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The News – Fall 2010

CRIMSON ACCOLADE

On a bright and sunny late May morning in Cambridge, MA, UMBC’s president Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, received one of the most prestigious awards offered in American higher education: an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Harvard University.

Hrabowski was one of a group of 10 recipients that included Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Cech, retired U.S. Supreme Court justice David Souter and Oscar award-winning actress Meryl Streep.

In her remarks on the occasion, Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust called Hrabowski “a galvanic force in his university’s ascent, spurring success against the odds. A leader whose wellspring of energy and insight has plenished pools of talent in science and beyond.”

Reflecting on the award a few weeks after the ceremony, UMBC’s president says that “I consider that award as an award for the institution. It comes as a result of the respect our colleagues there have for the academic enterprise here.”

Hrabowski adds that the festivities – and the chance to talk with academic leaders at Harvard – revealed to him the depth and breadth of that respect.

“The point made to me over and over again was that the UMBC product is superb,” says UMBC’s president. “And that the students who have graduated from here and gone to Harvard – across a range of disciplines – have done extraordinary work and come from a wide range of racial and ethnic and economic backgrounds. So we have become a symbol of inclusive excellence in American higher education.”

— Richard Byrne ’86
Image: Staff Photographer Justin Ide/Harvard University


ALUMNI ACHIEVERS

Last year, the UMBC Alumni of the Year awards moved back to campus and were scheduled to coincide with the university’s Homecoming celebrations. It was such a smashing success that it’s happening again on Thursday, October 14, 2010, with a new crop of alumni award winners picked by UMBC’s Alumni Association Board of Directors. This year’s recipients are:

  • Michael George ’87, information systems – a vice president at Amazon.com – is the Engineering and Information Technology Alumnus of the Year.
  • Vikki Valentine ’96, English – a science editor at National Public Radio – is the Humanities Alumna of the Year.
  • Michael Nishimura ’80, M.S. ’84 and Ph.D. ’89 – Vice Chair of Research, Department of Surgery at the Medical University of South Carolina – is Natural and Mathematical Science Alumnus of the Year.
  • Chad Cradock ’97, psychology – director of aquatics at UMBC and leader of the university’s highly successful swimming teams — is Social and Behavioral Sciences Alumnus of the Year.
  • Dean Alexander ’88, visual arts – award-winning photographer – is the Visual and Performing Arts Alumnus of the Year.
  • Gene Trainor ’86, health science and policy and economics – chair of the alumni committee for UMBC’s Exceptional by Example campaign – will receive the Distinguished Service to the University and the Alumni Association Award.
  • Aaron Merki ’05, political science – an associate at Venable LLP – will receive the Young Alumni Rising Star Award.

— Richard Byrne ’86


U.S. News: UMBC IS STILL NUMBER ONE

Getting to the top is hard. But ask any competitor, and they’ll tell you that staying there is much harder.

That’s why UMBC’s repeat appearance at the top of the list of “Up-and-Coming National Universities” in the U.S. News and World Report America’s Best Colleges Guide this year is an acknowledgment that UMBC has raised itself to prominence in discussions about best practices in higher education.

How do we know that? Well, the “Up-and-Coming” list is what’s known as a “reputational survey.” U.S. News canvasses a wide range of academic leaders (college and university presidents, provosts and admissions deans) and asks them which 10 institutions “are worth watching because they are making promising and innovative changes.”

In short: the more those leaders are talking about you, the higher your ranking. UMBC’s place at the summit of the list for a second straight year means that the university has people talking – and in a good way.

UMBC’s commitment to undergraduate education was also highlighted once again by the university’s placement on the annual guide’s list of the top 16 national universities “where the faculty has an unusual commitment to undergraduate teaching.” Other universities on that list include Dartmouth, Princeton, Brown, the University of California-Berkeley, Stanford, and Yale.

In a joint letter to the campus community, UMBC’s president Freeman A. Hrabowski, III and provost Elliot Hirshman wrote that “needless to say, we are extremely proud to be recognized for our commitment to our students and to be seen as a national leader in higher education.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

HIGH ASSESSMENT

High Assessment

Books about higher education attract policy makers and academic leaders, but they also increasingly find readers among parents and students making tough decisions about where to spend their tuition dollars.

One book about America’s colleges being widely discussed this autumn is Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids And What We Can Do About It. Co-written by Queens College professor Andrew Hacker and New York Times columnist Claudia Dreifus, the book has been serialized in The Chronicle of Higher Education and is stirring up spirited debate.

The big news for UMBC is that Hacker and Dreifus’ assessment of the university squares significantly with the plaudits for overall excellence and undergraduate teaching that UMBC has received from U.S. News and World Report and other media outlets.

“Of all the research universities we’ve visited, [UMBC] is the place that has most capably connected research with undergraduate education,” Hacker and Dreifus write. The authors cite a number of UMBC success stories in undergraduate education – and a palpable overall enthusiasm among students – observed in a campus visit made as they researched their book.

While Hacker and Dreifus also noted the Meyerhoff Scholars Program’s immense success in increasing minority presence in the sciences and engineering, their conclusions about UMBC and its president focused keenly on an issue that many students and parents value most highly in selecting a university:

“[Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski, III] sets a tone from the top that says teaching undergraduates is important, and the faculty knows he means it.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

Back to Top

Tapping Into the Wire

American Studies professor Kimberly Moffitt felt like a stranger when she moved to Baltimore. But her research on public attitudes about the gritty HBO crime drama brought the city closer to home.

By Richard Byrne ’86
Photos by Howard Korn

When assistant professor of American Studies Kimberly Moffitt arrived in Maryland and moved into the Liberty Heights neighborhood in the northwest section of Baltimore four years ago, she had an almost immediate aversion to the place. For Moffitt, Charm City wasn’t so charming.

“I’ve lived in a number of major cities,” she says. “New York, Boston, Chicago and D.C. And this one seemed to rub me the wrong way.”

So Moffitt sought to resolve her dilemma as many academics do: Make her strange new environment the subject of pedagogy by creating a course on Baltimore in film.

“It forced me to learn about Baltimore,” Moffitt recalls. “This is going to be home. So how can I embrace it in ways that fit my own interests? And how we bring film and other media into how we understand America is precisely what I’m interested in.”

Moffitt stocked her course with works by the best-known names who had used the city as a setting for their films. But she balked at first when a colleague insisted that she include the critically-acclaimed HBO series The Wire – which tracks the intersection of the drug trade with the decline of American cities and institutions.

“He said it was the most contemporary example using the city as a landscape,” Moffitt recalls. “And he asked: What were the chances of the students knowing John Waters or Barry Levinson or even Charles Dutton in their age group? You have to talk about The Wire because that’s what they know.”

Moffitt picked up on The Wire in its fourth season – which included a masterful excavation of the problems facing urban schools. And like many viewers, she got hooked. And not merely as a fan of the show, but also as a scholar who saw an opportunity – through the show’s unblinking gaze on the grit and graft of Baltimore – to analyze how the city’s residents and others saw themselves and their metropolis.

FINDING BALTIMORE’S VOICE

Moffitt observes that academics in various disciplines such as sociology, urban planning and political science were already mining The Wire for their research. “The voice I felt wasn’t being talked about was the perspective of Baltimore itself,” she says. “People who live and work here day-to-day. Do they love it? Do they hate it? Is it a bad reflection on their city – or truth telling that needs to be heard?”

So Moffitt set out to find them. She initially wanted to create focus groups with various constituencies represented in The Wire (teachers, journalists, law enforcement), but ran into some yellow “Do Not Cross” tape – particularly with Baltimore’s finest.

“It was hard to get police officers to talk about The Wire, period,” says Moffitt. Her efforts extended to walking unannounced into precincts and approaching squad cars, but availed her little in the way of scholarly insight.

“The thing I heard back from the [Baltimore Police Department] public affairs office was, ‘We do not participate in entertainment research,’” Moffitt recalls. So the UMBC professor pursued another avenue to obtain her data: a web survey. The full survey featured 55 questions, including 14 targeted specifically at local residents.

Moffitt’s sample grew quickly from current and former Baltimore residents to a cohort that included Wire viewers from across the United States. She even put up links to the survey on a Facebook page devoted to the series.

After receiving queries from the United Kingdom (where The Wire was being aired a few years behind its U.S. showings) and elsewhere, she opened up the survey to anyone with an interest in the show. Eventually, Moffitt received 800 completed responses.

Opening up the survey did result in less than 25 percent of the responses coming from the target audience. But it did reveal the depth and breadth of the show’s popularity – and how those outside the city viewed Baltimore after watching The Wire. (Season Four, by the way, was the fan favorite of all five seasons.)

