development at Columbia, and Houseworth saw surveying TKTS patrons as a way of finding out what the audience wanted and needed.

“I think I was in a class and blurted something out,” Houseworth says. “Thousands of people line up outside [the TKTS booth] every day in Times Square. Has anyone ever asked them what they were thinking about their experience?”

Houseworth surveyed the masses and reported back to Bailey. She found that those waiting to buy bargain tickets had little information about what was on offer, and were easy prey for touts and scalpers. “The research was initially so provocative to her,” Houseworth says, “that she kept me on for the summer.”

Though Houseworth had a knack for using online tools to build audiences, Bailey was impressed with her student’s willingness to press the flesh to find answers.

“[The survey] was just the opposite of a virtual experience,” she observes.

Houseworth then helped Bailey and others develop a new way to help TKTS customers: The Theatre Development Fund’s pioneering Patron Services Program. The fund hired representatives in snazzy red jackets to work the line and offer impartial information for consumers. They also policed the scalpers and hucksters. The TKTS booth’s ticket sales (and customer satisfaction) shot up – and stayed up.

Bailey says that Houseworth was a driving force behind “building what has developed into a good, strong, and extensive program. She has a real understanding of the importance of new audiences and how to open up theatre to other people.”

Chaikelson agrees: “She is one of the amazing success stories of the program.”

He also pressed Houseworth to finish up her thesis so that he could hire her. “I’d been trying to find someone to teach a course on social media before social media was a big thing,” he says. “But I couldn’t find anyone who was a real teacher. I saw that in Alli when she was still a student. She was already grappling with big ideas and could communicate them.”

PREACHING THE POTENTIAL

On a sultry spring day in a classroom at Columbia University, Houseworth leads students through the case study of a fundraising campaign she created at Woolly Mammoth. The effort leveraged Twitter and Facebook exclusively to raise cash for the company – and she emphasizes that the idea for the “social-media only” fundraiser began not in a cubicle, but over a supercharged lunch debate.

“You probably won’t get your best ideas at your desk,” she quips.

Social media is an integral part of Houseworth’s curriculum. Students even tweet in class, using the hashtag “#alliclass” as they tap away on laptops.

Houseworth’s passion about social media isn’t restricted to classrooms at Columbia and American University. She has brought it to high-profile jobs at Woolly Mammoth and in an effort to rebrand Washington D.C.’s Helen Hayes Awards as a larger and more proactive group called theatre Washington.

“I love teaching,” she says. “But you have to work in the industry to teach well.”

Houseworth’s work at Method 121 – keeps her engaged in a broad range of projects. And her increasing profile as a leading voice in using social media to win and retain new theatre audiences continues to impress the Washington Post’s Peter Marks.

“One of the reasons she’s good at her job is that she’s a magnetic saleswoman,” says Marks. “When she talks about the glories of social media, she’s the digital world’s Professor Harold Hill. Except that what she’s selling is not a mirage. And so, at her urging, I took the leap, and I will always remember that she was the one standing up there behind me, on the ledge.”

But salesmanship is not Houseworth’s only strength. As she showed at the 2011 TCG conference, she is not afraid to take provocative public stands on hot-button issues in theatre.

Even when she’s not looking for controversy, it somehow finds her – as it did this past spring when circumstances thrust Houseworth directly into the middle of the biggest U.S. theater controversy in recent memory: the dustup over monologist Mike Daisey’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

Daisey’s pungent monologue about the chasm between the genius of Apple’s design and the often lamentable conditions in which its dazzling gadgets are manufactured in China was political theatre par excellence – engaging audiences deeply, selling tickets, and making a strong case for theatre’s power to inform current events.

After a long string of successes, the truth of Daisey’s account of what he’s found in China was called into question by the public radio show This American Life – which worked with Daisey on a broadcast based on his monologue. The radio program was retracted and a major media controversy over the relation between theatre and journalism ensued.

Houseworth was Woolly Mammoth’s marketing director when the show debuted on that company’s stage, and she was stung by what she saw as Daisey’s betrayal of the audience in marketing the show as “nonfiction.” So she committed an act of extreme anti-marketing: while en route from New York to Washington, D.C., she stretched out on the floor at Penn Station and typing out a blog post calling for a boycott of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs until Daisey offered an apology. (He later did.)

“Boycott Mike’s gorgeous, amazing piece of theatre that is based on a true story,” Houseworth wrote. “Boycott it until you get the apology that you deserve and do not ever, ever remount it or produce a work of his again until you know for sure what is true and what is not so your audiences are never ever mislead again.”

Chaikelson says that such stands are part and parcel of what makes Houseworth so influential. “She’s extremely smart and very gutsy,” he says. “She’s willing to put herself on the line for what she believes.”

Houseworth says that making the change she wants to see in American theatre requires self-interrogation and a willingness to speak out.

“It’s healthy to always be questioning yourself,” she says. “And the people around you. Why do you do things the way you do. Quite frankly, I don’t see anyone else doing it. So someone has to speak up. And I hope I don’t come across as always being right. I just want to present an intelligent opposing view.”

– Subscribe to Alli’s tweets here

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of UMBC Magazine.

For All the World to See – the award-winning exhibit created at UMBC on the role of visual culture in America’s Civil Rights movement – makes a triumphant return to campus.

Introduction by Richard Byrne ’86

Photo essay text by Maurice Berger, Research Professor and Chief Curator at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture

One major victory in the preservation of American memory over the last 40 years is the prominence now enjoyed in that narrative by our nation’s long, bloody and (in many respects) still-unfinished Civil Rights struggle.

Indeed, the iconic images of that journey toward equality are now inescapable – so much so that they are perhaps in danger of becoming over familiar – and thus diminished in power and pathos.

The new challenge for historians and other scholars is to recount the battle for Civil Rights afresh, keeping its immediacy alive and deepening its hold on our shared memory.

For those seeking to meet that challenge, the unalloyed success of For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights – an exhibit created by UMBC professor Maurice Berger at the university’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) – is an exhilarating guide to the way forward.

The power of For All the World to See is its excavation of a rich trove of visual history around the Civil Rights movement to deepen and enrich the context in which the struggle’s classic images are viewed. The exhibit does not displace the epic photojournalism of the movement, but intensifies its resonances through juxtapositions – profound and provocative – with television, print and material culture of the 20th century.

For All the World to See already has found a home at some of the key cultural institutions in the United States – including the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., the International Center of Photography in New York City, and the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago – and received glowing reviews in the press – including major features in the New York Times and the Washington Post. And For All the World to See’s impact will spread even further as a traveling version of the exhibit visits at least 20 more museums across the nation between now and 2017 as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ NEH On the Road series.

The UMBC community has eagerly awaited a chance to welcome For All the World to See back to the university’s campus. And to mark the occasion of its arrival on November 15, 2012, UMBC Magazine asked curator Maurice Berger to select a few images from the exhibit as a preview to give readers a taste of what they can expect when they see the full show at CADVC.

PHOTO ESSAY:  With essays by Maurice Berger, Research Professor and Chief Curator at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture

INTERVIEW: Read an interview with Maurice Berger by UMBC Magazine editor Richard Byrne ’86

This article appeared in UMBC Magazine’s Fall 2012 issue.