I am delighted that one of the features in this issue is written by John Strausbaugh ’74, interdisciplinary studies. Strausbaugh has had a successful career in journalism and cultural criticism, and is the author of a string of books that explore fascinating byways of American culture.

But I’m particularly happy to have Strausbaugh in the magazine because I would not have launched my own career without his help. It’s a story that demonstrates the power that alumni have to mentor and shape the careers of those who follow after them.

You might already have recognized the goofy face on the UMBC identification card below. (Though the Social Security number that also served as campus identification back then has been obscured.) I arrived at UMBC in August 1984, having transferred from the University of Pittsburgh, and was interested in becoming a writer.

Thanks to a continuing web of alumni relations between writers and faculty in the English Department in that era, local writers like Strausbaugh (who was writing fiction and involved in local theatre at that time) were often invited back to give readings on campus.

But Strausbaugh’s increasing claim to fame at that moment was his book and music reviewing for Baltimore City Paper – reviews in which he championed his favorites and savaged whatever he thought was inferior.

After a reading that Strausbaugh gave at the English department one semester, we got to chatting about culture. He looked past the big goofy glasses and saw that I might have some future in the journalism game. Not only did Strausbaugh start letting me hang out with him occasionally, but he also eventually brokered a chance for me to break into print at City Paper. My first review – 10,000 Maniacs’ The Wishing Chair – ran in that newspaper in November 1985, while I was still a student at UMBC.

The chance to put clips from City Paper in my portfolio was a great launching pad for my career. I gained a foothold in journalism that eventually took me great places: On tour with Uncle Tupelo. Reporting on media in Bosnia and pop culture and politics in Serbia. Covering national political conventions.

But it happened largely because an alumnus helped out a student. And while it’s a story that no doubt has been repeated thousands of times at UMBC across many disciplines and schools, it’s also a reminder that we, as alumni, can help shape futures by becoming actively involved in the lives of those who attend UMBC after us.

Want an easy way to get started? Sign up to be a Professional Network mentor. The joint effort between UMBC’s Career Services Center and Alumni Relations allows students to connect with professionals in their desired fields. Go to www.careers.umbc.edu to see what it’s all about and sign up.

— Richard Byrne ’86
byrne@umbc.edu

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

Q. What book do you recommend that every young person read before they go out into the “real world?”

— Shivonne L. Laird ’99, biological sciences

A. Right now, I think it’s important for students to be constantly reading. And to read even more when they go into the real world, because life is changing in so many ways.

Now if I were forced to choose a book, I would say Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded today. Because it focuses on the need for a green revolution, the impact of technology, the critical role that research on energy will play and the need for innovation and nation-building. It puts America into the global context.

Q. I am impressed by UMBC’s growth, but it seems like the arts are getting the short side of the stick. Are there plans to increase the budget for the arts at UMBC or to expand course and degree offerings in visual arts, theatre, writing and music?

— Maria E. Watters-Mahone ’87, English and M.A. ’00, instructional development systems

A. It’s a great question. The arts and humanities are very much alive here. The fact that we have a new College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS) has to do with our continued commitment to build those disciplines. And our number-one capital project – a $150 million facility – is the new performing arts and humanities building for which we have gotten planning funds, and hope to receive construction funds, in order to break ground in 2010.

I spent time today presenting our proposal for construction funds for that facility. And we’ll be spending time every day with legislators and people representing the Governor’s office, about the importance of that building. The fact is that the arts and humanities building, over the next few years, will transform the campus physically and aesthetically.

The development of our Humanities Scholars Program and our Linehan Artist Scholars program is especially significant in attracting high-achieving, talented students in the arts and humanities and getting them support here. Building a community of scholars. And the Dresher Center for Humanities itself is a very strong intellectual initiative on our campus, focusing on research and teaching in the humanities.

More and more is happening in those areas. I invite alumni to come back to some of these activities. And to serve as mentors to our current students.

I’m especially excited about the Kauffman entrepreneurship grant, which is heavily focused in the arts. People expect it to be in economics and engineering – and while those programs are involved, we have a lot of faculty in the arts and the humanities involved in entrepreneurship initiatives, with the thought that we should be preparing students through infusion of entrepreneurship into the curriculum, to be businesspeople. Because if you think about it, when someone starts a photography studio or a dance studio, it is a business that is designed to elevate people culturally, but also to make money. We are being creative about connecting entrepreneurs and the arts.

