All posts by: Jenny O'Grady

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

Q. When you speak about UMBC’s achievements, you always stress the contribution made by your predecessor as president: the late Michael Hooker. What is his legacy at UMBC? What role did he play in your life as a mentor and friend? — Richard Byrne ’86, English

A. Michael Hooker was capable of seeing what others did not think possible. He clearly saw the great potential of UMBC to become an increasingly important institution of higher education in our country.

He had no trouble saying that UMBC was going to be the best university of its size and its kind in the country. And it sounded like hyperbole. Except he really believed it.

Michael also saw that the entire Baltimore region could go to the next level by focusing on higher education. He got a number of people to visit the university. He also began to see taking people to the roof of [the Administration Building] as a way to allow them to see the campus – and the campus connection with downtown Baltimore. I take people to the roof because Michael taught me to take people to the roof.

Wherever Michael Hooker went, whether it was to Massachusetts, or to North Carolina, or when he was here at UMBC, people called him a whirlwind. He had a way of moving with great energy and excitement. People were either fascinated with him, or they were bothered by what he said. And Michael preferred people being bothered by what he said to being boring.

I was always taken by his intellectual curiosity. He was always excited by what was new at UMBC, and he was seeking it out and asking questions – be it in the labs or in the theatre productions.

When I first visited here, and I was not necessarily thinking of moving to this university, Michael said to me: “You’d be good for UMBC. And UMBC would be good for you. It’s time for you to move to another position.” And at first it somewhat upset me. I thought: “This man doesn’t know me. How dare he say what’s best for me?” But he had a way of saying it with confidence. And as intellectual as he was, he used his gut in making decisions. He saw that he could trust me.

He told me on the first day I came to work here as vice provost: “You’re going to be president of this place one day.” And I said: “Yeah, right, Michael.” I was always saying that to him: “Yeah, right, Michael.”

We were constantly memorizing things and reciting them together. Poetry, or things we had read. He was always pushing me. Another quality Michael possessed, however, was that he listened. My argument to him was that we needed to make sure that all of UMBC’s students – graduate and undergraduate – were having a good experience. He listened, and then he said: “Well, do it. Make it happen.” He liked bringing people with good ideas around and having them take those ideas to reality.

Michael had tremendous pride in UMBC as an institution, even after he left. When you look at the True Grit statue outside the Retriever Activities Center, that was Michael, too. If you asked him what he did at UMBC that really mattered, he’d say that he wanted that dog out front. As a symbol. At the time, it seemed like a kooky idea. But whenever Michael came back to campus, he would point to it.

To the very end, when Michael was dying and I went to see him at National Institutes of Health, his eyes reflected his spirit. He was still elevating and supporting me. He wanted to hear about UMBC. He always sang UMBC’s praises.

To send a question to President Hrabowski, click here.

Traditions don’t start easily. Someone has to plant the seeds. Attract attention to them. Nurture them. Allow them both to grow and take root.

The image on the cover of the Fall 2012 issue of UMBC Magazine is one tradition that has taken root at the university. UMBC’s presidential insignia – worn by the university’s president at every commencement – was a gift from the university’s Alumni Association that recognized the school’s milestone 30th anniversary in 1996.

The insignia was purposely created to have a contemporary look that reflected the innovation that characterized the institution. The insignia’s design includes not only the university seal, but also incorporates three symbols that represent the key pillars upon which UMBC stands as a proud public university in Maryland: teaching, research and service. There are also visual references to the iconic Albin O. Kuhn Library in its design – rooting the insignia firmly in campus space.

At the time of its completion in 1998, UMBC’s director of alumni relations Joan Williams observed that she hoped the insignia was “just the beginning of many more traditions to come.” But little did she know that the president who first wore the insignia 14 years ago would still be the university’s leader in 2012.

Our cover story in this issue examines the 20 years of transformation at UMBC that have occurred under the leadership of Freeman A. Hrabowski, III. (See “From Aspiration to Achievement”).

Stability also helps nurture traditions. UMBC’s two decades with Hrabowski at the helm have given the university the ability to innovate in an environment of continuity – and thus advance the commitment to teaching, research and service that are part of the design of the university and its insignia.

As a young university with a growing sense of its legacy and its promise, the students, faculty, and staff of UMBC make history every day. And alumni can do it, too. Everything that happens at UMBC now lays the foundation for the university’s future.

For instance, every year that there is a bonfire at UMBC Homecoming brings that conflagration another step away from being an “annual event” and one step closer to being a “tradition.” And every year that The Retriever Weekly publishes during the first week of school – as it has since 1966 – makes the university’s student newspaper more of an institution.