“I’m happy with the survey,” says Moffitt, who is now doing follow-up interviews with Baltimore-area survey participants who agreed to be interviewed at greater length about their perceptions of the interplay between the city, various professions and the show. She’s hoping that those interviews will lead to other local residents that the web survey didn’t pick up.

“The voices I hear are loving the city, loving the realism of The Wire, but worrying about its effect on tourism,” she concludes.

Part of what Moffitt hopes to do in the follow-up interviews is “to cultivate greater diversity in the voices.” In particular, she says, the fact that more than two-thirds of the web survey respondents were white means that she has some work to do to encompass the city’s full ethnic weave.

“The city is not 68 percent white,” she says. “I want to get a greater sense of racial and ethnic diversity in response to the show. I really want to hear the voice of Baltimore.”

MAKING SENSE OF MOTHERS

While her own ambivalence about Baltimore sparked her initial scholarly interest in The Wire, Moffitt’s latest work is now plunging headlong into the politics of gender and race depicted in the series.

“I have issues with the show,” Moffitt says. “I think it’s fabulously written, but I do have issues with it… especially how it can perpetuate the ways in which we look at certain people.”

In particular, Moffitt says that she is drawn to the topic of how black mothers are depicted on the show. “Personally, I was very taken aback by these moms,” she says.

Indeed, as the professor and this reporter tally up the mothers represented on The Wire during an interview, it’s agreed that only two women could be considered “good” mothers – one is a white police officer and the other is an older black adoptive mother. The preponderance of black mothers on the show are abusive, neglectful and – in some cases – willing to sell out their children for the good of a larger drug syndicate or their own personal comfort.

“There’s a particular story being told,” Moffitt says. [University of Maryland at College Park professor of sociology] Patricia Hill Collins talks about there being these particular images that are constantly recycled about black women – and one of them is the bad black mother. That easily, without much effort, fits into what [series creators] David Simon and Ed Burns are doing on The Wire.”

Moffitt says that her interest in this aspect of The Wire springs from similar work she did as a scholar with Stevenson University professor Heather Harris on the films of Spike Lee. “One of the things that sticks out time and again [in Lee’s films] is how he reports on motherhood – and it’s not very flattering.”

When Moffitt’s survey asked respondents what they thought was missing from the show, a number of them – a majority of whom were white and middle-class and male – commented that they felt that their voice was missing from the series and that they did not see their Baltimore reflected in the show.

As a researcher who sought to help find her place in a strange city through a close study of The Wire, Moffitt says that she too is searching for her voice in the show as she looks for its missing good black mothers.

“As a black woman who is a wife and mother,” Moffitt asks, “where am I in this process? I live in Baltimore yet I do not see the women who look like me. Where is the face of the concerned black woman who is simply trying to succeed at keeping her family together and in good health, physically, emotionally, and spiritually?”

Over Coffee – Fall 2010

It’s no surprise that an Honors University in Maryland has a chapter of America’s longest-lived and most prestigious academic honor society. But hosting a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (PBK), founded in 1776 at The College of William and Mary, requires an intensive application and review process by the organization. Success is a sign of great distinction and intellectual rigor – especially at a university as young as UMBC. Jay Freyman, associate professor of ancient studies and first president of UMBC’s chapter, Anna Shields, current president and director of UMBC’s Honors College and outgoing Phi Beta Kappa chapter president and professor of computer engineering John Pinkston sat down with UMBC Magazine to talk about UMBC’S chapter which was created in 1997.

Q: I have read that it took a decade to create UMBC’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Jay Freyman: Oh, longer. We put in a preliminary application in 1979. The campus was only 13 years old. The term for that is “chutzpah.” We put in another application in 1982. That didn’t go anywhere either. But it was important that we did it. Because the executive secretary of Phi Beta Kappa invited us down to his office… and told us, “This is what we have concerns about.” One of the things that he suggested was that we start an Honors Program, which is now the Honors College.

After another 12 years, we thought we had a chance, so we applied in 1994 and were eventually approved in 1997.

Q: Students can’t apply to Phi Beta Kappa. They are chosen based on academic excellence and fulfillment of certain criteria – including 90 credits in liberal studies subjects, at least one college-level course in mathematics, and 18 credits in a structured program outside their major. How do you let students know what they need to do to be eligible?

Anna Shields: As director of the Honors College, one of the things I have my advising teams do is to let students know that Phi Beta Kappa is something that should be on their radar. That they need a college-level math course, for instance.

John Pinkston: The eligibility requirements are spelled out on our web page, but we need to do a better job of informing people about how meaningful membership is, and differentiate Phi Beta Kappa from other honor societies that have come on the scene.

Jay Freyman: There are two hard pieces of evidence that Phi Beta Kappa is different. First, the age. It was formed in 1776. There really isn’t anything else that comes up to that on its prestige. Second, there is the difficulty in obtaining a chapter charter.

Q: What’s the greatest misconception about Phi Beta Kappa at UMBC?

John Pinkston: The question of liberal studies can be interpreted many ways. At Princeton, where I graduated, engineers were eligible for Phi Beta Kappa. And I think there is an argument to be made that knowledge of technology is an important part of a liberal education. I was very pleasantly surprised at how receptive the UMBC chapter was to that idea.

Anna Shields: I think there’s a misconception in the culture generally that the love of learning is something that’s affiliated only with humanistic modes of inquiry. That’s not the case. You can’t turn over a rock here at UMBC without finding a passionate chemist or physicist or computer scientist. Passion and love of learning and liberal education can all go together and be perfectly coherent and important at a school that has strong STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] disciplines. Part of our job as the chapter is to explain to students how their membership reaffirms things about them that they may not have conceptualized or articulated as love of learning and passion for education.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Discovery – Fall 2010

PLAYING WITH TYRE

As the lights dim to signal the commencement of the UMBC Theatre Department’s production of William Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, the audience doesn’t quite know what to expect. The makeshift theater set up in the university’s Imaging Research Center (IRC) already defies expectations: A table for a stage. Actors dressed in all black.

At last, one of the actors picks up a toy man and gives it the deep booming voice of King Antiochus. A version of one of Shakespeare’s more difficult plays – blending technology and stagecraft – takes off.

The creative minds in UMBC’s theatre department never shy away from innovation, so when department chair Alan Kreizenbeck made a mental connection between the leaps of imagination in Pericles and his own observations of his two children at play, he decided to explore the possibility of staging a production of the play using Playmobil figures and other toys. The resulting production – which obtained some of its funding from a Kauffman Innovation Grant – grew into an interdisciplinary collaboration that spanned two semesters and three departments.

“When Alan first suggested it, I thought he was kidding,” said Michele Osherow, a professor of English and a resident dramaturg at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre.

As a prelude to the actual production, Osherow’s dramaturgy class created study and production notes for the creative team, actors and audience. “This is not an easy Shakespeare play,” she explains.

In part, the textual difficulties of Pericles arise from questions of corruption (the play only exists in quarto form, and it was not included in the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays) and disputed authorship (many scholars believe the text was co-written by George Wilkins, a minor Elizabethan author and tavern keeper involved in frequent scuffles with the law).

One goal shared by Osherow and her students was to help audiences shake their fear of such uncertainties in language and textual history. They dug deep into Pericles to uncover the fun in the text. That effort extended into the spring, when the actors cast in the production began to learn how to channel their talents through toys that they manipulated atop a table. Under the direction of the technical director of the Imaging Research Center, Eric Smallwood ’03 and ’10 M.F.A, imaging and digital arts, students in that program created dozens of images that corresponded with the play’s scenes.

The production that emerged married technology and performing arts in innovative ways. As the students played on stage, a camera was trained on the playing space, and this footage was imposed on one of the backgrounds and then projected onto the screen behind the actors. The result was a show that held three focal points for the audience: actors, toys and the images on the screen.

The performance itself reflected the sense of play and collaboration that everyone involved brought to the project. A Shakespeare action figure was used as the play’s narrator. When Pericles fed the hungry citizens of Tarsus with food from his ship, a student poured corn flakes onto the playing area.

“Imagination doesn’t stop just because we outgrow the toys,” said Kreizenbeck.

— Chelsea Haddaway

CREEDS AND CRISES

It’s not often that a historian gives a lecture in a series named in his honor, but that’s precisely what emeritus professor of history Robert K. Webb will do at 4 p.m. on October 27 at the Albin O. Kuhn Library.

