“Annual conference showcases UMBC’s focus on undergraduate research,” the Baltimore Sun announced this morning. The article highlights the hard work of over 200 UMBC students who participated in this year’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD), from fields as diverse as political science, chemical engineering and visual arts.
URCAD is “like a middle-school science fair, only for college-age people of intimidating drive and intellect,” writes reporter Childs Walker. In addition to providing undergraduates with this opportunity to share their scholarship, UMBC also offers competitive Undergraduate Research Awards of up to $1,500 and publishes a selection of projects in an undergraduate research journal.
Student projects highlighted in the Sun article include Macy Bokhari’s research on “Implications of the Arab Spring on Women’s Rights” and Dagmawi Tilahun and Kevin Tran’s design for low-cost incubators for premature infants. Watch videos of UMBC undergrads talking about their work on the URCAD blog.
Fred L. Pincus, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, will retire at the end of the semester after spending 44 years at UMBC. He came to Baltimore from UCLA as a 26-year-old instructor in 1968, the third year of UMBC’s existence. In addition to all the committee work needed to build the department and the university, Pincus taught courses in race relations, social psychology and introductory sociology. He also became very involved in the movement against the war in Vietnam and promoted campus policies to increase the number of African American students on campus. He was an early supporter of Black Studies and Women’s Studies. In 1972, Pincus visited the People’s Republic of China. He was excited to see a non-capitalist country and for the next dozen years he learned all he could about China. He developed a course called “Social Organization in the People’s Republic of China,” wrote several articles about Chinese education and served on the editorial committee of New China, a magazine published by the US-China Friendship Association. He also became the China writer and later the education writer for The Guardian, an independent radical newsweekly published in New York. In the late 1990s, Pincus joined the steering committee of UMBC’s (then) new Language, Literacy and Culture (LLC) doctoral program. He became interested in diversity in the United States in terms of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. He took over the graduate seminar “Constructing Race, Gender and Class” and developed the undergraduate course “Diversity and Pluralism: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.” Over the years, Pincus published four books and monographs and several dozen scholarly articles on a wide range of topics including the role of community colleges in higher education, race relations, affirmative action, conservative education policy and diversity. Over the course of his career, he has taught between 6,000 and 7,000 undergraduates and several hundred graduate students in applied sociology, LLC, public policy and intercultural communication. For the past several years, he has also been working on a memoir and has taken creative writing classes through the Gotham Writers Workshop based in New York City. UMBC thanks Fred L. Pincus for his tremendous service to our community and to the field of higher education over the past 44 years.
The Baltimore Sun’s “Picture of Health” blog today highlights an exciting new online resource developed by UMBC’s Hilltop Institute in partnership with the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The interactive website provides expanded public access to Medicaid data, giving users a clear picture of population health by county.
The site includes maps that reveal the frequency of chronic diseases (like diabetes and asthma), mental health conditions and substance abuse across Maryland’s counties. “These data will help localities plan for health improvement,” said Frances B. Phillips, Deputy Secretary for Public Health Services. Governor O’Malley has also responded positively to the site, commenting on the value of Hilltop’s health data visualization.
William H. Thomas, a geriatrician, author and UMBC Erickson School faculty member, calls himself a “nursing home abolitionist.” For years he has championed an innovative, new approach to senior care based on small, home-like environments. Today his vision is a reality.
The Green House Residences at Stadium Place opened in Baltimore last week. Coinciding with the launch of the new facility, Sheilah Kast of WYPR’s “Maryland Morning” interviewed Thomas about the future of senior living.
In responding to the global economic crisis of the past two years, which nations’ governments got it right and which got it wrong? UMBC political science professor Thomas Schaller asks this question in his latest Baltimore Sun column, which compares economic policies and outcomes in the U.S. and Europe. “Economic indicators strongly suggest that the Obama administration and those who called in 2009 for a massive, Keynesian stimulus made the prudent, informed choice,” Schaller argues. He writes, “Austerity measures — tax increases and public sector payroll and benefit reductions — actually resulted in higher, not lower debt ratios for some European economies because GDP contraction yielded lower tax revenues, which more than offset any short-term economic savings from budget-slashing.”
