Terp Fall 2017

STUDENTS CATCH FLU—FOR SCIENCE / 14 VETERANS’ ADVENTURE ORIENTATION / 28 HEALING AFTER HATE / 32

FALL 2017 / Connecting the University of Maryland Community

THE

TIDES

T H AT

BIND

PG. 22

L E T T E R F ROM T H E E X E C U T I V E DI R E C T OR FALL 2017 / VOL. 15, NO. 1

PU BLISH ER

Jackie Lewis VICE PRESIDENT, UNIVERSIT Y RELATIONS ADVISERS

Joel Seligman ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS

Amy Eichhorst EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

Margaret Hall EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CREATIVE STRATEGIES MAGAZIN E STAFF

Lauren Brown UNIVERSIT Y EDITOR

John T. Consoli ’86 CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Gabriela Hernandez ART DIRECTOR

Chris Carroll Liam Farrell Sala Levin ’10 WRITERS

Charlie Wright ’17 INTERN

Jason A. Keisling DESIGNER

Gail Rupert M.L.S. ’10 PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT

Jagu Cornish PRODUCTION MANAGER

Submit and read letters to the editor at terp.umd.edu.

EMAIL

terpfeedback@umd.edu

ON LIN E

terp.umd.edu

VIDEO

terpvision.umd.edu

N EWS

umdrightnow.umd.edu

l e a de r ship is such a n

in the University of Maryland’s success. From our fearless president, Wallace Loh, to our worldclass deans, to our faculty, researchers and administrators, all are working to ensure our students receive not just a quality education, but a transformative experience.

At the Alumni Association, we are fortunate to have volunteer leaders— including the new executive council and Board of Governors members—who eagerly serve both the university as well as its 361,000 living alumni through strategic direction and personal action.

Recently, many other alumni committed to leadership positions on our 30 regional alumni boards, with the task of providing meaningful ways for alumni to engage around the country. In addition, the volunteer boards of our 16 alumni affinity groups are working to increase the involvement of alumni with a shared special interest. The university is also lucky to have talented and dedicated alumni serving on its college alumni boards.

I’m excited to share that the association is developing a pipeline of future leaders through its new student ambassador program. The goal of the Student Alumni Leadership Council is to develop an importa n t elemen t

awareness of our awesome alumni community, enhance school spirit and tradition, and instill a culture of giving back.

All of our volunteer leaders provide strategic input; share their professional expertise; mentor students; plan community service projects; recruit Alumni Association members; and promote philanthropy.

They also serve in less glamorous ways, like waking up at dawn to set up for a golf tournament, hauling tables from their cars, or dressing up a parade float in Maryland colors. Our volunteer alumni and student leaders forgo time with their family and friends in order to serve Maryland.

Leadership. Time. Talent. Without it, the Alumni Association would not be able to achieve its mission to connect, cultivate and channel the power of alumni to enrich themselves and advance the university.

Thank you to our leaders—and to the future ones reading this! We hope you’ll consider joining this movement, too. Find out how at alumni.umd.edu/ give-back/volunteer.

Stay Fearless, Terps!

Amy Eichhorst Executive Director University of Maryland Alumni Association

FACEBOOK .COM /Univof Maryland TWITTER.COM /Uof Maryland VIM EO.COM /umd YOUTU BE .COM /UMD2101

The University of Maryland, College Park is an equal opportunity institution with respect to both education and employment.

University policies, programs and activities are in conformance with pertinent federal and state laws and regulations on non-discrimination regarding race, color, religion, age, national origin, political affiliation, gender, sexual orientation or disability.

COVER Photo by John T. Consoli

F E A R L ESS I D EAS Every issue of Terp features our students’ and faculty’s discovery of new knowledge.

In this issue, we further highlight those efforts with a “ .” We’ll do the same in future issues on our efforts to inspire Maryland pride, transform the student experience and turn imagination into innovation.

DISCOVER NEW KNOWLEDGE 02 / Inside Story 18 / A Jump-start for Late Starts 14 / V iral Knowledge 20 /

Miles of Smiles 16 / Air Power 22 / T he Tides 17 / Street Moves That Bind

SPEAK UP! TERP MAGAZINE TURNS 15 NEXT YEAR, AND WE’RE LOOKING AT HOW TO STAY FRESH AND RELEVANT TO READERS LIKE YOU, BOTH ONLINE AND IN PRINT. TELL US WHAT YOU THINK IN A SHORT SURVEY AT GO.UMD.EDU/TERPSURVEY, NOW EXTENDED THROUGH OCT. 31, AND BE ENTERED TO WIN A TERP SWEATSHIRT.

departments

CONTENTS FALL 2017 / VOL. 15, NO. 1

IN BRIEF

features

22

02 Inside Story

THE TIDES THAT BIND

03 Ask Anne

Proud and independent, the people of the Deal Island peninsula are on the front lines of climate change. umd wants to help make sure their centuriesold community doesn’t wash away.

CLASS ACT

04 Nothing Fishy Here 06 A Sibling’s Search C AMPUS LIFE

BY LIAM FARRELL

08 A Park of Past and Future

28

09 Twin Peaks

EASING IN

10 Drawing Bottle Lines

Adventure-themed orientation weekend connects Terp veterans to campus and each other based on the warrior ethos: Leave no one behind.

10 New Victory for Old Basketball 11 Art in Exile 12 Wild Child

BY CHRIS CARROLL

13 Identifying Progress

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INNOVATION

HEALING AFTER HATE

14 Viral Knowledge 16 Air Power 17 Street Moves 18 A Jump-start for Late Starts 19 Faculty Q&A CENTERPIECE

20 Miles of Smiles ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

38 Leading With Pride

FEARLESS B O LD. FU N . S M A RT. CU R I O US . PRO U D. Find new stories every week at terp.umd.edu.

RECENT WEB E XCLUSIVES THAT YOU MAY HAVE MISSED :

• Celebrate 125 years of Maryland football with superlative moments and memories • Meet the newest Terps, from a Rubik's Cube champ to a seafood entrepreneur • UMD expands its scientific footprint on the International Space Station

After a shocking murder on campus, Terps across the spectrum— alumni, students and employees—share their thoughts on hate in America and on college campuses, and how institutions and individuals can find a path forward.

BY TERP STAFF

IN BRIEF

Inside Story Cole’s Indoor Field Debuts; Research, Academic Facilities Next Where Terps basketball once dribbled and dunked, Terps football is now punting and passing.

Cole Field House reopened in August with a new indoor practice field, the first step in the building’s rebirth as a university hub for athletics, academics and research.

Ground has broken on the second phase, which will highlight UMD’s strategic partnership with the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) to advance the science of sport. It will include the Center for Sports Medicine, Health and Human Performance, the clinical home for UMB's School of Medicine Program in Sports, and space for the Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

The $196 million project, scheduled for completion in 2019, will also feature other athletic facilities and two outdoor practice fields.