The Robert K. Webb lecture is an annual event established by the History Department to honor Webb, a former UMBC professor who is also one of the preeminent historians of Great Britain’s religious and social movements. His talk is titled “The Very Long Eighteenth Century: An Experiment in the History of Religion?”

Reminiscing recently about his career as a historian, Webb recalls that he never had any intention of becoming a scholar whose work focused on religion.

“I sort of backed into working on the history of religion,” Webb says. “I saw myself as a social historian. I did my early work on literacy.”

Webb’s first book, The British Working Class Reader: 1790-1848; Literacy and Social Tension (1955), was part of a wave of research into that era. Webb and other scholars excavated the roots of the empowerment of the working class that fueled the social revolutions which convulsed Britain in the late 17th and 18th centuries.

“And then I became interested in middle-class radicals. I suppose that’s autobiographical to some extent,” Webb chuckles.

Webb first tackled the roots of the tumultuous career of political theorist Harriet Martineau in the Unitarian religion (leading to a 1960 book, Harriet Martineau: A Victorian Radical) and then widened his focus to religion’s importance as an animating force in British and European politics and history. In panoramic works on the era – including Modern England (1968) and Modern Europe (1972), co-written with his eminent colleague and friend Peter Gay – Webb reshaped our notions of how faith led to works of revolution and repression.

Webb says that his lecture will use “the Long 18th Century” – a term coined by University of Kansas professor Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark to describe the unity of religion and politics in Britain from 1660 to 1840 – as the springboard for an even more expansive investigation.

“My talk is about the relationship between religion and science,” Webb says, “or to put it better, religion and reason. I’m taking [Clarke’s] idea and making it into a very long 18th century – from the 1640s to the 1880s. It’s a period in which there was a real symbiosis between religion and science, which only gradually mutated into hostility.”

Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon (who died in 1626) had argued that religion and philosophy (or science) should be separated, but Webb says that the 1640s marked a long period in which many thinkers abandoned that notion and embraced a belief “that science supports religion, and religion supports science.”

It was only near the end of the 19th century, Webb argues, that there was an explicit return to the notion that Bacon set out. “In the 1880s, it all finally changes,” he says, “and very quickly. And after that, science and religion are at real loggerheads. I can show you this in denomination after denomination.”

— Richard Byrne ’86
LAB LEADER

Ralph Semmel ’92, Ph.D., computer science, is the new director of the renowned Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL). He replaced Richard Roca on July 1 to become the eighth director of APL in the laboratory’s 68-year history.

Located in Laurel, Md., APL has close to 5,000 employees conducting and supporting research related to national defense and security. Semmel has worked at the lab for the past 23 years.

Semmel is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and he completed master’s degrees at Hopkins and the University of Southern California before pursuing his doctorate at UMBC.

— Richard Byrne ’86
SPLITTING SECONDS

In Anthony M. Johnson’s world, the blink of the eye is an eon.

Indeed, the pulses of light used by Johnson – a professor of physics and of computer science and electrical engineering – in his research are so quick that scientists had to invent new words to describe their elapsed time: picoseconds (a trillionth), femtoseconds (a quadrillionth), and attoseconds (a quintillionth) of a second.

Nature really moves that fast. The initial movement in the seemingly simple act of seeing, for instance, has been measured by lasers and occurs in about 300 femtoseconds – as a photon arrives and triggers a cascade of biochemical events leading to vision.

Johnson is the director of UMBC’s Center for Advanced Studies in Photonics Research (CASPR), and deputy director of the NSF Engineering Research Center, Mid-Infrared Technologies for Health and the Environment (MIRTHE), a collaboration of six research universities including UMBC based at Princeton.

One of Johnson’s main tools is a titanium-doped sapphire laser which emits pulses measured in femtoseconds. His labs consist of large tables on which it appears people have dumped hundreds of mirrors and lenses randomly. In fact, every mirror and lens is in a precise position facing a precise direction to intercept a precise beam of light from a laser.

Johnson’s research is deeply imbedded in the principles of optics and quantum mechanics. Because electronic instruments are too slow, he uses light to measure light. He splits beams of photons, the basic constituent of light, into two streams in a crystal. One stream is altered slightly to add just enough distance to hold its arrival to a determined amount. (Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity says light always travels at one speed and extending the length of the trip is the only way to delay its arrival).

Another crystal generates a “harmonic” (a doubled frequency) of the merged light nearly instantaneously, which he can measure.

“It has helped us understand how many things work,” he says. “The devices and optical techniques we use uncover the processes in physics and chemistry.”

To make faster microprocessors and integrated circuits, scientists have to understand what happens in the semiconductors, events happening in picoseconds or shorter.

“The only way to measure these ultrafast events is with short pulses of light,” he says. Johnson’s research may even lead to faster Internet connections as more information is crammed down through fiber optic cables.

A native of Brooklyn, NY, Johnson graduated magna cum laude from the Polytechnic Institute of New York. He conducted his thesis research at the Bell Labs in New Jersey and earned a Ph.D. in physics from the City College of New York. He went on to work at Bell Labs for 14 years, and then reentered university life as chair of the physics department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology for eight years.

Johnson was recruited by UMBC to become the director of CASPR in 2003. His work with MIRTHE centers on improving medical devices to detect minute quantities of chemicals that may adversely affect health and wellness. He is one of a small number of African-American physicists and is a fellow of the National Society of Black Physicists and other professional societies.

— Joel N. Shurkin
LATTES AND LETTERS

When Starbucks solicits the thoughts of its millions of customers on comment cards, they likely weren’t counting on someone like Christine Ferrera ’10, M.F.A. imaging and digital arts.

Musing over one of the ubiquitous cards a few years ago, Ferrera recalls asking herself: “What would I naturally say to a friend?” Then Ferrera began writing. And didn’t stop.

Five years later, Ferrera has penned nearly 2,000 letters to Starbucks – one for every day of every year. And she continues to write them today. They range in tone from fun and quirky to highly sensitive. In one, she asks the company, “Has anyone ever fallen in love at Starbucks?” In another, she discusses her pride in buying a new couch. In many letters, Ferrera writes about the daily struggles of being an artist.

Ferrera started the lopsided correspondence when she lived in Richmond, taking classes at Virginia Commonwealth University. She enrolled in an endurance art class which required students to undertake a one-year project. The class was asked to do something out of their element, and since Ferrera was a painter, she chose writing.

“The only loose rule I had was that this wasn’t going to be some kind of political statement,” she says. “After the year was over, I just started doing it out of habit.”

Within a month, Ferrera received generic replies from Starbucks. Some even enclosed coupons. After six responses, Starbucks stopped writing back. But Ferrera kept writing. Occasionally, she would hear from the company – usually when she asked a question related to the coffee business. (For instance, Starbucks replied that people had fallen in love at the coffee shop.) In the main, however, the replies were curt.

After two years of writing, Ferrera moved to Korea. She didn’t hear from Starbucks that year, assuming they had lost her address. But when she returned to the United States, a surprise was waiting for her: a personal letter from a customer service representative at Starbucks.

“The letter was so direct, so confrontational,” she said. “But it was nice and obvious that she had something to say to me. She had been reading my letters for years and had been touched by them.”

Ferrera appreciated the reply, but she also felt something was lost. “The project served as a diary for me, and it was almost like no one was reading,” she says. “This letter assured me that someone had been reading, that my words were out there.”

Although Ferrara hopes she will be known for works other than her coffee correspondence, she observes that “Starbucks – and other corporations – are part of our every day landscape. Artists need to react to the times in which they live.” she said. “There may be some kind of shift eventually, and maybe I’ll know when to stop writing the letters. But for now, it is part of my routine, and I’ll keep doing it until there’s a reason to stop.”

— B. Rose Huber

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At Play – Fall 2010

MAKING THE GRADE

Points on the scoreboard aren’t the only ones that UMBC’s women’s basketball team is scoring. Team members are also racking up the grade points.

The team was recognized by the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA) for posting the third-highest grade-point average in the country among NCAA Division I teams.

Only Utah Valley (3.630) and South Dakota State (3.622) earned higher GPAs than UMBC’s women’s hoops team (3.578) in Division I. And the Retrievers ranked 13th in the country among schools from all divisions. The high marks were also the best-ever ranking for an America East conference school.

“It’s a testament to how hard our kids work,” said UMBC coach Phil Stern. “The players that we recruit understand what it takes to succeed at an honors university.” Team members have consistently posted GPAs of 3.0 or higher through Stern’s eight years as coach.