Both the bonfire and The Retriever Weekly will figure prominently in this year’s UMBC Homecoming 2012. The bonfire will be set at dusk on Wednesday, October 10. And a reunion of staff members of The Retriever Weekly will happen on Saturday, October 13, at 2:30 p.m.

We hope to see you at Homecoming 2012. You will see how UMBC nurtures the traditions it has as it creates new ones – and you can help us make history in continuing them.

— Richard Byrne ’86

From the moment we rise each day, we are surrounded by messages from the media: news, advertising, images, sounds, video, texts. How do we make sense of it all intellectually? Students in UMBC’s Media & Communication Studies (MCS) major are trying to do just that. UMBC Magazine sat down with Jason Loviglio, director of the program, and Donald Snyder, a lecturer and director of the MCS internship program, to find out more about one of UMBC’s fastest growing majors.

* * * * *

UMBC Magazine: People might be surprised that many of the major’s introductory classes are grounded in theory, rather than producing media.

Jason Loviglio: Any humanities discipline should have as its goal to help young minds think critically, to peel away layers of distracting information, misleading information, and misinformation to get at implicit truths and implicit facts that are harder to see. All of us on the MCS faculty see ourselves as engaged in the difficult task of encouraging students to think critically, to look for implicit meanings, and to read against the grain whenever possible.

Donald Snyder: We’ve also tried to balance the theoretical core with practical applications of media literacy in the world of today or the world of tomorrow. Students have responded overwhelmingly positively to the push toward internships. We talk to them about the importance of getting really good practical experience and figuring out what it means to be a professional. Our lab-based courses and our new course in media literacy will focus on digital and public projects. It’s very exciting with the technologies we have available to us in terms of production and distribution.

UMBC Magazine: Why is UMBC such a good place for a media and communication studies program?

Loviglio: The fact that the program exists has everything to do with the culture of collaboration at UMBC. There was an interest at the highest levels of the university to create something along these lines. It was entrusted to humanities people and we made it after our own interests: we made it rigorous, we made it critical, we made it writing intensive, and we made it interesting to us.

We also had support from our dean, John Jeffries, and from three provosts. And the most important thing is that we had massive support from other humanities departments and programs, who volunteered time and resources to build the capacity to run a major that is now one of the middle- to large-sized majors in the college. In some cases, they lost students to us. That spirit of collaboration and cross-disciplinary cooperation is a credit to an atmosphere at UMBC that has been encouraged from top-down, but that was really built from bottom-up.

Snyder: With the growth that we’ve experienced, there was certainly a demand for this type of intellectual field at UMBC.

UMBC Magazine: The job market in traditional media is shrinking. What value does an MCS degree offer?

Loviglio: The first thing we’re eager to tell students is what we’re not. We’re not a narrow pre-professional major and we’re not preparing students for specific technical positions within the media industries as they exist right now. What we’re trying to do is much more like what a classical liberal arts discipline has always tried to do, which is teach the skills of communication, critical thinking, and love of learning. The major offers skills that we think will serve students as workers and citizens in the 21st century better than anything else we can think of.

Snyder: Thinking about media in a broader way instead of just narrow media tracks is one of the reasons we built this interdisciplinary model. We’ve had students who have combined environmental science and MCS, communicating essential environmental issues to the public. We’ve had theatre students who have talked about bringing new social media platforms to that more traditional art form. The major certainly has been valuable for students to really establish themselves within all kinds of different fields.

