Dance has always been an integral part of UMBC campus life – especially its social life. Look back through old yearbooks and university archives and there are plenty of photos of the mixers and formals of that era. Today, dance on campus not only knits together members of the university community, but it also helps charitable causes. The UMBC 2010 Dance-a-Thon, sponsored by Sigma Alpha Epsilon & Phi Beta Sigma, was just such an occasion, with its proceeds benefiting The Matthews Foundation – which provides financial aid and support to children of Maryland diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
On April 28, the lights went down on Michael Hollinger’s play Incorruptible (above) – the last UMBC Theatre Department production in the campus theatre which opened in 1968. A production of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (right) was one of the first performances in that space. The department’s productions will begin in the new Performing Arts and Humanities Building beginning in late Fall 2012.
Back in 1992, Tim Ford – who is manager of illustrative services for UMBC’s department of biological sciences – snapped a photograph of the university’s interim president Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, surrounded by members of the UMBC community. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Hrabowski’s presidency, UMBC Magazine recreated that photograph after the university’s August retreat.
UMBC is known as a hale and hearty campus that rarely closes its doors because of winter weather. But the great ‘Snowpocalypse’ of 2011 closed down the campus for almost a week. Fortunately, no cars skidded down into the Library Pond – an event caught on film by The Retriever’s William Morgenstern and featured on the front page of the newspaper’s February 10, 1970 edition.
UMBC’s athletics department has grown with the rising profile of the university, and the retirement of athletic director Charles Brown this month after 24 years at the helm of the program is an opportunity to reflect on UMBC’s winning tradition (50 conference championships over the past two decades) and its burgeoning club sports program (25 sports) – all of it accomplished with a proven commitment to the university’s high academic standards.
UMBC’s first Earth Day, on April 20, 1970, was not a success. UMBC students occupied the Hillcrest Building and classrooms to protest the university’s refusal to renew the contracts of two professors, leading John Adams, the editor of The Retriever, to question what he saw as the protestors’ narrow priorities. Adams would likely be happy that today’s UMBC students have made Earth Day a campus-wide celebration of the planet.
“Years may pass, but commencement – whether it is in 1979 (above left) or in 2008 (inset) – brings with it the same mixture of accomplishment, optimism and a bittersweet feeling of departure.”