Jessica Hammond, assistant athletic director for academic services for student-athletes, said UMBC coaches work diligently to recruit athletes who can succeed academically. She points to UMBC’s overall graduation rate of 86 percent among athletes last year. Fourteen UMBC student-athletes graduated with honors, including two who earned summa cum laude degrees.

Forward Meghan Colabella ’10, history, for instance, graduated in only three years this past spring (magna cum laude) and will start graduate school as she plays in her final year of eligibility with UMBC.

“Academics is number one and basketball is number two,” says Stern, “and fortunately we have kids that understand that right away.”

— Jeff Seidel ’85
CYCLING FOR A CAUSE

Road trip. Those two words together conjure up thoughts of freedom, wide open space, and self discovery.

This summer, three UMBC alumni and one rising junior at the university put their own spin on this classic journey of fun and self-discovery as they cycled across the country to raise money for Active:Water – a charity dedicated to bringing clean water to communities around the globe.

The trip’s itinerary unfurled from San Francisco, CA, to Baltimore, MD. The crew of three cyclists – Mike German ’09, Mike Pacella ’10, and Jesse Crow ’12 – and one support car driver, Shelly Kessler ’10 – is connected by their relationship with UMBC and their strong belief in the importance of helping others.

“Living on the East Coast, we take water for granted,” says German. “Clean water access is not a commodity, but a human right.”

The four participants hope to raise $8,000 for Active:Water, and they’re well on their way to that goal thanks to family, friends, and people they’ve met along the way.

The kindness hasn’t only come in the form of donations. From home-cooked meals in Utah to peach cobbler and fireworks in Texas, almost everyone they’ve encountered has helped out.

“Everyone has something to offer others,” German observes. “It might not be much money, but it might be a nice piece of advice, a kind word, a glass of water, or a sandwich.”

Kessler adds that while the trip runs cross-country, the goals that she has set for herself are ones that will last more than a summer. “This is not just about a trip,” she says. “It’s about deciding to live a life of service.”

— Meredith Purvis

RETRIEVER (BLOG) BELIEVER

Curtis Tarver ’03, psychology and music, has made music for UMBC as a former member of the “Down and Dirty Dawgs” pep band. And he keeps up with his alma mater and other matters musical and sporting via his blog: “80 Minutes of Regulation.”

A native of Wilmington, DE, Tarver banged the drums for UMBC’s pep band for four years. These days, he works as an associate director of student programs at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, but part of his heart will always remain in Catonsville.

“I talk the most about the things that mean the most to me, and the things I follow most closely,” Tarver said. “Since I love UMBC and follow their programs, I tend to talk about them quite a bit.”

Tarver updates the blog once or twice a week. In the late spring, he posted an entry about his bout of sad nostalgia over the new look of UMBC’s athletics logo.

“I will not obsess over UMBC’s new logo,” Tarver wrote four times, tongue firmly in cheek. He also added a picture of the old logo, wishing it “Farewell and Godspeed, old friend.”

Tarver says that one of his post-graduation highlights was a chance to cheer on his alma mater in person when the Retrievers met Georgetown University in Raleigh, NC, in the 2008 NCAA men’s basketball tournament. He also made a trip to Chapel Hill to catch UMBC’s lacrosse team play the University of North Carolina in a 2009 NCAA tournament game.

“UMBC is where I met my wife, and, obviously, where I started my college career. It means the world to me,” Tarver says.

— Jeff Seidel ’85

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WORLD TITLE TEAMMATES

Brendan Mundorf ’06, sociology, and Drew Westervelt ’09, economics, have taken on – and conquered – the lacrosse world with a friendship that began at UMBC.

Both Mundorf and Westervelt were members of the United States team that won the 2010 World Lacrosse Championships in England in late July. Mundorf scored 17 goals in the six-game tournament and made the All-World team. Westervelt tallied 12 goals.

The national teammates have also played lacrosse together for seven seasons now: three years at UMBC and four more with the Denver Outlaws in Major League Lacrosse. “It was an honor to be selected to that team,” Mundorf said. “Having Drew there makes it even more special. We’ve gone down the same road together.”

Mundorf played at UMBC from 2003 to 2006 and finished as the school’s sixth all-time leading scorer with 195 points. Westervelt finished his UMBC career – which ran from 2004 through 2007 – with 206 points, making him the university’s third all-time scorer.

“It just seems like we keep meeting up,” Westervelt says with a laugh. “I’m just happy that I got to experience this with him. It’s always fun playing with him.”

UMBC lacrosse coach Don Zimmerman points to the duo’s success as further proof of the university’s burgeoning lacrosse reputation. The Johns Hopkins University had three players on America’s championship team. Like UMBC, Princeton, Syracuse, College Park and 2010 national champion Duke all placed two members on the winning team.

“It just shows that UMBC is a top-notch lacrosse school,” Mundorf said. “The opportunity is there through UMBC.”

— Jeff Seidel ’85
Photo by Bryce Vickmark

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An Elemental Education

Spend a semester inside UMBC’s pioneering Chemistry Discovery Center and you’ll find that its successes are rooted in teamwork – and two hours a week without Twitter and Twinkies.

By Ann Griswold
Photos Chris Hartlove

Think Chemistry 101 is hard? A few years ago, Bill LaCourse, chair of UMBC’s chemistry department, devised a way to simultaneously make it seem harder.

He called his invention the “Chemistry Discovery Center.” Students call it “the isolation tank” or “boot camp.”

LaCourse’s brainstorm is housed in a brightly-lit room on the second floor University Center – just a horseshoe toss from the chemistry department’s offices. For two hours every week, the students who enter it abandon all hope of food and drink, texting and web-surfing, Twitter and Facebook.

Their full attention is on chemistry – and in particular – thinking and talking about chemistry. “The idea is to get them in there to share their collective thoughts,” says LaCourse. “Give them roles to perform, take away their pads and pencils and make them talk.”

Complaints about the rules and rationale abound. The center is a waste of time, some students say. Others argue that they could solve the assigned problems in 45 minutes if left to their own devices.

LaCourse deflects the gripes with two words: “It works.” And he has the numbers to prove it.

In its five years of operation, the Chemistry Discovery Center has helped slash the failure rate for Chemistry 101 by half. But it has done more. Grades among students at all levels are up, even after the department raised the grading standards. (See page 21.) And the number of UMBC undergraduates who choose chemistry as their major has also dramatically increased.

In the spring 2010 semester, I followed one group of students through the Chemistry Discovery Center experience. My question was simple: How does a weekly plunge into a world without social media and snacking create better – and more – chemistry students?

February 3, 2010

The campus is still buried in snow when students trudge into the center, wearing heavy coats and scarves. It’s their first day, and most of them look as if they’d rather be outside sledding.

Diana Hamilton, a lecturer in the Chemistry Department, explains how the center works to the 72 students in attendance. Teams are created from four students. Each team member is assigned a role, which shifts every few weeks. A “blogger” types the group’s answers on a keyboard. (These responses are conveyed to a computer used by Hamilton.) A “scribe” jots the team’s calculations on a whiteboard. A “researcher” uses a calculator to manage the math.

The final team member is a “manager” who keeps the group focused and enforces the Chemistry Discovery Center’s rules. (Breaking them costs the team valuable points.) “Managers aren’t typing or drawing,” Hamilton says, “but your brains should be actively involved…. If we come by, you should be able to give us a quick rundown on what the team is doing.”

The first task? A set of chemistry problems based on an hour-long lecture students attended earlier that morning.

The members of Team Nitrogen are already struggling with their new roles. Most of the answers are provided by Brennen Cheung, a chemical engineering major who acts as the manager. Kuntal Patel, a pajama pant-clad psychology major who ambled into the center late, yawns, tilts back in his chair and stares into midair.

“You have to write that on the board,” Cheung says to Patel, who looks up. “Question three,” Cheung repeats.

“You have to write the answer on the board.” Patel swivels his chair and leans over to grab the dry-erase marker. “No,” Cheung says. “Take out the ‘S’ and put an ‘R.’”

Hamilton circulates among the students, stopping here and there to read the answers scribbled on each group’s whiteboard. At one point, she freezes the students’ monitors and calls for attention. “A lot of you seem to be having trouble with question three,” she says. Hamilton explains the problem and drops a few hints to steer the teams back on track.

By the end of the first session, the groups have picked up the momentum of solving problems as teams. But many are hesitant to admit the session was anything but tedious.

Jennifer Fedorowski, a third-year graduate student and teaching assistant, says it takes a few weeks before students realize that the benefits reaped from the Discovery Center depend largely on the energy they put into it. “The students on their first day need to be pushed,” she says. “In the second or third week, we hardly ever have any issues.”