The system of indentured labor from India, which the British devised in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery to replace the demand for labor world-wide, has often been referred to as a “new system of slavery.” When, how and why did this once lucrative system eventually come to an end? What was the significance of this second abolition?
Mrinalini Sinha, associate professor of history and women’s studies at Penn State, will address these questions in a Social Sciences Forum lecture on April 18, 4:00 p.m. in the UMBC library, 7th floor. The talk is co-sponsored by UMBC’s Asian Studies Program, Gender and Women’s Studies Program, and the Departments of History, English and Political Science.
Sinha will focus on the contributions of abolitionist Totaram Sanadhya, an ex-indentured laborer and author of one of the earliest first-hand accounts of indenture.
Donald F. Norris, professor and chairman of UMBC’s Department of Public Policy, offered insight to both the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun this week on what the media are calling Maryland’s “budget meltdown.”
Although state lawmakers passed a budget, the Senate failed to vote on a package of tax increases that would fund it. If the problem isn’t corrected by July 1, it will trigger a “Doomsday” budget that cuts hundreds of millions of dollars from public safety and education.
“If the Doomsday budget stands, everybody gets hurt,” Norris argues, including both interests in Maryland that now lack funding and the lawmakers themselves, who appear dysfunctional. Norris says, “It shows that they can’t function. That they can’t govern.”
Olszewski, 29, a second-term Baltimore County Democrat, was a social studies and special education teacher prior to enrolling at UMBC. As a delegate, he regularly comments on state governance in the media, including in the Baltimore Sun‘s most recent coverage of Maryland budget developments.
UMBC professor Roy T. Meyers, political science, offered his budget expertise in this week’s PolitiFact analysis of a claim by Rep. Paul Ryan that “the president has doubled the size of government since he took office.” The article concludes that data do not support Ryan’s statement. Meyers argues that even if the doubling claim were true, President Obama would not be the cause. “Were all the increased outlays because of Obama’s actions? Of course not,” Meyers says. “Many of them were the result of ‘mandatory’ policies in place before he took office, and those policies responded to unfavorable economic conditions — deposit insurance, food stamps, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and so on.” PolitiFact rated Ryan’s claim “Pants on Fire” and Ryan’s office has since replaced the sentence on his congressional website.
“At the end of the day, it’s about student success,” Burroughs told CNN. “My number one priority is going to be hiring and retaining highly-qualified teachers…and the ones that are struggling we need to provide them professional development. If they’re not able to be successful after that, they have to exit our system.”
Reflecting on criticism that the candidates are too young to be effective leaders, Murray argued, “We’re the ones that can really make a difference, because we’ve been there and we understand what’s working and what’s not.” Emphasizing the importance of diversity on the school board, he continued, “It doesn’t help to have a room of 10 people if they all have the same background and the same set of ideas.”
This feature follows a front-page Metro story in the Washington Post on the students’ electoral success. Both received the most votes in their districts by wide margins.
“The president of the Council of Prince George’s County PTAs said her phone has been ringing nonstop since final results from Tuesday’s primary election were reported,” writes Ovetta Wiggins in today’s Washington Post. The results of that election? Three young adults, including two students from UMBC and one from College Park, soundly defeated their Prince George’s County Board of Education primary opponents to advance to the general election in November.
Wiggins reports that although the isolated election of a single teenager to a school board is not unusual, this case’s three young candidates make it exceptional. UMBC student David H. Murray, a 20-year-old UMBC economics major and Sondheim Scholar, is vying for a District 1 seat. Fellow sophomore Edward Burroughs is running for reelection in District 8. Both received the most votes in their districts by wide margins.
In today’s U.S. News article “Why Our Homes Make Us Happy,” UMBC professor Robert Rubinstein (Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology) argues that having a connection to home is important for our well-being throughout the life course and particularly in later life. “We live in a society that is concerned with freedom,” Rubinstein says. He argues “being able to make a space for yourself, and having a central place from which to look out at the world” is central to personal development in American culture, which highly values independence, autonomy and control.
Rubinstein offered particular insight for the meaning of home among older adults. He suggests transitioning to a new environment “can be very difficult for older people who have lived in a place for 40 or 50 years” and that they might benefit from counseling before moving into a smaller home or an assisted care facility.