Watch a video on the new Cole at terp.umd.edu.

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PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

ASK ANNE Questions for Anne Turkos, the university archivist

Final Anne-swers Archivist, at Retirement, Looks Back at Looking Back

“ask anne” isn’t just an invitation. It’s been a tradition at Terp and at Maryland, where for 32 years, University Archivist Anne Turkos was the chief keeper of the institution’s history.

Alumni, faculty, staff and students turned to her with their umd-related queries, from the kooky to the common, the intriguing to the intimate. She and her staff have scoured microfilm, yearbooks, photos, documents and many other kinds of sources to piece together answers and ultimately color in the details of the past.

Turkos shifted into semi-retirement—or “rewirement,” as she’s been calling it—this summer; she’s not about to walk away from projects in progress such as the digitization of The Diamondback and old football and basketball films. But she did stop to share the backstories behind some of her favorite questions.—lb

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY That was a question about the pendulum that used to hang in Kirwan Hall back in the ’70s and early ’80s. If you walk into the lobby, you’ll still see the fancy mosaic tile work in the floor where the pendulum hung. But students used to steal it all the time, and the math department got tired of replacing it or trying to track it down, so they finally took it down and took it away, and where the pendulum is today nobody knows. I thought it was a great question. We talked to I don’t how many people. Is it in somebody’s basement?

Is it tucked into some corner of the Math Building? We don't know.

THE ONE SHE THOUGHT WAS WEIRD The weirdest question was about a cow that was kidnapped from the campus farm back in the ’60s, then put in an elevator in a high-rise dorm. The poor cow rode right up and down and was frightened to death and made a mess. The Diamondback wrote about it, and someone (decades later) wanted us to find that story. We spent a long time going through the microfilm to find it. Now with the digitization of The Diamondback, we’re going to be able to find the answer to those kinds of questions very quickly, or the person who’s asking can do the research for him- or herself.

THE ONE SHE GETS MOST OFTEN We probably get the most questions about Testudo: How did they choose a diamondback terrapin to become the mascot? Where did this diamondback terrapin—because of course we have the real Testudo in the Archives—come from? How long did it live? How old was it when it died? What we call the original Testudo is a diamondback terrapin that’s been taxidermied like a fish or a deer head and mounted on a board.

That terrapin was the model for the statue and was responsible for unveiling it. I tell all the students who come to work for us if there’s ever a fire in this building, that’s the first thing that goes out.

THE ONE THAT STILL MAKES HER TEAR UP One of the most emotional questions was when a gentleman called and asked us if there was a picture of a particular woman in a 1950s yearbook. We found the yearbook, and we told him that it was there, and he said, “I'll be there in 10 minutes.” Well, that picture was his birth mother. He had been adopted, and was on this journey to find her. Yearbook pictures are voluntary, so a lot of times we can’t fulfill that kind of request. But that particular day, we made that man’s world, and it was really terrific.

Listen to Anne Turkos talk about these questions at terp.umd.edu.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF UNIVERSIT Y ARCHIVES

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CLASS ACT

ALUMNI PROFILE / JASON GREEN ’11

Nothing Fishy Here A Microgreens Vertical Farm Grows in Brooklyn most people don’t get off at the Montrose Avenue subway station in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to visit a farm. To buy a doughnut? Sure. Coffee? Not a problem.

But a block from the subway, in a parking lot surrounded by a metal fence, stands an industrial building. Through the doorway and up three f lights of stairs is Edenworks, a rooftop vertical farm using fish to harvest microgreens.

Founded in 2013 by Jason Green ’11 with two partners, Edenworks raises tilapia on site and, through a farming process known as aquaponics, turns their waste into fertilizer to nourish the young versions of vegetables like broccoli, kale, radish and mustard

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greens. At Edenworks, the greens float in raft-like beds in about three inches of water and are stacked on four shelf-like growing surfaces, putting the “vertical” in “vertical farm.”

Even though Green seems perfectly cast for the role of Brooklyn urban farmer—beard, glasses, wardrobe heavy on black—he started with a different career plan. As an undergraduate, the biology major worked in Professor Emeritus John Jeka’s lab on virtual reality applications for neurological rehabilitation.

Recognized as the 2011 Undergraduate Researcher of the Year and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Fellow, Green expected to pursue joint

medical and doctoral degrees.

The New York native was working in a lab at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine after graduating from the University of Maryland when he realized that “academia was not where I was going to feel fulfilled,” he says. “Rather than writing a paper, I wanted to get something impactful into the user’s hands.”

Green took some time to explore “what the big impact areas were going to be over the course of my lifetime. Food seemed to be at the nexus of a lot of global issues.”

Beyond the science and health aspects of food, its more personal elements appealed to Green. “You eat food every

day and brush your teeth every day,” he says. “You have a very different relationship with eating than you do with brushing your teeth. It’s not purely habit.”

Green’s mission to bring to the masses sustainably raised, local, “more delicious” fresh food found fruition in 2013, when he took his idea for an urban aquaponic farm to pitch events for entrepreneurs and found both his eventual co-founder Matt La Rosa and funding for what became Edenworks. (The third co-founder, Ben Silverman, came on later the same year.)

Inside Edenworks’ 800-square-foot Farmlab, tilapia swim in two round tanks.

Using equipment filled with beneficial bacteria, Edenworks converts waste from the fish into organic fertilizer, a process Green compares to brewing beer.

Fertilized water is then pumped into the growing beds. Further sustained by led lights, the greens grow and ready for harvest in seven to 10 days. The fish grow until they weigh about 1 to 1.5 pounds, then are donated to local organizations or served at company events.

Edenworks, which has raised $3 million in venture capital funding, now has 10 full-time employees and two ready-to-eat salad lines available for purchase at Brooklyn Whole Foods Market locations—one, called “Mighty Microgreens,” contains a mix of broccoli, red cabbage and red

Russian kale, while the second, “Spicy Microgreens,” lives up to its name by combining radish, red cabbage and mustard greens.

Green is planning on expanding: Edenworks hopes to open a 12,000-squarefoot farm in Brooklyn soon, which, in addition to greens, will also make its fish commercially available. Green has his sights set on locations beyond New York. “Ninety-five percent of America’s leafy greens are grown in California and Arizona and then spend a week in transit,” he says. By expanding to set up farms across the country that serve the region in which they’re located, Edenworks hopes to become a local alternative for national grocers.

Changing how microgreens are grown and distributed, Green believes, can have a macro impact. “As a New Yorker, I’m not going to change the way corn, soy, wheat or beef are grown,” says Green. “But fresh food is a really fascinating problem.”—sl

Changing how microgreens are grown and distributed, Green believes, can have a macro impact.