March 3, 2010

It’s a wet morning a few days before the first exam, and the students wear anxious looks. Seven of them dropped the class after the first week, and several more wonder if they should follow suit.

“Just for this time, we’re going to look at some of the stuff you need to know on Friday,” Hamilton announces. The review session takes the form of a game: questions pop up on each team’s monitor and the students scramble for answers.

Team Nitrogen’s table remains empty until 10 minutes after the hour, when Kuntal Patel ambles through the door. “I think our other dudes dropped,” he says, falling into a chair at an empty table. Hamilton steers him into a seat at Team Gold’s table, where he take on the blogger’s role.

It’s a good match. Patel is already engaged by the time the next question pops up: “Your biodiesel car gets 48 miles per gallon. Biodiesel’s energy density is 127,000 Btu per gallon. If 1 Btu = 1055 Joules, how many kilojoules would be produced by travelling 250 miles?”

“You gotta do the…” Patel begins, before his teammates finish reading the question.

“…dimensional analysis,” finishes Michael Criswell, a returning student with a bachelor’s degree in theatre arts who is here to brush up on chemistry for his MCATs.

“I knew it started with a ‘d’,” Patel says, searching for the calculator. “Do 48 times 120,000 times 655 times 250 times 10 to the minus three.”

The teams grapple with the review questions. It’s a messy process. Sometimes a blogger abandons the calculator and grabs a dry-erase pen. Hamilton watches to see if the teams adhere to the rules. At one point, she stands behind Criswell and peers over his shoulder at the group’s answers.

“It’s terribly frightening to have you here,” Criswell says. “It’s like Darth Vader in the academy for the storm troopers.”

“I’m sorry I make you feel that way,” Hamilton laughs. She points out an error in their calculations before moving on to the next table.

If the center’s goal is to get students to puzzle through chemistry together, however, it’s working as intended today.

Hamilton offers to stay afterwards, but everyone seems eager to leave when the session is over. Outside in the courtyard, the students seem confident about the upcoming exam.

“Discovery Center is the reason I’m going to pass chemistry,” Criswell says. “They actually hold your hand and walk you through it. It’s ingenious, actually.”

Necessity and Invention

The Chemistry Discovery Center’s founder says that it was an invention born out of necessity.

Only a few years ago, LaCourse recalls, introductory chemistry at UMBC was in a downward spiral. Fewer and fewer students attended classes. Exam scores had plummeted. Student discontent became so loud that even the university’s administration took note. Something had to change, and fast.

UMBC’s academic leadership had already made student retention and success a university-wide priority. And the Chemistry Discovery Center was one key part of the strategy to improve the university’s success.

LaCourse took his cue for creating the center from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a host of smaller colleges that were attempting to revolutionize science education by using an approach called “constructivism” – encouraging students to learn by doing and share their knowledge with each other.

Other schools experimenting with this approach were moving slowly, with pilot programs and small groups of students. But the challenges facing UMBC compelled LaCourse to move faster.

“We were failing and we didn’t want to subject anyone to a placebo,” says LaCourse. “Our GPA average was going down; you had to keep lowering the cutoffs to get the same percentage of people passing. So we just went out and tried it.”

So LaCourse and his colleagues dismantled and rebuilt UMBC’s introductory chemistry program. Gone were antiquated discussion rooms and laboratory benches. They also ditched a method of instruction that saw students muddle through problem sets on their own and bring them back to large discussions groups where a teaching assistant simply announced the answers.

“You’d have 90 kids in a discussion group,” LaCourse recalls. “The alpha people in there were getting the answers they wanted, but students who were a bit shy or overburdened with other things were left behind.”

The lectures have remained, but a room with tables and intensive small-group interaction (without the distractions of snacking and social media websites) replaced the discussions. LaCourse and his colleagues sought to level the playing field and engage even the most introverted students.

The center also works because it helps students overcome barriers that prevent them from grasping the concepts of what LaCourse calls an ‘invisible’ science. “The [periodic] table is full of atoms; you’ve got millions of them in your hand. You can’t see them,” he says. “If you’re studying chimpanzees, you can see their behavior. But how do you see the behavior of a molecule? That’s the trouble.”

In the Chemistry Discovery Center, he says, the problem sets often ask students to contemplate more tangible concepts like how the molecules swirling in their morning coffee react with air to give the drink its bitter taste.

“At some point, you make the connection,” LaCourse says. “The things you see around you now become explainable.”

April 7, 2010

White cherry blossoms adorn the branches of a tree outside the Chemistry Discovery Center’s windows. The theme of today’s problem set is food. “If you can cook, you can do chemistry,” says Hamilton. “And if you can do chemistry, you can cook.”

Patel is a bit lost. He’s been shunted to a less-enthusiastic group, and he spends some of his time exploring the limits of the group’s computer. Despite the risk of losing points, Patel pokes around to see how computer applications are actually off limits. Annoyed that the team’s researcher is not using the calculator on the table, Patel opens the calculator application in the computer’s Accessories folder, only to elicit an error message: “UTILITY BLOCKED.”

“Aww, bastard!” he mutters. “Someone type in 144 divided by 8.” No one picks up the calculator. No one stands at the whiteboard. Patel’s teammates also won’t discuss the answers out loud, so he does a lot of thinking and typing. His frustration is palpable.

“The atmosphere definitely feels like a high school environment where you’re heavily monitored to stay on task,” Patel says, bemoaning the strictness of the rules.

“Stand up, stand up,” Hamilton says, striding briskly past the team’s table and snapping her fingers at the member who has been designated as the scribe. “If you need to, go splash water on your face. Wake up.”

It’s times like these – when hunger, fatigue and restlessness set in before the session is even halfway over – that the urges to ignore chemistry and doodle on a notepad are most compelling. Which is precisely why laptops, iPods and cell phones are prohibited. Distractions dissipate the energy, particularly in groups where the energy level is already lacking.

“Edutainment – that’s not what we’re going for,” says LaCourse.

Over at the next table, Criswell is part of an animated and jovial Team Mercury. He punches numbers into the calculator as the team’s blogger, Ed Kim, types the group’s answers on the keyboard. Freshman Dena Lehmann jots down calculations on the whiteboard enthusiastically.

“We are destroying this,” says Criswell, pleased with his current teammates and thankful that – at least for now – he’s not stuck in a group where no one speaks.

“So much of it depends on the synergy,” Criswell says later, empathizing with Patel’s plight. “I was in a couple of groups where they were just like toast. There was nothing exciting about them. The best group I had was my first group because there was a large spectrum of personalities. There would be an obnoxious person, and a super nerd that wanted to get 100 percent on the test and was really anxious about the material, and someone who knew it well and was just really relaxed about it, and that was Kuntal [Patel].”

Hamilton says that she is not surprised by the contrast. In groups where everyone works well together, the session moves quickly and everyone has fun. But that’s not always the case.

“With so many students, I’ve seen it all,” Hamilton says. “Some students, you can tell they’d rather work alone. They’re either too competitive or not comfortable in social situations. But some just seem to be natural tutors, whatever role they play. And other people, you can see they’re smart; they can do chemistry and they understand. Kuntal seems like that. No matter what the context, other students can get along with him.”

May 12, 2010

It’s the last session of the semester. Attendance is uncharacteristically low, with many students cramming for finals in other courses. “Hopefully we’ll have some more people coming in shortly,” Hamilton says. “Otherwise we’ll have to shuffle people around to fill the tables.”

The session starts off with a quick game to review the material. Patel, who is a scribe for Team Noble Gases, madly writes the complete electron configuration of lead on the whiteboard, hoping to be the first to arrive at the answer: 1s22s22p63s23p64s23d104p65s24d105p66s25d106p67s24f4…

“How far am I?” he asks.

“Almost done,” says the manager, a sophomore named Andrea Mancilla.

“I’m going to need the whole board for this,” Patel sighs. “What’s the next question?”

“What is the complete electron configuration of the cation that formed the solid lead iodide?” Mancilla reads.

“Agh! Now I have to do iodide?” Patel asks. “Are you serious?”

But before he can start, Hamilton freezes the monitors and congratulates Team Cadmium for arriving at the right answer.

“They got it,” Mancilla says, shaking her head.

Patel’s disappointment is short-lived: Noble Gases win the next round. In retrospect, he says his experience with the Discovery Center wasn’t all bad. The real-world examples it offered and the teamwork approach helped him nail down important concepts.

“It’s not about getting it in your head, it’s about getting it back out,” Patel says. “You’re not going to understand something until you actually apply it or at least recite it.”