— Stefanie Mavronis ’12

Whether he is enlightening readers on the nuances of photographs with his posts on “The Lens” blog at The New York Times, curating an exhibit such as For All the World to See, or testing the boundaries of memoir and cultural criticism (as he did with his book White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness), you can count on Maurice Berger to be at the forefront of American culture’s engagement with its history and visual culture.
Berger is research professor and the chief curator at UMBC’s Center for Arts, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC). He is also a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York City. He took a B.A. from Hunter College and his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Berger’s range of activities is prolific – including cultural criticism in books and articles, curating exhibits and filmmaking. (His short film, Threshold, was screened in May at the Whitney Biennial.)
Berger’s interests range widely, and he has written about and organized exhibits taking in the grand sweep of 20th Century U.S. culture and its artistic movements. Yet it is his eagerness to tackle some of the thorniest issues in American race relations that has catapulted him to greatest prominence. Early in his career, Berger was a key voice in the debate over whether art museums were perpetuating racism (including a 1990 piece in Art in America – “Are Art Museums Racist?”). And his memoir, White Lies, dissected his own experience and attitudes about race while simultaneously conducting a rigorous yet empathetic analysis of the entire fraught concept of racial categories. (The New York Times called the book “startlingly original.”)
As Berger receives recognition and rewards for For All the World to See and his other work in cultural research (including an Emmy Award nomination for his work on a PBS Sunday Arts story about For All the World to See and the “Outstanding Exhibition in a University Art Museum 2010″ from the Association of Art Museum Curators), he is moving forward on new projects that include three future exhibits that will also appear at the CADVC in coming years: a 25th anniversary exhibit for the center and a new exhibit tracing the influence of modernism on the birth of American television.
Berger talked with UMBC Magazine recently about his career and those future exhibits. He is particularly excited about the opportunity to reach even wider audiences through his posts on “The Lens” blog.
“It’s an opportunity to explore the story of race in America through photographs,” Berger says. “The enormous audience that the Times affords will provides me with a broad, international platform to explore the fraught, but also vital, subject of race. The response to my first piece this July, on Gordon Parks’ civil rights photographs, was extraordinary. My plan is to write an essay every other month.”
– Richard Byrne ’86
UMBC Magazine: One thing that immediately stands out to me when looking at your career is that you have spent a great deal of time questioning how race works in our institutions and in our own individual lives – as you did so eloquently with your own life in White Lies.
Maurice Berger: My interest in questioning institutional attitudes about race goes back to my childhood, to growing up in an environment in which very few white people lived or worked. I saw how the system operated very early in life. I could walk around a department store and not be followed by security guards, for example, while my black friends would walk around the same stores and be followed. Even early on, I understood.
I also saw teachers who would treat black students quite differently from the way they treated me – since I for most of my early education I was one of the few white kids in the schools I attended. Even from that early vantage point, I could see things were not quite equal – and that institutions had certain kinds of collective attitudes.
I became a professor at Hunter College in the early 1980s. (First thing you know I was back as a professor at my undergraduate college.) And even there, I found it interesting that I had only one African-American colleague – and he was an artist, not an art historian. I had never heard a black artist discussed in any of my art history classes as an undergraduate or a graduate student, perhaps with the exception of a mention of Jacob Lawrence in passing.
Given that my field is 20th century American art and culture, that’s pretty amazing. And my teaching career began just about the time I began publishing in 1980. So at that point, I started to see that there was a problem. And I realized that I had to do something about it as an art historian and a cultural historian (as well as a responsible human being).
As you see with White Lies, I’ve always been thinking about these issues. But the reason that the memoir was published in 1999 and not in 1989 was that I wasn’t ready. One of the hardest things that I have accomplished as a writer was to write autobiographically. It brings up memories. It brings up things you’d rather not think about. It exposes you in a certain way. And then when you publish it, you rightfully (in an almost paranoid way) feel that what you’ve published isn’t a piece of writing, but you. If it is rejected, then you are rejected.
The good news is that White Lies was widely reviewed and almost every review was very positive and some were raves (it even was nominated for several awards). The book remains in print and it still has a relatively wide audience, especially among young people and in academia. So it turned out all right, but it was very scary at the time.
UMBC Magazine: When I went back and read the profile of you that The New York Times published shortly after White Lies came out, one of the things you noted was that readers’ responses to the book were very different and very personal. Telling your own story seemed to compel readers to share their journeys.
Berger: I think with race – and attitudes and behavior around race – if you want to change, it has to begin with personal honesty. I’ve always said that if people can’t see the problem and acknowledge the problem, then you can’t get past it.
Remember, so much of what I am writing about in White Lies is not just the domain of white supremacy in the South, it is also the domain of white liberals and leftists. Racism is not limited to conservatives or Southerners. We all need to collectively – and, even more important, intimately and privately, where there is less room to be rebuked or embarrassed – assess ourselves.
And that’s the point of White Lies. And it’s also part of the apparatus of For All the World to See. All the images and stories in the exhibit invite you to think about your own attitudes. Or, if you are older, to reflect on when you yourself first saw these images. How did they make you feel? Did they help change your attitudes? Did they awaken you to the reality of racism and segregation and the problems they presented for the country?
UMBC Magazine: Do you remember the moment when you had the vision for For All the World to See? Was there a particular image that set you in the direction you took in the exhibit?