PHOTO BY BUCK ENNIS; ILLUSTRATION BY JASON KEISLING

WEAR YOUR PRIDE Celebrate 125 years of victories and memories of Terps football with a new collection of anniversary T-shirts and merchandise available at the UMD Bookstore and online.

shop.umterps.com shopterp.com

ALUMNI PROFILE / DANNY OQUENDO ‘08

“ From the moment I learned

that [Avonte] had passed away, I was determined to go to law

”

school and advocate for him.

— DA N N Y O Q U E N D O

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PHOTO BY ROLLAND SMITH

CLASS NOTES Submit your class notes and read many more at terp.umd.edu.

A Sibling’s Search Terp’s Passion for the Law Is Reignited After Disabled Brother’s Death his lsat score was solid; his law school applications were in the mail. But when Danny Oquendo ’08 thought about the school loan debt he was about to rack up, the criminology and criminal justice major decided to pass on a legal career after all.

Nearly five years later, the former Terp wide receiver was working as a manager at a Florida recycling company when a call from relatives shattered the comfortable life he’d been building: His half-brother Avonte, nonverbal and profoundly autistic, had run away from his special-needs school in New York and was missing.

Oquendo rushed to the city to help his family pound the pavement and lead social media publicity efforts that prompted headlines worldwide. But their efforts proved futile. More than three months later, in January 2014, a photographer walking along the East River found the body of the missing 14-year old, a victim of drowning and a system that failed him.

As he grieved, Oquendo pondered the fact that what might have saved Avonte was the thing he’d walked away from years earlier: the law.

“I realized there were things that could have been done,” he says. “Coping with this has been hard, and all my family members have coped with it differently, but with me, from the moment I learned that he had passed away, I was determined to go to law school and advocate for him, even though he’s gone.”

Today, Oquendo is a father of two who attends night classes at New York Law School (he works days at an office furniture company) and plans a career to help people like his late brother. He interned last year at a New York City law firm

focused on representing autistic clients and their families. Oquendo says meeting the head of the firm, Gary Mayerson, after Avonte went missing rekindled his interest in a legal career.

Since the tragedy, he’s helped pass “Avonte’s Law,” a New York statute to protect disabled people prone to wandering by requiring door alarms, as well as more training for first responders to help them in emergencies involving lost people with mental disabilities. (The U.S. House and Senate have passed related bills to help electronically track mentally disabled individuals, though no legislation has yet been enacted.)

Oquendo’s compelling story—not to mention his near-perfect gpa—earned him a spot this year among National Jurist magazine’s roster of the top 25 law students in the United States.

“Many students—and I was like this myself in law school—aren’t very clear or focused as they feel around for their way in the world,” says Brandt Goldstein, a visiting professor at New York Law School. “Perhaps in part because of what happened to his brother, Danny has a sense of purpose and direction one normally only encounters in people many years his senior.”

After initially opting out of a legal career because of what he was afraid it would cost him, Oquendo now sees it as the best way he knows to stay close in spirit to his late brother.

“We grew up in different households, and I wasn’t there when this happened to him, and that makes it really hard,” Oquendo says. “So for all the time I missed with Avonte, this is how I’m trying to give back to him, by giving back to other children with autism.”—cc

The U.S. Senate confirmed former Army Ranger RYAN McCARTHY MBA ’13 as Army under secretary, the No. 2 civilian position there. He previously worked as a vice president at Lockheed Martin and served as a special assistant to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and on the staff of the House International Relations Committee.

CHI HEA CHO ’99 was named one of 13 top young communicators to watch in 2017 by Inc. magazine. Formerly at Salesforce and Oracle, she was named in January the director of communications, advertising and commerce for Google.

DR. JEROME ADAMS ’97 was sworn in on Sept.5 as U.S. surgeon general.

An anesthesiologist, Adams was most recently Indiana’s state health commissioner and is best known for his advocacy of needle-exchange programs, particularly to address an HIV outbreak in a rural Indiana community.

SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON ’85, a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, will receive the International Center for Journalists’ Excellence in International Reporting Award on Nov. 9 in Washington, D.C. The Pulitzer Prize winner opened NPR’s Kabul bureau in 2006 and spent 31/2 years reporting from Afghanistan. She was based in Cairo, and is now in Berlin.

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CAMPUS LIFE

A Park of Past and Future

ROLLER COASTER ENTRANCE CIRCA 1930

Students Help Kick Off New Plans for Historic Glen Echo nestled between suburbia and the c&o canal, Glen Echo Park appears out of wooded paths like a fairy tale setting, with playful 1970s yurts, a gorgeously restored 1920s carousel and the Art Deco facades of a long-closed amusement park still advertising popcorn, a teacup ride and swimming pool. You almost expect Rapunzel’s hair to come flowing down from the 19th-century stone tower at its gate.

Park officials hope to build on this whimsical foundation and expand Glen Echo’s impact as a regional arts center, and they recently turned to umd for help in kick-starting a new master plan. A graduate architecture class in the spring tackled needs such as additional facilities for arts programs, environmental sustainability, stormwater management and visitor wayfinding as it came up with proposals to revitalize the park.

“ Students are really good at innovative thinking to imagine multiple possible futures. There’s an aspect of wonder about this place that inspires the imagination.”

— Madlen Simon, associate professor of architecture

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“Students are really good at innovative thinking to imagine multiple possible futures,” says Madlen Simon, the associate professor of architecture who taught the course. “There’s an aspect of wonder about this place that inspires the imagination.”

Founded as an arts and education facility in 1891, nine-acre Glen Echo Park was once an immensely popular amusement park; each summer day, thousands of visitors drove from Maryland and Virginia or traveled up from D.C. via streetcar to ride the Coaster Dips, swim in the Crystal Pool or dance in the Spanish Ballroom.

The main attraction, still standing, was the hand-carved animals of the Dentzel Carousel. In 1960, civil rights activists climbed aboard that ride to protest the park’s segregation, and ensuing protests led to integration the next year.

The amusement park closed in 1968, and the National Park Service took over in 1971. Today, in collaboration with Montgomery County and the nonprofit Glen Echo Partnership for Arts and Culture, the park has circled back to its roots, housing arts organizations, children’s theaters, galleries and dance, nature and arts programs that draw 350,000 visitors a year.

Some renovations were done from 2003-10, but Katey Boerner, the park’s executive director, says there still isn’t adequate gallery and studio space and the park could be improved to function at the highest environmental standards.

HISTORIC PHOTOS COURTESY OF RICHARD COOK; RENDERINGS COURTESY OF SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE , PLANNING AND PRESERVATION

TWIN PEAKS

Men’s, Women’s Lacrosse Teams Capture National Championships men’s and women’s lacrosse teams were each crowned the 2017 NCAA Division I champion, the first feat of its kind in the sport’s history and reason enough for all of the stick-tossing, hugging and tears.