So what happens to the UMBC chemistry students who survive the rigors of the center – and the gnawing absence of websites, texting and snacks? In most cases, they thrive. More than 80 percent of the students I followed earned a grade of ‘C’ or better. And true to the statistics, some of the students did decide to become chemistry majors. Among them, Patel, who earned a high B in the course.

Still, he laughs when asked if the Chemistry Discovery Center influenced his decision to double-major in chemistry and psychology. “Oh no, absolutely not,” he says. “I’ll put it this way. At the end of the day, it’s a two-hour session and no one really wants to do it. People I’ve talked to pretty much unanimously say it’s torture. But whether you want to do it or not, it’s a mandatory component of Chem 101, so I just did the best I could with what they gave me.”

Patel may deny that the Discovery Center influenced his decision to become a chemistry major, but LaCourse says the historical data suggests otherwise. The chemistry department has seen a steady and dramatic increase in majors since the Discovery Center began.

In the end, what does this love-hate relationship with the Chemistry Discovery Center mean? For Patel, it represents hope for a future career in neuroscience. For the chemistry department, it means higher scores and more chemistry alumni. And for society at large, it helps build a stronger, more disciplined and collaborative workforce.

“I don’t think all of the students who take the course will be chemists,” LaCourse says, “But they will all be more productive citizens in the end.”

Broad(mede) Vistas Aging

The Erickson School’s masters program for the Management of Aging Services (MAgS) counts among its alumni professionals as diverse as lawyers, publishers, artists, nursing directors, and, of course, seniors housing executives – hailing from states as far away as Texas.

But one small retirement community in particular – Quaker-directed Broadmead in Cockeysville, Md. – dominates the school’s young crop of alumni with seven graduates, including the company’s CEO, Rich Compton ’08.

It started with Compton hiring fellow classmate, Diana Givens ’08, midway through the program to become Broadmead’s Director of Community Excellence. Before even graduating in December 2008, Compton knew he wanted the rest of his leadership team to enroll in the Erickson School’s unique masters program integrating aging, policy and management.

“We needed to help all facets of the organization understand how managing aging services is no longer something that can be done by people with just good intentions,” Compton said. “The program opened my eyes to the changing landscape of aging in America and the need to adapt our business practices.”

By December of 2009, the Erickson School graduated five more master’s degree alumni associated with Broadmead, including the organization’s Associate CEO Tom Mondloch ’09, Resident Life Director Brenda Becker ’09, Rehab Director Charee Collins ’09, trust fund manager Elizabeth Shaughnessy ’09 and Board of Trustees member Bettie Farrar ’09.

Mondloch is now spearheading an organization-wide initiative to adopt the principles of “culture change,” a central philosophy at the Erickson School that emphasizes person-centered approaches to long-term care. For Broadmead, a continuous care retirement community, the goal is to create living environments that will provide a quality living experience that does not change when residents transition from independent living to assisted living or to nursing care.

“We’re trying to create equity within people’s experiences, remaining person-centered in the sense that where you live is not the primary driver as to what your life experience is,” Mondloch said.

This is being realized in 2010 by the conversion of the third floor of a community residence building into 28 assisted-living apartments with private bathrooms, bedrooms and living areas, walk-in closets, kitchenettes and stacked washer and dryers.

“Not many graduate programs can boast such a robust legacy and immediate impact right out of the gate,” said Erickson School interim dean Judah Ronch. “But this is exactly the kind of leadership development that the Erickson School was designed to create.”

The impetus for creating the Erickson School came from the shared vision of UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, and Erickson Retirement Communities founder John Erickson. They recognized the significant societal shift that would come with the impending retirement of the baby boom generation, nearly 80 million strong.

A donation of $5 million by Erickson and a matching grant from the state helped launch the Erickson School as an interdisciplinary program intended to address every phase of aging in America through undergraduate, graduate and executive education programs integrating aging, policy and management.

The school currently enrolls 470 undergraduate and 35 master’s degree students. Broadmead’s ties to the Erickson School also extend into the undergraduate program with four UMBC students participating in Broadmead internships in the past two years.

— Kavan Peterson

Chasing Tales

As a journalist and an author, UMBC English professor Christopher Corbett has a knack for finding marvelous and mislaid stories past and present.

By Rafael Alvarez

Christopher Corbett once chased news for the Central Maine Morning Sentinel, the last daily newspaper in New England to use hot type before computers took the noise out of the business.

chasingtales_subimage1It was the final gasp of an epoch, when copy was still lowered down to the composing room in a wire basket to a few old goats who remembered the days of the newsroom telegrapher. “We wrote about bean suppers and lists of new books at the library,” marvels Corbett, a professor of the practice in UMBC’s English department and a connoisseur of the everyday marvel. “Everything was news in Maine.”

Corbett was in his early 20s, a newly-minted penny out of Northwestern University, tossed into the world of Watergate journalism after a stint on the Maine Weekly and a spell in Ireland among his ancestral fabulists.

While the young Turks with reporter’s notebooks in Washington were bringing down hog-jowled presidents, Sentinel readers were bringing dead animals into the Waterville newsroom.

“We had a full-time fish and game columnist,” says Corbett, doing what he does best – spinning yarn – over a plate of lasagna in Little Italy. “They’d come in with turtles as big as manhole covers.”

Stories ripe and hanging low for the picking: Hustlers teaching white water canoeing through the mail! Turtles as big as manhole covers!

And therein is the skeleton key to Corbett’s success: the instinct to know that before you can write a good story, you must be able to tell one. And before you can spin the yarns that he has spun as a reporter – along with books such as Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express – it helps to have lived a few.

Some were tragic – “bad things, terrible things,” he says of his early days on the cops and robbers beat. And others were just breakfast, like his Washington Post assignment to cover the first annual Spam Festival in Austin, Minn.

And sometimes, an especially rascally reporter helps herd a story into print and becomes a part of local lore in the doing, as Corbett did in Farmington, Maine – his first outpost at the Morning Sentinel.

“In my four years in Farmington, I never stopped hearing about the Corbett legend,” says Neil Genzlinger, now a copy editor with The New York Times. “Farmington was the kind of backwater where weird news tends to occur.”

The Farmington “bureau” was a room at the back of Mickey’s Variety Store, recalls Corbett, and it was there that an obscure inventor named Chester Greenwood – who invented the earmuff in the town in 1873 – went from local trivia item to famous native son.

“Corbett’s greatest coup,” Genzlinger says, “was when he and Mickey Maguire – an aged local legend – cooked up the idea that the town should celebrate Greenwood. There would be a Chester Greenwood Day and a local state legislator helped draft and pass a statewide proclamation.”

The first celebration took place in 1977. The national media descended on Farmington to cover it. A parade to celebrate Chester Greenwood (a machinist who also patented a steel tooth rake) has been celebrated each December ever since.

“There was a Chester Greenwood and he did invent the earmuff,” twinkles Corbett. “But I helped him out.”

Anative of the Pine Tree State, Chris Corbett has lived in Baltimore since 1980. He has taught in the English Department of UMBC for the past 20 years. The acting chair of the department in 2006 and 2007, he became a professor of the practice in 2006.

Corbett’s “practice” is the written word. Little else in American life – aside from joining the circus or running away to sea, neither of which are what they used to be – allowed for obtaining such experience as being a rookie reporter at the now-quaint institution known as a daily newspaper.

Many of Corbett’s adventures as a newspaperman in Maine became the source of his first book, the 1986 novel, Vacationland.

“I was riding around in a 1967 Buick LeSabre with a 20-channel Bearcat police scanner on the dashboard, covering news and taking pictures in the town where the earmuff was invented,” remembers Corbett. “I was 22 or 23-years-old taking pictures of car accidents. When you’ve seen someone go through the windshield, you tend to remember it.”

A repast with Corbett, whether a plate of pasta on South High Street or coffee at the Evergreen Café near his home in Roland Park, might persuade one that he’s never forgotten anything, except perhaps to clean out the garage like his wife asked him to do.

“I can see it all when Chris talks. It’s a monologue you can’t interrupt,” says Greg Otto, a Baltimore artist known for his local streetscapes – a territory he regularly walks with Corbett. “When he talks of the Old West, a real love of his, I can see those scattered Pony Express stations.”

“Chris Corbett would never want to write a story that’s been written the same way a hundred times,” says Ann LoLordo, a former Baltimore Sun editorial writer and a poet. “His intellectual curiosity complements his curiosity about the common man. What he finds isn’t always pretty, but it makes for good storytelling.”

