Posted by Gena Chung on May 14, 2012
By Peter Wien
History, UMCP
Egyptians celebrate from a building balcony near Talat Harb Square February 12, 2011 in Cairo, Egypt. The day after the revolution toppled the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians continued to celebrate and began to focus on rebuilding their country and society. (Photo by Scott Nelson) Copyright 2011 Scott Nelson
A little more than a year ago, I was standing on the balcony of a Cairo apartment that I rented, overlooking a narrow side street in a popular quarter of the city center, only a 15 minutes walk from Tahrir Square. From time to time I was exchanging greetings, incredulous and nervous laughter, and worried looks with the neighbors that were out on their balconies trying to get a glimpse of what was going on underneath. Our alleyway was used as an escape route and re-grouping area by youth who were attacking barricades that the police had erected not far from us to prevent the protesters from storming the much hated Ministry of the Interior. Continue Reading »Impressions from the Arab Spring
Categories: Features, News |
Tags: Arab Spring, Islamist, Middle East, revolution | 
No Comments »
Posted by Gena Chung on May 14, 2012
By Colette Searls
Theatre, UMBC
“Girl Laughing Alone with Salad” performed at the CenterStage GrrlParts Festival.
This past Friday, I attended the opening night of Michael Hollinger’s Incorruptible, the last production in UMBC’s 36-year-old theatre. We are rapidly packing up for our move to the Performing Arts and Humanities Building this fall – a state-of-the art facility with two new theatre spaces as well as expanded rehearsal rooms and laboratories with the latest technical equipment. In that “last first night,” Department Chair Alan Kreizenbeck honored scores of alumni and retired faculty members in attendance who had performed and created in that little space over the past decades. The goodbye elicited fond memories, but we are ready to move on.
In the intervening years between knowing the new PAHB would come and its actual completion, our department has continued to produce successfully in the aging proscenium theatre, but ironically the nature of some of these productions suggest we have been figuratively moving beyond this space for some time. I would like to highlight two projects in particular my colleagues have created that have reached beyond the confines of our current space and simultaneously pushed the boundaries of traditional theatre. Continue Reading »Pushing Limitations: UMBC’s Theatre Transition 2012
Categories: Features, News |
Tags: faculty, theatre, UMBC | No Comments »
Posted by Gena Chung on May 14, 2012
Emmanuel Anoruo, Accounting/Coppin State
Professor and chair of the Department of Accounting, Managerial Economics and Finance, one of Prof. Anoruo’s research papers was recently recognized by the Social Science Research Network as a “Top Ten Downloads” for Economics Research Networks. He examined “both the linear and nonlinear causal relationships between crude oil price changes and stock market returns for the United States.” The major finding of this study is that oil and stock markets are integrated rather than segmented. Okay reader, call your broker now! Continue Reading »People in the News
Categories: People/Places |
Tags: awards, funding, grants | No Comments »
Posted by Gena Chung on May 14, 2012
By Bill Hanna
Planning/UMCP & The Faculty Voice
It has been reported to the Faculty Voice that a graduate student at one of our campuses received a C for participation, a C for the term paper, and a C in the final examination. Course grade=C. And he was furious, indicating that he should receive a B or an A. That led first to an informal meeting. The chair of the meeting indicated that his goal was “to come to some kind of consensus about what might be fair and right for all concerned.” And he indicated that the student was from a poor minority neighborhood. So it seems that what used to be a “foreign-student-C” or “rich-family-C” might have transmogrified over time into a “poor-minority-student-B” for at least some people. Which does raise the question: Should there be an upward adjustment for a student who has worked his or her way up from a neighborhood from which few graduate students come? After all, that upward leap is not easy, at least compared with the situation of the typical middle class or upper middle class student.(And the leap is getting harder as the inequality in the USA and elsewhere grows.) What is fair? Should universities always be achievement-based rather than ascriptive-based? Oh yes, the C stood. Continue Reading »The Grading Game: Welcome to Lake Wobegon