But the two national powerhouses gritted out those victories carrying different kinds of baggage: The women had chased an undefeated record in pursuit of a third trophy in four years, while the men desperately wanted to shake off a ghost that had haunted the program since 1975.

On May 28, the women beat Boston College 16-13 at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, and a day later on that same field, the men defeated Ohio State 9-6. Into the air went their sticks, and their anxieties.—lb the terps

PROPOSED PLAY AND CLARA BARTON HOUSE AREAS

MEN 42

years since last national title

All-Americans—tops in 9 the nation

9 title-game losses since 1975 71% faceoff percentage 12 championships total

5 Terps selected in

the 2017 Major League Lacrosse draft

PARK ENTRANCE CIRCA 1950

46 goals for Connor Kelly ’18, the most for a midfielder in UMD history

“There are missing pieces if you want a full-service arts center,” she says. “We have a lot of great ideas and needs, but we don’t know a lot about facility and site planning.”

Students visited the property and interviewed park patrons and leaders to brainstorm. Split into three teams, they presented proposals to the park’s master planning committee, and suggested adding a welcome center, incorporating green roofs, creating a market street for artists to sell crafts, and even making a looping elevated walkway that mimics the path of the historic roller coaster.

“It’s an incredibly challenging site,” says graduate student Peter Cunningham. “It’s really inspiring to think that the work I do now, even though I’m a student, has significance.”

Although the planning process is just under way, Christopher Fromboluti, a park board member, predicts that umd will imprint the final product.

“They did a great job in getting it going,” he says. “We have got a lot to talk about.”—lf

for Jon Garino Jr. in the four NCAA tournament games

12.5 goals-

per-game average ranked No. 10 in the country and highest for a Maryland team since 1998

WOMEN 23-0 record

at finale—an 11,668 fansNCAA record

14 championships

21 NCAA title appearances, No. 1 in the nation

5

undefeated seasons

ALL LAX 3 finalists on both teams for the Tewaaraton Award, given

annually to the most outstanding male and female American college lacrosse player.

See a photo gallery of the park, past and present, at terp.umd.edu.

2 Tewaaraton Award winners. Matt Rambo and Zoe Stukenberg

are the first players in its history to win the award from the same school in the same season.

LACROSSE PHOTOS BY GREG FIUME

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Drawing Bottle Lines Water-filling Stations Dry Up Plastic-Bottle Use REFILL ’ER UP! That’s the concept behind Terps Heart the Tap, a project run by the Office of Sustainability to reduce bottled-water consumption at the University of Maryland.

Since 2013, 101 filtered water-filling stations have been installed in buildings across campus, with another 85 coming this fall.

Making it easy for thirsty Terps to refresh for free, anytime, has prevented more than 4.7 million plastic single-use bottles from being used and sent to landfills.

We’ll drink to that.—LB

NUMBER OF BOTTLES DIVERTED FROM LANDFILLS*

2 0 1 6 –1 7

4 ,7 2 5 , 0 5 3

2 0 1 5 –1 6

2 ,9 3 3 , 0 8 7

2 0 1 4 –1 5

1 ,7 3 9, 0 4 3

2 0 1 3 –1 4

5 0 7, 6 3 8

2 0 1 2–1 3

141,041

New Victory for Old Basketball Archives to Digitize Historic Films, Video boxes stacked in a cool room of Hornbake Library are filled with time machines. Pick the right one and you’ll be taken to Greensboro, N.C., circa 1974, with Len Elmore battling David Thompson for the acc title. Pick another and it will be 1986, Chapel Hill, with Len Bias overthrowing No. 1 North Carolina.

The man who helped make those moments happen—Coach Charles “Lefty” Driesell, who made Maryland basketball, Maryland basketball—wants to make sure future generations can always go there. So last year, when visiting with umd archivists Anne Turkos and Amanda Hawk, he donated 72 videotapes and 65 film reels spanning 1969-86.

“We had a lot of great teams, a lot of great players, a lot of great fans,” Driesell says. “Young kids, they never saw Len Elmore play, or Tom McMillen or Len Bias.”

His collection supplements 1,200 reels at the library and is the catalyst for a new $500,000 fundraising effort to digitize all basketball footage in the archives. This new cache of highlights, practice footage, interviews and game tape is critical in filling in the gaps for some of the most important years of the program’s history, says Hawk, the university’s athletics archivist.

“Not every game was on TV,” she says. “It’s possible some of these reels are the only copies available.”

The project mirrors an earlier effort that put more than 950 reels of Terp football online. Besides fans and researchers, Hawk says, former players benefit as well from having a chance to capture footage of their playing days and share it with family and friends.

“We’re all about making things accessible,” she says. “What’s the point of having it here in a box?”—lf For more information or to make a donation, visit go.umd.edu/bballfund.

*CUMULATIVE

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PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI; HISTORIC BASKETBALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF UNIVERSIT Y ARCHIVES

MASTERPIECE

Art in Exile

Belarus Free Theatre Brings Challenging Show to UMD FOR THE PAST SIX YEARS , Natalia Kaliada has had to direct her theater company’s rehearsals from more than a thousand miles away.

The co-founder and artistic director of the Belarus Free Theatre, Kaliada lives in exile with her family in London, a consequence of running an underground performance company in what is often called “Europe’s last dictatorship.” On the one hand, she misses the daily performances in Minsk, held in private apartments, cafés and even the woods to avoid the secret police; on the other, she can lobby politicians more effectively on behalf of her actors, who face the constant threat of arrest.

“There are two parallel realities,” she says.

The Belarus Free Theatre will depict the reality faced by artists from repressive regimes in performances Oct. 26 and 27 at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. “Burning Doors,” featuring Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot (above right), a punk band arrested for its protests in Russia, explores how artists are persecuted and survive as enemies of the state.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BELARUS FREE THEATRE

“We want our audience to be able to think.

When people think, dictators are scared of them,” Kaliada says. “We need to have a very direct and truthful dialogue. It’s a warning.”

The Belarus Free Theatre’s performances are part of The Clarice’s Artist Partner Program, which brings artists to UMD to engage in workshops, classes and conversations with students and the broader community. While in College Park, the group will host a forum on freedom of expression at MilkBoy ArtHouse and sessions with the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies.

“Burning Doors” is one example of how The Clarice works to empower its audience on societal issues, says Martin Wollesen, executive director.

“Free speech is a complicated issue. Where are the limits? How do we navigate the complicated world?” he says. “You also see the consequences of taking free speech away.”—LF

For more information on this and other performances, visit theclarice.umd.edu.

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Identifying Progress Staffer Receives First Official Gender-Neutral Driver’s License in U.S. for most people, renewing a driver’s license is drudgery, defined by long lines, drab surroundings and interminable waits.