Q. Aesthetically, where do you think the university will be in five years? What kind of campus should I look forward to seeing when I visit a few years down the line?

— Elan Schnitzer ’06, political science

A. The greening of UMBC. That is our theme. Every time alumni come back, they will see more trees, bigger trees, more shrubbery, more flowers and more initiatives focused on the environment…. An emphasis on making the campus physically and aesthetically appealing to newcomers and alumni as well as faculty, staff and students.

With $400 million in new construction – and with the new arts and humanities building, it will be half a billion – it has been important to focus on the well-being of the environment. I think the biggest difference between the campus today and the campus 20 years ago is grass and trees. We’ve gotten rid of a lot of the concrete and laid down grass. And there are never enough trees. The growth of the trees is symbolic of the growth in the stature of the university itself.

Many theatre companies are born out of a mixture of inspiration and frustration. Take The Venus Theatre in Laurel, for instance.

When its founder, Deborah Randall ’94, theatre, graduated from UMBC, she pursued a career as a playwright and a performer in Washington, D.C. Like many recent graduates, Randall had a desire to succeed in a challenging profession. But she also found some of the roles she played and the theatrical atmosphere that surrounded her to be stifling her creativity. She craved a theatre that valued women and living playwrights.

Randall recalls UMBC theatre professor Wendy Salkind’s advice to her. “Every time I would gripe to her,” Randall recalls, “she’d say: If it doesn’t exist, create it. That was her mantra to me.”

The theatre company that Randall founded in 2001 is dedicated to filling what she sees as a gap in the Baltimore-Washington region, presenting shows with a decidedly female perspective and recent work by contemporary playwrights.

The company is in the middle of its current season, which features new plays that include a fresh look at the experience of women characters in Shakespeare and a contemporary retelling of Medea set in Los Angeles. The series concludes this coming fall with a new World War II memory play called Why’d You Make Me Wear This, Joe? by acclaimed writer Vanda and a comedic look at a very difficult Helen of Troy in a new play called Helen of Sparta.

Randall says that the emphasis on new work – especially by women playwrights – is important to her. A steady cultural diet of reality television and revisiting the classical repertoire, she observes, has meant that “there are so many writers who are not getting an opportunity.”

Finding and nurturing new work, she says, “is part of the life of the theatre…. Finding the pulse in a new work is kind of what I wake up in the morning to do.”

Creating what ultimately became Venus Theatre took time, however. Randall started small, crafting one-woman shows for herself that played in various venues in Washington, D.C. She also started a reading series for women writers and tried her hand at children’s theatre before settling on more adult fare.

After a series of misadventures and mishaps, including one show that had its last week in a D.C. theater interrupted by a street explosion that rendered the space unusable, Randall decided that she needed to find a more permanent home.

The constant scrapping and hustling for space to rent “was not cute anymore,” says Randall, especially after the street explosion. After a long search, she finally settled on a storefront space just off Laurel’s Main Street, which she dubbed “The Venus Theatre Play Shack.” She and a dedicated crew of volunteers transformed the place into a black box theater that’s become a new home base for the company, perched halfway between Washington and Baltimore and drawing from both cities and the surrounding community.

Randall recalls her time at UMBC fondly. “I was a nontraditional student,” she says. “So I was a few years older than everyone else. I had been to community college, worked for three years, sown some wild oats…. I wanted to squeeze everything I could out of the experience.”

Along with Salkind, she counts professors Xerxes Mehta and Alan Kreizenbeck as influences on her current career path. Randall also recalls that her roles in a production of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade (directed by Mehta) and in Cinders – a play by Polish playwright Janusz Glowack, directed by Kreizenbeck – were particularly memorable.

Though Randall still writes plays (one of her works, Molly Daughter, is included in Anthracite! An Anthology of Pennsylvania Coal Region Plays, which was published by the University of Scranton Press), she says that she “has ended up more of a producer and a director than a writer and actor anymore.” Running a theatre company also involves a lot of logistics and fundraising.

But Randall’s commitment to helping produce new works by playwrights – especially women playwrights – remains a primary challenge that she’s happy to take on. With the classics, she observes, “all the kinks have been worked out in a way.” New work, she says, is where the sizzle and satisfaction is.

“If it has been done too often,” she says, “it doesn’t interest me.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

For more information about Venus Playhouse, visit http://www.venustheatre.org/.