The Baltimore Sun recently chronicled UMBC’s rise over the past two decades into a nationally-recognized powerhouse for academic innovation.
As the campus approaches its 50th anniversary in 2016, UMBC sports enviable credentials, the Sun wrote: “It’s cited as America’s top up-and-coming university and a leader in undergraduate teaching by U.S. News. It has an endowment of about $60 million, built from less than $1 million when Hrabowski took over. Research funding has risen from less than $10 million to about $90 million.”
While UMBC is known for excellence in a wide range of fields, the Sun notes that the university has found remarkable success in areas where higher education nationally has struggled. “Educational heavyweights such as MIT and Stanford have been to Catonsville to study the methods with which UMBC churns out elite black graduates in the sciences. How, they want to know, has a 46-year-old university, founded to serve commuters, cracked the code to one of American education’s most vexing problems?”
The piece comes as President Hrabowski marks his 20th year leading UMBC, and it paints a picture of university and leader both deeply committed to students’ success.
“This is a guy who’s on a flight to speak somewhere every other day,” Jeremy Brickey ’12, English, said of President Hrabowski. “But here he takes the time to talk with me for 30 minutes all the time. It’s amazing.”
Miguel Calderon ’12, Visual Arts, seconded that: “I can’t speak to other universities. But from what I hear, it’s not an everyday thing to see the president asking students, ‘How are your classes? What did you get on your last test? You didn’t do well? Maybe you need a tutor.’ It’s really a miraculous thing.”
More than that, though, President Hrabowski stressed that it’s a sign of the culture of UMBC, and of the dedication of so many faculty and staff members. It’s who we are.
“It is part of the work of education to have substantive relationships with your students,” President Hrabowski told the Sun. “What people don’t realize is that everybody needs support, one way or another.”
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