But for Nic Sakurai, acting director of umd’s lgbt Equity Center, the occasion was a proud one. In June in Washington, D.C., Sakurai received the country’s first official gender-neutral driver’s license—a goal that Sakurai, who identifies as neither a man nor a woman and uses the pronoun “they,” had long hoped to achieve.

“It’s a validation that my government sees me—that the place where I live recognizes that I exist and that I shouldn’t have to show an ID that’s not true to who I am,” says Sakurai.

Sakurai’s new license lists an “X” instead of an “M” or “F,” denoting “unspecified” or “other.” D.C. isn’t the first jurisdiction to issue gender-neutral official documents— New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India and other countries offer identification documents with options beyond simply

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“male” or “female”—but it was the first in the U.S. to legally offer the choice on driver’s licenses. Oregon now has a similar policy, and New York and California are in the process of considering policies, as well.

Sakurai was inspired partly by similar efforts of genderqueer individuals in other states. Sakurai met with lawyers from the National Center for Transgender Equality and D.C.-based Whitman-Walker Health to discuss how to present the idea to the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles. In March, Sakurai and their lawyers met with Lucinda Babers, director of D.C.’s dmv, only to discover that gender-neutral IDs were already part of the department’s plan.

“It was really exciting to learn that we didn’t really have to fight on that,” says Sakurai.

Still, the Sakurai team helped D.C. hammer out some details, and also pushed for another switch: that gender be selfdesignated, a departure from the previous policy, which required the approval and

signature of a health care or social services provider before changing genders on an already-existing license.

“It’s a really important acknowledgement that individuals themselves are the ones who know their gender identity and are best-suited to report it and know what’s safest and most accurate for them,” says Arli Christian, state policy counsel at the National Center for Transgender Equality, who worked with Sakurai and D.C.’s dmv.

To some, this is a watershed moment for gender-variant people nationwide.

“The District has set the new gold standard for access to accurate gender markers on identification documents in the United States,” Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, told cnn.

For Sakurai, who came out as gay and bisexual while attending an all-boys Catholic high school in the Cincinnati area and later as gender-variant, a gender-neutral driver’s license isn’t a recognition of a new phenomenon, but of an identity with a long history. “The idea of more than two genders is not new at all,” they say. “It’s not some newfangled thing.”

Sakurai, who has worked at umd for more than seven years, was somewhat surprised by the sustained media attention around their driver’s license—including coverage in The Washington Post and on cnn—but says the response has been “overall, very positive.”

Still, some online commenters have been “super vile,” says Sakurai, who describes the situation as “don’t read the comments, but do. The reason I want to know what people are saying is that I’m an educator, and I want to be thinking about where there’s ignorance and what it looks like to try to help people understand.”—sl

THE LGBT EQUITY CENTER LAUNCHED THE #TRANSTERPS CAMPAIGN THIS FALL TO IMPROVE THE CAMPUS CLIMATE FOR TRANS PEOPLE. IT INCLUDES EVENTS, TRAINING AND OTHER RESOURCES TO IDENTIFY, SHARE AND IMPLEMENT GOOD PRACTICES FOR TRANS INCLUSION. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT TRANS.UMD.EDU.

PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

PLAYBYPLAY

Wild Child Soccer Star Sprang From Family of Acrobats PLENTY OF CHILDREN would be terrified if confronted by clowns in the dark, but for a young Gordon Wild ’19 it was a nightly occurrence.

Before bursting onto the American soccer scene, Wild toured his native Germany with his parents, longtime circus performers who worked as a tandem acrobatic team. No matter what city they stopped in, they always tucked Gordon into bed, still decked out in their full makeup and costumes.

Wild is now the star of a different kind of show, dominating the pitch as the leading goal scorer for the powerhouse Maryland men’s soccer team.

After leading the nation in goals as a freshman at University of South Carolina Upstate, Wild transferred to UMD, where he has excelled on a national stage. Last year, he brought home firstteam All-Big Ten and Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year honors while finishing in the top three in the country in goals and points.

The European import started playing soccer at age 4 and showed a talent that he never had for acrobatics. He’s grateful that his parents didn’t pressure him to follow in their oversized footsteps.

“They just said whatever your heart feels like, do that, follow that,” says Wild. “And that’s what I did.”

Wild left home at 16 to join the youth academy at Mainz of the Bundesliga, the top professional soccer league in Germany, then played for Wehen Wiesbaden. His parents then encouraged him to pursue opportunities abroad.

As a relative unknown, Wild ended up at USC Upstate, where

he was named the Atlantic Sun Conference freshman of the year. As bigger schools vied for his talents, Wild chose to come to College Park.

“We felt like we needed someone who had the ability and the confidence and the swagger to be a goal scorer,” says Head Coach Sasho Cirovski.

“Certainly, he came through with flying colors. I felt like he was the missing ingredient to a successful season.”

The Terps, who had an iron grip on the No. 1 ranking for much of last season, are looking to bounce back after a disappointing second-round exit in the NCAA tournament. Wild is again the team’s offensive focal point.

He credits the yoga training he learned from his mother with keeping him in shape and says he got his strong legs and athleticism from his father.

Wild’s biggest adjustment coming to America has been the schedule. He prefers competing year-round, rather than training most of the year and playing multiple games a week for a few intense months in the fall.

“As a futbol player you live for the games, you want to win in competition,” he says. “I miss playing; you are suffering in the spring.”—CW

PHOTO BY GREG FIUME; FAMILY PHOTO COURTESY OF GORDON WILD

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INNOVATION

Viral Knowledge

Researchers Investigate How Flu and Colds Spread, and How to Predict Them it’s almost 70 degrees on a pleasant spring day, but in a lab at the School of Public Health, Maria Pozo ’19 huddles in a sweater and puffy vest and hacks out a percussive series of coughs.

The bioengineering major has no idea how she fell ill—no one she knows is obviously sick, and she doesn’t recall being blasted recently by a stranger’s random sneeze.

The fact that health science itself is almost equally mystified explains why Pozo is about to spend half an hour with her face stuck in a trumpet-like metal tube. It’s attached to filters, tanks and other gadgetry that will vacuum up virtually everything that comes out of her lungs for further study.

“Believe it or not, how people transmit f lu and other respiratory illnesses is not understood,” says Don Milton, a professor of environmental and

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occupational health, who invented the so-called “Gesundheit machine” and is now running the unique study in which Pozo is participating.

He, a team of faculty investigators and students have been tracking hundreds of undergraduates around campus, observing when and how they get sick, summoning their contacts and testing them as well, measuring ventilation in their rooms, even testing the germs on students’ ever-present cell phones.