Not that the public necessarily wants pretty. “No one cares if you went to Bermuda and had a good time,” says Corbett, a veteran of the travel narrative. “Bad experiences make for good stories. People want a nightmare.”

All of Corbett’s skill, considerable charm and skeptic’s love of the Old West are on display in his new book, The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West (Atlantic Monthly Press).

The tale, described by Corbett as a “popular narrative,” recounts the legacy of the mid-19th century California Gold Rush, one of mankind’s great migrations. The story is told through the largely dreary and often tragic experiences of Chinese laborers who landed in California to get their piece of the action once the cry of “Eureka!” circled the globe in 1848.

“The welcome wagon was not there to meet them,” says Corbett of the 130,000 or so Chinese – most from the Pearl River delta – who came to the American West through the port of San Francisco. “It was not a particularly jolly episode in American history.”

One of those who landed on the shores of what the Chinese called “the Golden Mountain,” was an illiterate sex slave, a woman who became the winning jackpot of the book’s title, a singular character we only know as Polly Bemis.

Not only was Polly an unlikely survivor whose affable ghost drives the story, but her tale, says Corbett, “put a face on an experience we don’t know a lot about. “The Library of Congress has lamented the lack of primary source material for the Chinese in the American West… Their story has been told from the perspective of this country, and all references to them are either comic or unflattering.”

Edged out of the prime mining claims, the Chinese who arrived in America did domestic work that no one else in the bachelor society of the Old West was willing to do, including laundry and cooking.

“There isn’t a flyblown town from Grangeville, Idaho down to Nevada that doesn’t have a Chinese restaurant” that harkens back to the Old West, said Corbett. “The more I poked around, the more Chinese I found.”

As the decades wore on after the California Gold Rush, fewer Chinese were admitted into the United States. Legislation was passed in 1882 prohibiting their entry for a decade, a law that was then renewed.

The racist phrase “a Chinaman’s chance” – an epithet applied to the fate of a Chinese immigrant whether in a court of law or an argument over a pig – represents the odds the entire group had in a white man’s world.

Says Corbett: “The Chinaman’s chance is no chance at all.”

Polly Bemis survived an era of fatal fights over sex slaves imported from China (with the Chinese favoring hatchets over six-shooters) that appeared in newspapers as late as World War I.

Corbett claims she outlived the hate that labeled her and her brethren a “yellow peril.”

Polly beat the odds.

If Corbett’s instincts for the tales told in The Poker Bride and Orphans Preferred (released this year in paperback to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Pony Express) were nurtured at the Morning Sentinel, they were honed in his seven years as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press (AP).

At the storied wire service, he says, “You were taught to be careful, to ask questions.”

Corbett first shoveled AP copy in Hartford, Conn., the one-time home of Mark Twain, that rare American writer, he points out, who wrote passionate defenses of the immigrant Chinese in the Old West, particularly in the 1872 classic, Roughing It.

From Hartford, Corbett landed in Baltimore when his wife, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Rebecca Corbett (now with The New York Times), took a job with the Sun.

If “everything” was news in Maine, the characters behind bizarre tales along the Patapsco knocked on a reporter’s door to introduce themselves in Crabtown.

“Baltimore is ground zero for man-bites-dog stories,” he says. “More men bite dogs here than anywhere on the Eastern seaboard. I have interviewed many a lady who’d taught her parrot how to sing ‘Home on the Range.’”

Reporting for a wire service, Corbett said, was “like being a short order cook in a mental hospital. You learn to work quickly because all of the patients wanted something different and they wanted it right now!”

It was a life, he said, about as far removed from the mood of a college campus as the plates of noodles shared among Chinese mule packers during the California Gold Rush were from the salons that nurtured Edith Wharton’s society intrigues.

The life of kings, to quote H.L. Mencken, if the monarchs happened to reign over people who talked funny, dressed funny and had absolutely no idea how funny they were. “My first AP office was at 210 North Calvert Street,” he recalls. ‘The other tenant was some operation that dealt with junkies. The mounted police used to tie their horses up at the back door.”

Now something of a vanished world, it bore “no resemblance to the world of UMBC. I might as well have come off a spaceship,” says Corbett, under whose mentorship The Retriever Weekly student newspaper won national awards in 1995 and 1996.

Trying to get a young writer’s radar to pick up the presence of other worldly characters who crowd the shores of the Chesapeake is somewhat more difficult than teaching the five Ws of news gathering, says Corbett.

“I tell my students to find a good story and then let the story carry them,” he says. “I use the annual ‘Night of 100 Elvises’ as an example. How can you not get a base hit out of 100 fat guys who think they look like Elvis?”

Though no one can recall Elvis stopping by the Baltimore AP office in the years that Corbett was there (1980-1984), a frequent source of news was the late John Kafka, founding legend of “Polock Johnny’s” polish sausage, once promoted as the “un-burger.”

Kafka was an ironclad original who made his bones and a boatload of shekels around the corner from the AP office on “The Block” before a heart attack took him in 1986. “Here is a big difference between now and then,” says Corbett. “Polock Johnny would not stop at UMBC to discuss metaphysics with us. I suppose it was all a long, long time ago.” But not quite as long ago was the day the woman who would be known as Polly Bemis landed on the crowded wharves of San Francisco in 1872 to work the sex trade, having been sold for bags of seed in China by her impoverished parents and resold in California for $2,500.

Polly was later won in a poker game by a borderline cad and deadbeat gambler named Charlie Bemis who – in a move that kept her in a New World that so many of her countrymen abandoned in time – made her his wife.

It is Polly, a true pioneer of the Idaho Territory who died in 1933 at the age of 80, who shadows The Poker Bride as the California Gold Rush and its aftermath drive the story.

“We do not have anyone else like Polly – period. Hers is as much of a story as we have that is also true about someone who survived the Chinese sex slave trade,” says Corbett. While kicking around the Western United States on another story, Corbett kept coming across deep veins of memories and remnants about the first Chinese communities there. And he was intrigued to discover that while “the whole world is buried” in Old West cemeteries, there was scant trace of any Chinese interred there.

Bone collectors had come from China to take the corpses home.

But not Polly.

She is buried near the home that friends built for her along the Salmon River, her cabin a museum on the National Register of Historic Places.

“Polly shines a light on a sad and little-explored experience about the way the Chinese were treated in the West,” says Corbett. “In the end, it was all a melancholy tale.”

Discovery – Summer 2010

The Eyes Have It

When you think of advanced, complex visual systems – eyes with far more acuity of vision than human eyes – you do not think of shrimp. Tom Cronin does. He collects samples of a variety of the animals to study how they view the world, and to see if anything he can learn from them would be useful to us.

Specifically, Cronin, a professor of biological sciences at UMBC, studies mantis shrimps, named because of their folded arms and tilted, mantis-like stance. The creatures – some of which are edible, and can range in size from half an inch to a foot long – are remarkable in many ways.

For one thing, they aren’t really shrimp. The variously-colored creatures are crustaceans from the order Stomatopoda (shrimp are usually Decapods), but these long, flat crustaceans often acquire the “shrimp” name. They have evolved a remarkable visual system because they are predators: they hunt down smaller creatures, crush and eat them. Yes, killer shrimp. They even have a nasty disposition. Fishermen who catch them can get their hands mangled if they grab them from their nets. One surgeon in South Africa lost a hand when a mantis shrimp stabbed him, Cronin says. While they are popular aquarium pets, you don’t want anything else in the tank unless it is very big or very fast. They can knock out the glass in tanks.

But it’s the shrimps’ eyes, and not their temperament, that fascinates Cronin. His lab’s motto is, “If it has eyes, we study it,” and Cronin travels to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia yearly to pick up samples.

The mantis shrimp’s eyes can do things ours cannot.

“They are extremely complicated, in some ways advanced, in some ways primitive,” he says. “They have more color channels than any other animal we know about. Humans are pretty weak in the color vision department.” Humans have only three color channels. Many invertebrates have a fourth channel for ultraviolet or long red sensing.

More interesting, mantis shrimp eyes, which are located on two constantly moving stalks in the head, can see polarized light in ways we cannot. We can see the colors, but the shrimp can tell whether it is polarized, if the electromagnetic vibrations are all going the same direction. That helps them see details we would miss, and are great for hunting.

The system evolved as a “kludge,” attributes piled on attributes during evolution; without the elegance some systems develop. The eyes must keep moving to see anything. They scan, with parts of the two eyes moving separately, and the stalks moving independently. If they see a target, they snap to attention. Because the shrimp have tiny brains and the information collected by the eyes is huge, the shrimps, like most arthropods, have most of their nervous system in the eye stalks.