Categories: Features, News |
Tags: academics, grading, Professor, quality, students | No Comments »
Posted by Gena Chung on May 14, 2012
Andrew Lounder and KerryAnn O’Meara*
UMCP
I was 11 years as an assistant professor and should have gone up for full soon after being promoted to associate, but no one told me. Well, we had a beginning of the year faculty meeting, and the chair came up to me with a question. In our department, you get offices with windows by rank and number of years. There was another faculty member who was about to retire, who was in this great office. So there I am with a bagel in my mouth, and my chair says to me that one of my male colleagues is going to go up for full professor, and he asks, “Are you going up this year?” I’m still chewing, thinking, “He’s gonna get that windowed office.” Now, I didn’t care about being a full professor. Honestly, I really didn’t, because I never felt that rank had [many] privileges, but those windows… As it turns out, my colleague never wanted the office, but I didn’t know that at the time. I swallowed my bagel and said to the chair, “Yeah!” I always say I am a full professor because I wanted the office, not because I wanted the rank, and I think that is a problem for women in general. I just think that status and rank—it’s there, it’s not that it’s not there, but I think our mothers didn’t raise us to think that we should have that. -Anonymous woman faculty member, UMD, on why ADVANCE is important. Continue Reading »ADVANCE-ing Faculty Agency
Categories: Features |
Tags: ADVANCE grant, advancement, faculty, inequality, Professor, promotion, University of Maryland | No Comments »
Posted by Gena Chung on May 14, 2012
Linda Day Clark, a professor at Coppin State U., is a nationally exhibited visual artist whose primary instrument is the camera. In 1998, Ms. Day Clark left her employment as an Educator at the Baltimore Museum of Art until she moved to Coppin in 1998. Her inspiration? She says that “the whispers of her ancestors greatly inform her imagery.”
Prof. Day Clark earned an A.A. from Howard Community College, a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and a Masters of Fine Art from the U. of Delaware.
Her work is widely known and praised. Her media appearances include a feature as a “Woman of Triumph” by Maryland Public Television and “Winners: Linda Day Clark” by WJZ Channel 13. Her photographs have been called, “Simple and stunningly beautiful.” by the Baltimore Sun; “What art is all about.” by The City Paper and “Winners!” by the New York Times.
Her many exhibitions include galleries and museums in New York, Maryland, California, Delaware, Philadelphia, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Missouri, Virginia, Georgia, Massachusetts and The Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC. Ms. Day Clark’s work is accessible in important books on photography including two authored by the MacArthur Award winning Deborah Willis Kennedy, “Reflections in Black: A History of African American Photography 1840-1999″ and “Black: A Celebration of a Culture.” She is also featured in the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s ” Committed to the Image” by Barbara Millstein and “Spirit of Family” by Al and Tipper Gore. Ms. Day Clark’s creations are in many collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the James E. Lewis Museum of Art, Morgan State University and the Maryland Historical Society.
Prof. Day Clark has traveled to Gee’s Bend annually since 2002 when she made her first visit on assignment for The New York Times. Gee’s Bend is a small African-American town known for its quilting. She has taken many photographs of the area’s quilts and people, capturing the strong sense of community as well as the quilt-making tradition. Go to http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/2008/323.html.
More of her photographs can be found at http://www.bakerartistawards.org/nominations/view/lindadayclark/. Continue Reading »The Photography of Linda Day-Clark
Categories: Arts, Features |
Tags: artist, award-winning, Coppin University, museum of art, photography | No Comments »
Posted by Gena Chung on May 14, 2012
John B. Egger
Economics, Towson[1]
Connie E. North’s “Confronting the ‘Helper Syndrome’” (The Faculty Voice, March 2011, p. 2)2 exposes service-learning for the farce that it is. This was probably unintentional, but maybe not: Surely few readers outside the service-learning clan could have been expected to see academic value in her project.