The monitoring began in spring 2017, targeting volunteers from a group of about 150 students enrolled in College Park Scholars’ Global Public Health Scholars program or their roommates in Centreville Hall. The program was extended this school year to students in the Science, Technology and Society and Life Sciences programs as well.

The primary research aim of the project, supported by the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (darpa), is to locate biomarkers in blood—genes that have been switched on in reaction to infection, for instance, or the presence of certain proteins— that will reveal if someone is about to become contagious.

Such predictive ability would revolutionize the ability to control outbreaks of scary, emerging respiratory diseases like sars, says Col. Matt Hepburn, a U.S. Army doctor who manages darpa’s infectious diseases research portfolio.

Contacts of initial disease carriers could be precisely targeted for treatment with potentially scarce supplies of medication, or possibly quarantined.

“Now we have to wait for people to get sick, and by then they might

ILLUSTRATION BY JASON KEISLING

NEWSDESK UMD faculty share their expertise through the media:

“ This income boost

people are getting through housing assistance can free up scarce resources to be spent on other things.

”

ANDREW FENELON, PUBLIC HEALTH, WHO CO-AUTHORED A STUDY LINKING FEDERAL HOUSING ASSISTANCE TO IMPROVED HEALTH, KAISER HEALTH NEWS, JUNE 5.

“Use of the bully pulpit is mainly effective when presidents are pushing Congress to do something the public already favors.

”

have infected others, so the outbreak spreads and spreads,” Hepburn says.

While collecting the biological samples for darpa’s biomarker venture, Milton and his team are also delving into every aspect of person-to-person transmission of colds and f lu—like measuring how much virus individuals eject into the air around them or onto surfaces, or how dorm room ventilation inf luences contagiousness or if stress and health habits play a role in illness susceptibility.

“If for example we could show inf luenza is airborne… and we know how much virus people shed into the air, we could design buildings with ventilation designed so that you don’t transmit inf luenza,” Milton says.

Observation of students passing germs around is likely the first study

of its kind, Hepburn says—feasible only because of the conf luence of a world-class inf luenza transmission expert with a group of long-term, willing study participants right across the street.

“It’s a unique setup, and I think there are few places in the world that would be able to pull this off,” he says.

Just how willing Milton’s subjects are is illustrated by biology major Jillian Macchia ’20, who went in for a series of blood draws and sessions breathing into the Gesundheit machine in early April.

She admits she was moderately pleased to have contracted the cough that allowed her to directly participate.

“This is a really interesting study, so I guess getting to be part of it makes getting sick a little nicer than it would be otherwise,” she says.— cc

FRANCES LEE, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS, ON PRESIDENTS’ TRADITIONALLY POOR RECORD OF CHANGING PUBLIC OPINION WHEN PUSHING UNPOPULAR INITIATIVES, SUCH AS THE GOP’S HEALTH-CARE PLANS, IN THE WASHINGTON POST, JULY 2.

“There is going to

come a reckoning, and they are going to have to raise prices. But we know what happens when you raise prices—demand goes down, and perhaps substantially so.

”

BRENT GOLDFARB, MANAGEMENT AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP, ON UBER HEAVILY SUBSIDIZING THE COST OF RIDES TO KEEP PRICES DOWN, REUTERS, AUG. 23.

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Air Power “Time Reversal” Could Make Wireless Electricity Ubiquitous wireless electrical power appeared on the horizon in the late 19th century when Nikola Tesla, the mercurial genius and sworn rival of Thomas Edison, invented an amazing device that could shoot electricity and set light bulbs aglow 100 feet away.

Unfortunately, the Tesla coil, as it was known, emitted alarming lightning bolts and was hugely inefficient. Nearly 130 years later, while electrical wires proliferate, wireless power across distances greater than a few inches remains a kind of holy grail.

A new invention developed jointly by umd physics Professor Steven Anlage and a group of undergraduates in the Honors College’s Gemstone program stands to make wireless power as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi. The device could someday clear a mess of wires off your desk and offer a groundbreaking way to power mobile devices, pacemakers and an array of futuristic gadgets.

But first, Anlage has to overcome some of the challenges that bedeviled Tesla.

“How do you find something… and get power to it when the target is moving around?”

The answer: time reversal. Put simply, it’s a way to analyze electromagnetic signals, recording and then playing them backward, in order to pinpoint a device in your purse, pocket or implanted in your body. Then, a Wi-Fi router-like device delivers electricity to that device in the form of microwaves.

“The idea is that a box on the wall sends the energy all over the place,” Anlage says. “Little bits of energy go in every possible direction, phased in such a way that when it reverberates all around the room, it does nothing anywhere to speak of except in your phone, and then, boom—it delivers all its energy in a pulse.”

The system was awarded the 2017 umd Invention of the Year Award in the physical sciences category. The groundbreaking patents and scientific papers the team produced—including a best paper award at the 2016 ieee International Wireless Power Transfer Conference in Portugal—are rare

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in the field, because companies hoping to cash in on proprietary discoveries conduct much of their research in secret, says Scott Roman ’16, a former Gemstone student who worked with Anlage.

There should be more collaboration around such a potentially important technology, Roman says.

“It’s clear that a lot of people in the industry have no idea of the science behind what they’re trying to do,” he says. “You can’t magically push out a product without understanding it.”

Efficiency—a measure of how much electricity emitted is being used—is perhaps the biggest challenge. Roman guesses 25 percent efficiency is required for a marketable product, while the Anlage/ Gemstone invention is currently below 1 percent.

Low efficiency means lots of electricity wasted, with only a tiny trickle of usable power remaining.

(It’s theoretically possible to crank the power way up, Anlage says, but the downside is that microwave energy could become intense enough to injure people.)

The efficiency question is a fascinating subject that Anlage is delving into in his continuing research, pursuing the project as science rather than product development, with funding from the Navy and Air Force. Once the technology is ready, much as Tesla envisioned in the 1890s, it could change the world.

“We might think of it as a way to charge a phone or a tablet now, but when you have ubiquitous power, people will start to think of new uses,” he says. “Health monitoring devices embedded in the body are one possibility. And it will open up other possibilities no one has considered yet.”—cc

ILLUSTRATION BY JASON KEISLING

Street Moves Sociologist Tracks Rising Dissent when people hoist signs and raise their voices, it’s a cue for sociology Professor Dana Fisher to start collecting data.

A leading researcher of the motivations and dynamics of mass street protests, Fisher says the United States is in the midst of a historic surge of civil dissent: “We’re seeing an amazing revitalization of American democracy, with people engaging in politics in a way I haven’t seen before in my lifetime.”

This fall, chapters from her upcoming book, “American Resistance,” due in 2019 from Columbia University Press, are going live at TheAmericanResistanceBook.wordpress.com. She took time out from writing to talk about some of the biggest street protests of recent years. —cc

1999 Seattle WTO Protest The so-called “Battle in Seattle,” including tens of thousands of peaceful activists decrying globalization and pockets of violent anarchists, foreshadowed bigger protests in the new millennium.