Cronin gets his funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Air Force. The military is interested because studying the eyes could lead to better instruments for both communication and scientific measurement. The research might also produce better DVD or disc players because more information can be crammed onto a single disc.

— Joel N. Shurkin

Reading Culture in Child Lit

Fables and tales for children are often foundational texts for our culture. But does it work the other way around? Can we read larger movements in popular culture back into the immense amounts of literature for children on the market today?

Ellen Handler Spitz, Honors College professor of the visual arts, takes children’s literature very seriously – as a researcher and a critic. Among her scholarly works are two classic studies of children’s literature and their aesthetic world: Inside Picture Books (1999), and The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood (2006). She also has a new book, Illuminating Childhood: Portraits in Fiction, Film, and Drama, forthcoming from University of Michigan Press later this year.

Now Spitz is also writing about children’s literature from one of the loftiest perches in the journalism of ideas: The New Republic and its online review, The Book. In recent essays, she’s written about a trio of books for children that tackle the topic of same-sex marriage (including the classic Heather Has Two Mommies) and David Wiesner’s retelling of the classic The Three Pigs aimed at “the population of children known as ‘cyberkids,’ ‘digital youth,’ and the ‘net generation.’”

Spitz’s essays read the works for children that she’s reviewing back into an intellectual heritage ranging from Ovid to La Fontaine to Walter Benjamin. And while her pieces are not reviews in the traditional consumer sense, she is also not afraid to make bold assertions.

In her review of The Three Pigs, for instance, she notes that the pigs simply leap out of the story when threatened by the wolf. “By letting pigs out of the story, Wiesner has pushed us out as well… When bad comes along here, you simply jump out of your story into another one. Click. Evil is therefore unreal.” She concludes that “the risk with the cyber-genre is that, with all its glitz, we lose the pity and the terror which Aristotle extolled and Plato feared.”

Spitz was invited to become the regular writer on children’s literature by The New Republic’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, and other editors at the magazine. “I said to Leon I’d be interested in doing it,” she says, “but only if I had free rein. I didn’t want to only just review contemporary children’s books.

I wanted more of a range, because my research and my writing have to do much more broadly with children’s aesthetic lives.”

The new platform has turned out to be a perfect fit, she continues: “They said, ‘We don’t want any cutesy, kiddie-lit kind of thing. We want serious, smart, hard-hitting critical reviews.’”

Spitz also sees strong links between her forays into mainstream media and her work at UMBC. “In the United States, we keep our academics very separate from the rest of the world,” she says. “There’s a lot of mistrust. I’ve always hated that. I think it’s absurd… For me, these worlds should not be separated. Everyone gains when they’re not.

The American academy needs to connect more closely with other elements in our cultural life.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

Nobel Nod

Every year, Nobel Laureates in the sciences meet in the Bavarian town of Lindau to exchange ideas. The meeting is also an opportunity for 500 young researchers, selected in a rigorous competition, to benefit from the dialogue. This year, Benyam Kinde ’10, will be among them. Kinde is a Meyerhoff scholar with ambitions to study neuroscience. He was nominated to attend the conference by Peter Agre, a medical doctor, professor and molecular biologist at The Johns Hopkins University who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and received an honorary degree from UMBC in 2009.

Kinde is currently weighing M.D./Ph.D. offers from The Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University. His brother, Isaac Kinde ’05, biological sciences, is pursuing that same joint degree at Hopkins.

Making Math Matter

There’s a small but shiny apple on the desk in Bonny Tighe’s office on the fourth floor of the Mathematics/Psychology building.

It’s precisely the right sort of fruit for Tighe – who is a senior lecturer in the Mathematics Department. Last year, she was also the first recipient of a new award for teaching created by UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences.

The Carl S. Weber Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching Award was created in memory of Weber, an assistant professor emeritus of biological sciences known for his passion for classroom teaching. The prize is intended to honor professors and lecturers in the college who combine the qualities of rigor, approachability, inspiration and pedagogical innovation.

Tighe laughs heartily as she recalls being surprised with news of the award at an academic committee meeting. “I was speechless,” she chuckles. “And that never happens.”

“When nominations were sought for the Weber prize, I could not think of anyone other than Bonny who deserved the award more,” says Professor Nagaraj Neerchal, chairman of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. “Bonny spends numerous hours beyond the class time with her students, and her help sessions are legendary.”

Tighe teaches Calculus I and Calculus II at UMBC – foundational and gateway courses to a wide range of disciplines in the sciences. Many successful UMBC students have numbered Tighe’s no-nonsense approach to the subject among their earliest memories of the university.

She says the students that arrive in her class from high school or elsewhere “are all bright. But most of them have no idea how to take responsibility for their own learning. They just sit there waiting for something to happen. That’s the biggest challenge. They’re bright, so in high school they can sit there and do well. Here, they sit there and they don’t do so well.”

At the beginning, at least. Tighe has a battery of weapons at her disposal to break the passivity and get things moving in the right direction. “I encourage them. I chastise them. It’s worse than being a mother… If you are willing to work, I will work with you every day. That’s the reputation I have. I’m hard. I require them to perform. But if they’re working at it, I’ll do anything to help.”

One of the arrows in Tighe’s quiver is getting the right balance of theory (“the ‘why’ of calculus,” she calls it) and problem solving in the course. Insistence on memorization as the key to mastering calculus is another. “They haven’t been expected to train their memory,” she says of her incoming students. “But there’s no knowledge without memory. All mathematics builds on what you know.”

And then there’s that voice: Tighe’s cheery boom that could waken the sleeping or the dead, let alone the passive student – even in UMBC’s large lecture halls. “My voice is loud,” she laughs. “So that’s not a problem.”

Tighe says the moments when she sees the lightbulb go on over a student’s head – and stay on – is “what keeps you going. If you don’t have those moments, then you quit.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

Targeting Terror in Turkey

Turkey is a nation faced with unique challenges and opportunities. It is a secular democracy – balancing its resurgent Islamic parties with a powerful military that has often dabbled in politics. It is seeking membership in the European Union. It is a key ally of the United States in a region that remains volatile.

One of Turkey’s greatest challenges, however, is an internal challenge: a movement by the nation’s Kurdish minority to gain greater rights and perhaps even autonomy in the country’s southeast region – which borders on Iraq and Iran.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was formed in the late 1970s under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan. The group launched violent guerilla attacks on Turkey for a number of years, exacting a large number of casualties and costing millions of dollars. Even Ocalan’s capture in 1999 has not completely stemmed the attacks.

Turkey’s effectiveness in battling the PKK was a topic that intrigued Mustafa Cosar Unal ’09, Ph.D., public policy. Unal, who is an intelligence official with Turkey’s National Police, dedicated his doctoral dissertation to researching the effects of Turkish government anti-terrorism policies aimed at thwarting violence.

His conclusion? The government’s efforts failed to produce long-term reductions in violence, despite bringing about the PKK’s military defeat.

Unal’s research examined the effects of the Turkish Government’s anti-terrorism policies on reducing PKK violence from 1984-2007, the response of the PKK to those policies and the underlying causes of the violence.

Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Turkish government policies and the PKK’s internal dynamics and strategic decisions, Unal concluded that despite some short-term reductions in violence and the PKK’s eventual military defeat, Turkish government policies intended to eliminate PKK violence have been ineffective in the long term. He also determined that policies aimed at incapacitating PKK members resulted in increased retaliatory PKK-initiated violence for up to three months.

Unal also emphasizes the role of the civilian population as key to reducing ethnic violence. He stated that the government’s failure to thwart PKK violence can be attributed largely to its singular reliance on criminological-based policies. Such an approach disregards grievances buried in social context and public sentiments that lead some individuals to engage in terrorist activities. As a result, government policies are likely to be perceived as illegitimate by civilians and therefore increase anti-government hostility, Unal said.

“Regardless of whether or not the government’s counterterrorism policies defeat the PKK and/or reduce the PKK violence, the PKK issue remains unresolved in Turkey and will be affected by internal and international events for some time to come,” Unal wrote.

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, singled out Unal’s work at the university’s winter commencement ceremonies, calling his research on terrorism “crucial to the world we live in today.”

Current events seem to bear out much of Unal’s analysis. While violent clashes between the Turkish military and the PKK continue, the group’s imprisoned leader Ocalan and others have been arguing for nonviolent solutions to Turkey’s disputes with its Kurdish minority. Turkish politicians have also broached the possibility of an amnesty that would bring guerilla fighters and the civilian population which supports them into the political process.

— Kavan Peterson and Richard Byrne ’86

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