Helping the Oglala Lakota Indians, Ms. North makes clear, was not the purpose of her group’s “alternative spring break.” This may puzzle those outside the service-learning world who generally view it positively because they think its goal is to help the less fortunate, and service-learning professionals have every incentive not to correct this error. Actually, as a reader would correctly infer from the title and body of Ms. North’s essay, in the service-learning community a wish to help indicates serious psychological shortcomings like the desire to establish an unwarranted superior-inferior (or rescuer-victim) power relation that “is frequently grounded in self-serving desire” and “rooted in the fear of facing our own unhealed pain.” Yet the group’s stated goal involves “‘…meeting community needs and … building upon community assets’,” activities the intelligent layman (meaning, here, someone other than a career service-learner) is sure to identify as helping. Ms. North may realize this. After reporting that they did “[refurbish] two residents’ homes and [deliver] donated goods” there is no further mention of what most of us would consider actual help. Helping seems more like an excuse or justification for the project, regrettable and embarrassing but needed to appease an ignorant or unsympathetic public. Indeed, she follows the service-learning community in actively disparaging it. Continue Reading »The ‘Helper Syndrome’
Categories: Et Cetera, Features |
Tags: academic, economic, education, individualism, institutions reason, reason, service-learning | No Comments »
Posted by Gena Chung on May 14, 2012
Our country’s soaring college debt load is a “ticking time bomb” — it’s a major crisis threatening young adults, their families, and the broader economy. “Student loan debt is not just a concern for the young,” states the New York Fed. How big is the bomb? These days, about one in four borrowers carries a past-due student loan balance; the total outstanding student loan balance is now about $870 billion. Yes, B for billion. And probably T for trillion is just ahead.
But what’s the alternative to a degree-rewarding system? After all, the median weekly earnings for someone with a bachelor’s degree is about $1,000 but with only a high school diploma it is about $600. It’s about $50k versus $30k. So off to college we must go!
Well, maybe not. Alternative forms of certification are clearly on the horizon. “With the advent of Massive Open Online Courses and other online programs offering informal credentials, the race is on for alternative forms of certification that would be widely accepted by employers.” (New York Times, 5 March 2012) Formalize the informal and don’t go deeply into debt with student loans! Only go to College Park or Frostburg or other Maryland institution if the goal is socializing. And while socializing, it’s easy to learn by downloading one of those great MIT or Berkeley courses. Continue Reading »DIRECTIONS
Categories: Et Cetera, Money, News, Statistics |
Tags: Bureau of Labor Statistics, debt, education, investment, job growth, MIT, online education, students, Teachers, Technology | No Comments »
Posted by Gena Chung on May 14, 2012
Categories: Et Cetera, Humor |
Tags: faculty, grades, survey | No Comments »
Posted by Gena Chung on May 14, 2012
Welcome, Leo, to our reviewing team! Leo and company has two restaurant favorites in the College Park area, and he’s sharing them with all of us.
Shagga Coffee and Restaurant (6040 Baltimore Avenue, Hyattsville; 240 296-3030): A treat awaits fans of Ethiopian cuisine at Shagga Coffee and Restaurant, just a couple of minutes drive south of East-West Highway (410) on Route 1. The building is a former donut shop, which it still resembles on the outside. Inside, however, the owners—a charming and gracious entrepreneurial Ethiopian couple who several years ago transformed the place from a breakfast hangout for Ethiopian cab drivers to a full-fledged restaurant—have created a very pleasant (though not fancy) atmosphere. Most important, the food at Shagga is superb. I recommend the vegetarian combo and Tibbs (chicken, lamb, or beef). As an appetizer, try one or more delicious sambusas (lentil, chicken, or beef filling). A wide selection of beers (including several Ethiopian beers), tej (honey wine), and other alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages (including delicious fruit smoothies) are available, as is excellent coffee (both straight up and cappuccino, etc.). Shagga is a true gem. This is a place that deserves to be more widely known. Note: Lunch specials and free Wifi are available. Continue Reading »Dining Around- with guest explorer Leo Shapiro
Categories: Et Cetera, People/Places, Reviews |
Tags: local dining, restaurant reviews | No Comments »
Recent Comments