Heritage of Excellence
The UMBC community mourns the passing of Albin Owings Kuhn, a lifelong farmer who rose through Maryland’s university system to become the founding chancellor of UMBC. Kuhn died of pneumonia at his Woodbine farm March 24 at the age of 94.
“Good gracious, we have so much to thank him for. He was a very special man and a giant, and we’re standing on the shoulders of that giant,” UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski III, said in a March 26 Baltimore Sun story about Kuhn.
“Dr. Kuhn was our biggest cheerleader. He believed in us. He’d call me up and tell me how proud he was of our work, and I’d get tears in my eyes,” Hrabowski said.
Kuhn was heavily involved in the initial planning, development, and construction of UMBC. A University of Maryland graduate (B.S., M.S., Ph.D.), he had been professor of agronomy and head of the agronomy department at what is now the University of Maryland College Park, and executive vice president of the University of Maryland, which included campuses in College Park, downtown Baltimore and the Eastern Shore.
In 1965, Kuhn was given the responsibility for creating UMBC as the newest member of the University of Maryland System. He and his family moved into one of the original farmhouses of the campus grounds. This small gray house became the command center – residence, office, architects’ and builders’ outpost, student and faculty way station. Its porch was the catalog center for the library’s nascent 20,000 volume collection. That farmhouse was later replaced by UMBC’s library, named after Kuhn.
Kuhn was officially chancellor of both UMBC and the University of Maryland Baltimore (UMB), a position he held from 1967 until the University’s second commencement in 1971. At that point, as each campus was acquiring individual leadership, he left UMBC to serve as chancellor of UMB.
History professor Joseph Tatarewicz, an old friend and admirer of Kuhn’s, said to the Baltimore Sun that Kuhn was, “Gregarious, yet self-effacing. He took to educational administration almost effortlessly, and by the early 1960s he was the perfect person to lead the development of a new campus, sorely needed due to the baby boomers’ entering college.”
Every year in his Commencement address, Hrabowski quotes the words Kuhn said to the first graduating class in 1970:
“If you bring to the future the same personal qualities and personal commitment you have brought to this campus as students, good and important things will happen to each of you, as well as to those around you … and the university community will be proud to have played a part in your life.”
In lieu of flowers, the Kuhn family suggests contributions to the Friends of the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery at UMBC. Checks may be made payable to the UMBC Foundation and sent to Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, Administrative Offices, UMBC, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250.
Excerpt from 1994 interview with Albin Kuhn:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSfE7yCxcEQ
UMBC Heritage of Excellence video featuring interview outtakes with Albin Kuhn:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiL-_-Rlf8A
(4/6/10)