Berger: It’s a funny thing to think about, because I can usually answer that question when someone asks it about a particular project. It’s not that I don’t remember with regard to For All the World to See, but the thing that’s different with this project – and possibly why it has been so well received and reached so many people (almost one million to date) – is that for the first time, in a dynamic and comprehensive way, I have been able to put together my two primary cultural research areas. The first is the history of American race relations – the issues of race and racism and the analysis of them.
The other interest I have been able to bring to bear on For All the World to See is how visual images manipulate, inspire, infiltrate and integrate ideas in American society and culture. As a cultural historian, my focus is on visual culture and how it operates in society.
So maybe that’s why I can’t remember a particular image. This project has been so natural. It’s the culmination of the two things I have been most driven to do and to explore, two things that have preoccupied me for most of my life.
UMBC Magazine: One of things in the exhibit that impressed me greatly was the way that the iconic journalistic images of the political and moral battles of the Civil Rights movement are juxtaposed and connected with lesser-known visual images created to build self-esteem in the African-American community and portray life in that community as very much like that in white America.
Berger: Until this project most exhibitions of Civil Rights history or Civil Rights culture focused on one particular thing: The way that photographers, and mostly well-known photographers or photojournalists (many of them white), documented the struggle for Civil Rights. And what that has meant is that these exhibitions are dominated by images of the events that we have come to associate with the Civil Rights movement: the protests, the marches, conflagrations, violence, poverty, and all the outward vestiges of racial segregation and prejudice. And that is what Civil Rights imagery has come to mean for most Americans.
For All the World to See argues that the Civil Rights movement is not just about who documented it, or the story of these protests and other events. It proposes that images of all kinds—from film and television to picture magazines and advertising (to quote the great, late photographer Gordon Parks) were employed by African Americans as a “weapon” against racism in America.
Thus, the story of the visual culture of the civil rights movement is far more complicated than we realize. For as [Supreme Court Justice] Thurgood Marshall said, the struggle for civil rights was not just about the protests or the legal cases, but also about African-American morale and legitimacy. How do you inspire a community that is continually beaten down by the realities of racism to rise up and keep the faith? How do you convince white people that the habitually negative and subservient images of black Americans in the culture at large were wrong and immoral? And, perhaps most important, how do you bolster the morale of African Americans scarred by racism and segregation? How to you reflect back to them images that showed the wholesome nature of black life, despite the onslaught of racism in myriad forms?
And, just as importantly, while much of white America did not perpetuate Jim Crow segregation, most white people remained uninformed about the African American community and the pervasive reality of racism, particularly their own. Once again, visual culture played an important role in educating white Americans about the reality of race and racism in America. Affirmative images of black people served as a very important aspect of the movement. These images not only bolstered the morale of African Americans in the face of withering prejudice, but also reminded white Americans that black people led the same kinds of lives and had the same kinds of family relationships as their white counterparts. Such imagery, in other words, powerfully appealed to the empathy of white readers and viewers.
UMBC Magazine: What’s next for you as a cultural historian and curator?
Berger: I am working on a number of projects simultaneously. Much of what I’ll continue to do revolves around the question of American race relations and the study of racism and segregation in America. I am working on another large Civil Rights exhibition and book, though it’s still a long way off, and it will be at CADVC in 2017: The Site of Memory: Reimagining the History of Civil Rights. Plus, I will be contributing regularly to the “Lens” blog at The New York Times, which I am very excited about. Writing for the Times gives me a broad, international platform through which I can share my ideas about race in America (and hopefully make a difference, even change minds and hearts).
I’ve also had a long term relationship with The Jewish Museum, where I have worked on a number of projects over the past twenty years. Last December, shortly after she came on board, newly hired Jewish Museum director Claudia Gould asked me to join the museum as consulting curator. She felt that my work and my point of view were a good fit. Over the past eight months, we’ve been working together with our colleagues to reshape the mandate of the museum and move forward in a bigger and more dynamic way.
I am also working on a collaborative project with The Jewish Museum and the CADVC, an exhibition and companion book (the latter to be published by Yale University Press): Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television. It’s the first major research project in a long time that does not focus on the story of American race relations It tells the extraordinary story of the birth and rise of American television from the 1940s to the 1960s, and how its executives and writers and producers – most of whom were Jewish – embraced the modernist avant garde as a source of inspiration, aesthetics, and ideas. Television pioneers such as Rod Serling were actively looking at surrealism; Ernie Kovacs was embracing both Dadaist and surrealist sensibilities in his work. And CBS employed some of the top modern artists and designers of the period to help them develop what was at the time one of the most progressive design campaigns of any American company.
The exhibit also argues that television was born not just in the spirit of entertainment, some of it frivolous, but also with deeply held artistic and intellectual concepts and ambitions. This story is virtually unknown to most Americans (and even most art and cultural historians).
Yet, even an institution as famous as the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) got into the act of producing, curating, and analyzing the medium. In the 1950s, the museum established the MOMA “Television Project,” dedicated to exploring the creative possibilities of television and producing content that sold the gospel of modern art and established the importance of modern artists. We will actually be working with MoMA to produce an array of public programs and TV screenings around the exhibition.
Ultimately, and despite the commercialism of it all, art has always been present on television. The point of “Revolution of the Eye” is that art is in the medium’s DNA.
I am also proud to say that I will also be curating CADVC’s 25th anniversary exhibition, which will open in 2014. So at UMBC alone, over the next five years, three of my projects will premiere.
– Return to Staging the Struggle