2003 Feb. 15 Iraq War Protest As many as 1 million people turned out in New York City to protest the impending war in Iraq, while sister marches took place globally. Crowd control measures were notably aggressive, Fisher says, and the city paid settlements to protestors who charged that police had violated their rights.

PHOTOS (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP), ALEJANDRO ALVAREZ, ALEX WRIGHT, MARK DIXON, SOUTH BEND VOICE VIA FLICKR, JONATHAN MCINTOSH , STEVE K AISER VIA FLICKR

2004 Republican National Convention Fisher’s data from the nyc event showed many marchers were protesting the Patriot Act, which upped surveillance authorities and broadened the definition of terrorism. Police, meanwhile, were accused of preemptively targeting marchers.

2014 People’s Climate March The single biggest anti-global warming march ever, with 311,000 or more in nyc alone, heralded the arrival of climate change as a mainstream U.S. concern, Fisher says.

2017 Women’s March The era of protest kicked into high gear in Washington, D.C., a day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration—the first of several big marches this year. Women’s issues were front and center, Fisher says, “but the degree to which there was a wide swath of progressive issues, including the environment and immigrants’ rights, was noteworthy.”

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A Jump-start for Late Starts Tool Analyzes Bus Routes for Shifting When School Begins FROM GROGGY TEENS TO PEDIATRICIANS, plenty of people want middle and high schools to start later in the morning. Thanks to a new tool from University of Maryland researchers, sleepy students may be closer to more shut-eye.

Ali Haghani, a UMD professor of civil and environmental engineering, and doctoral student Ali Shafahi have developed a mathematical model that analyzes start times and bus routes to create the most efficient transportation options using the fewest vehicles.

The cost of more buses has been a major financial hurdle to changing when schools begin. Instead, school systems typically require early high school bells, then later middle and elementary starts so each bus in their fleet can be deployed on multiple daily runs.

“A small percentage (decline) in the number of buses translates to a huge savings,” Haghani says. “You have less pollution, environmental issues, all kinds of things.”

The Howard County (Md.) Public School System originally approached UMD’s QUEST Honors Program in 2015 to ask its students to take on the bus and start-time quandary, but Haghani came aboard because of its complexity.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, five out of six U.S. middle and high schools start before 8:30 a.m., even though teenage sleep cycles—not

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to mention homework and extracurricular activities—make it difficult for students to fall asleep before 11 p.m. The CDC estimates that two out of three U.S. high school students sleep fewer than eight hours on school nights, putting them at higher risk for obesity, depression, poor school performance and risky behaviors such as drug use.

Opponents of delaying high school times have worried about disrupting after-school activities like sports and sending younger children out to bus stops on dark winter mornings. The bus issue “carries the most financial impact,” says David Ramsay, director of transportation for Howard County public schools.

Howard’s school board voted in February to have all schools begin between 8 and 9:25 a.m. in the 2018–19 school year. (High schools currently start at 7:25 a.m.) Ramsay says Haghani’s model will be critical to figuring out adjustments, as some county buses complete up to four routes every morning, and the later bells will cut 30 percent of their available time.

Haghani’s model tackles that problem by limiting the amount of time buses travel their different routes without students on board. His work has attracted interest from school systems in Philadelphia, Seattle, Kentucky, Massachusetts and California.

“I see it basically as a service we give back to the community,” he says.—LF

ILLUSTRATION BY JASON KEISLING

FACULTY Q&A / JENNIFER ROBERTS

These Commutes Are Made for Walking Professor Explores How Active Transportation and Built Environments Affect Health

like most researchers, Jennifer Roberts relies on case studies. In her most memorable case, she was the subject. When Roberts, an assistant professor of kinesiology, moved to a new city and shortened her commute, she lost more than 50 pounds. Roberts tells Terp how built environments—anything surrounding us made by humans—affect our health and how gentrification can be the unintended side effect of a health-promoting urban landscape.—sl DID YOU ALWAYS KNOW YOU WANTED TO GO INTO PUBLIC HEALTH?

Growing up, I liked science and health, and I thought that meant I wanted to be a physician. After I graduated from college I thought, “What do people in public health do?” I love public health because it’s everything. When you get a drink of water, public health is our water, because you want safe water. It’s the fluoride in our toothpaste, the food we eat—we hope it was inspected properly. Was our trash picked up? Are the traffic lights working?

HOW DID YOUR PERSONAL EXPERIENCE DIRECT YOU TOWARD THE FIELD OF BUILT ENVIRONMENTS?

While I was studying for my doctorate, I was focused more on toxicology and environmental risk assessment. But I made a turn toward built environment research when I moved to an environment that promoted a better quality of life. When I was living in the Bay Area, I commuted almost an hour and a half one way. I would get home late, I was eating poorly, there was no physical activity and inadequate sleep. And then I moved to Chicago, and my commute was only 15 minutes. I was able to get home and exercise, even if it was just walking my dog. I was able to grow a garden in my yard, cook healthier meals and get to bed at a reasonable hour.

PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

WHAT DID THAT TEACH YOU ABOUT THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN HOW WE LIVE AND HOW WE MOVE?

My research explores the health benefits of active living and how our environments encourage or discourage this type of living.

I investigate how we can increase active transportation for adults and children, such as with walking, biking or the presence of public transportation systems, and how we can look at active play of children in relation to where they live.

WHAT CAN CITY PLANNERS AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS DO TO ENCOURAGE HEALTHIER LIFESTYLES?

Do we want to invest in more roads, or do we want to invest in public transportation?

Studies show that when people live near light rail or train stations, they typically have higher levels of physical activity, because they’re walking or biking to the station. But there’s also transportation-induced gentrification. You want things like public transportation that improve a community, but you also want to make sure that you’re not displacing the existing community.

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CENTERPIECE

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MILES OF SMILES A ROOT CANAL or multiple cavity fillings

don’t sound like something to smile about.

But 900 people were thrilled to receive free emergency dental care at UMD’s Xfinity Center on Sept. 8 and 10 through the Mid-Maryland Mission of Mercy and Health Equity Festival, organized by the School of Public Health’s Center for Health Equity in partnership with Catholic Charities of Washington and the Maryland State Dental Association and Foundation.

Patients with the most serious problems were the focus of the 950 dental professionals and other volunteers, who provided an estimated $1.5 million in services, along with free health screenings, haircuts and help navigating insurance options.

Researchers also signed up patients for a text message-based study to connect them with ongoing health resources and to provide information for policymakers on increasing access to care—so that events like this might no longer be necessary.

PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

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THE

PROUD AND I N D E P E N D E N T, THE PEOPLE OF THE DEAL ISLAND PENINSULA ARE ON THE FRONT L I N E S O F C L I M AT E CHANGE. UMD WA N T S TO H E L P MAKE SURE THEIR CENTURIESOLD COMMUNITY D O E S N ’ T WA S H AWAY.

BY L I A M FA R R E L L PHOTOGRAPHS BY J O H N T. C O N S O L I

TIDES

T H AT

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BIND

Dames Quarter

Chance Deal Island

on a swampy july morning, Stoney Whitelock finally got his boat into the water. For five weeks, the 111-year-old wooden vessel, named Minnie V. after the original owner’s wife, had been dry-docked at Scotts Cove Marina in Chance, Md., to undergo repairs.

A native of the Deal Island peninsula, a finger of land poking into the Chesapeake Bay about 40 miles west of Ocean City, Whitelock restores historic boats known as skipjacks. He bought Minnie V. two years ago for oyster harvesting, sailing and racing.

Whitelock spent 40 years building power lines but always had water in his veins. As a child, he watched boats from his classroom window and listened to sea tales at Sunday family dinners.

“This was a special day,” he said after guiding Minnie V. to the dock, his Eastern Shore accent flattening vowels. “It feels so much better in the water.”

Half a world away, scientists watched a different launch with alarm. A 1-trillion-ton iceberg, nearly the size of Delaware and containing twice the water volume of Lake Erie, had broken off from Antarctica. Though scientists aren’t sure if climate change was the cause, the rupture raised fears that a continent with 90 percent of the world’s ice—enough to determine whether Chance will survive the next century—would be further destabilized.

Whitelock knows his position is uncertain. Over the last 15 years, flooding on the lone road to his house increased from a few times a year to dozens.

“I got tired of battling it,” he says. “You had to pick your days to get home.”

Not too tired, however, to leave entirely: He moved just one road down.

“If it’s your home,” Whitelock says, “you’re always partial to it.”

Since 2012, researchers from the University of Maryland have tried to connect local needs with global environmental challenges through the Deal Island Peninsula Project.

As climate change leads to erosion and flooding that strands school buses and submerges roads even on sunny days, umd has brought together people like Stoney Whitelock with environmental and government officials for workshops, community conversations and collaborative research to forge consensus and find ways to take action.

The goal, says anthropology Professor Michael Paolisso, the lead faculty member, is to create a blueprint for similar high-risk areas in the country.

Peninsula residents are fiercely independent, with no intention of leaving an endangered home. While they have a reverent and codependent relationship with the environment, the very words “climate change” can carry a host of negative connotations, Paolisso says, from academic arrogance to government overreach. They have spent generations surviving the wrath of nature; why should they follow the orders of outsiders?

“They struggle with the scientific explanations,” he Oriole says, “because they struggle with the idea that science could ever predict what nature would do.”

Wenona

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The Deal Island peninsula is like many places on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where the clustered state’s center unfurls into country roads, glinting marshes and verdant fields. When English settler John Smith wrote more than 400 years ago Above: The Deal Island peninsula is dotthat “heaven and earth never agreed ted by abandoned homes, evidence of better to frame a place for man’s the economic, social and environmental struggles facing the community. habitation” than on the Chesapeake Top right: Arby Holland stands in front of Bay, this is one of the places he was talking about. his general store in Wenona. Watermen Defined by the umd project as the 18 square gather here at the beginning of their miles encompassing the communities of St. Ste- days, grabbing breakfast at 4:30 a.m.

Bottom right: Stoney Whitelock stands phens, Oriole, Dames Quarter, Chance, Deal Island aboard Minnie V., a historic skipjack and Wenona, it was known as “Devil’s Island,” a boat that he recently restored. Increased forced Whitelock out of his pirate refuge for British loyalists during the Ameri- flooding home, but he didn’t want to leave the area and moved just one road down. can Revolution.

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and whose houses flooded and how badly. Conflict with the environment is not new; what’s to come isn’t more frightening than what’s already been.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Holland says. “These old-timers are used to this. They just go through every hurricane, wipe out the mud and start all over again.”

Instability, however, is inescapable. The Deal Island peninsula is located in Somerset County, the poorest and second smallest in Maryland. Almost 40 percent of its residents are 65 or older and only 11 percent are under 18. (Maryland’s overall numbers are 13 percent and 23 percent, respectively.) The median household income of $36,000 a year trails both Maryland ($73,850) and the United States as a whole ($53,657). Abandoned homes, some with elaborate gables and spires, are weather-beaten fossils from long-gone inhabitants who enjoyed long-gone financial fruits.

Paolisso, who joined umd’s faculty in 1997, first visited in 2000 to research a pfiesteria outbreak and bought a home in Chance six years later, joining the ranks of newcomers known as “come heres.” His appreciation is both professional—he values the history and culture of local communities—and personal—like everyone else, he habitually waves at each car and pedestrian he passes while driving. Because everyday concerns over economic and social struggles far outweigh future sea rise projections, he says, grassroots dialogue was needed.

“They have more immediate needs,” Paolisso says. “And they care about the environment just as much.”

The peninsula was an agricultural community before settlers shifted to Inch by inch, nature is asserting itself on the peninsula. Amidst clumps water transportation and seafood harvestof marshland pines are bright white stalagmites sticking up like ing in the 19th century, and the spread bleached bones. These are the “ghost forests,” made up of trees killed by of Methodism spurred a name change to the spiking salinity of rising seas.

Deil Island (with one minister wanting to The Maryland Climate Change Commission has forecast a grim show “the Devil had no claim here”) and, future for the Chesapeake Bay, predicting it will rise 1.4 feet by 2050 and 3.7 feet by 2100. eventually, Deal. It was once an important Several factors are contributing: geologic processes are causing the land to sink; glaciers hub for steamboats, but a 1933 storm and ice caps are melting; warming seawater is increasing in volume; and the Gulf Stream destroyed the wharf, and a population is weakening and carrying less water away. that approached 3,000 in 1940 has dwinThe average elevation of the Deal Island peninsula today is only about 3 feet. dled to a third of that.

Famine, drought, sickness and extinction ride pale horses through any projections of People on the Deal Island peninsula are earthly life if carbon emissions aren’t proud. They know by the color inside a crab’s eventually halted. But for Katherine swim fin whether it’s close to shedding. They “Jo” Johnson Ph.D. ’16, project director remember off hand when an osprey reap- until earlier this year, umd had to start peared in a nesting place after the winter. its work in the present. Johnson, who They tell stories about characters with nick- grew up 20 miles away in Salisbury, names like Fur Pole, Sputnik and Scrabbit. says creating a network of trust was Arby’s General Store in Wenona, the more important than arguing about southernmost peninsula community, is a the causes or future impact of climate squat turquoise building with food, fishing change; otherwise, there would be no supplies and an adjoining bar and grill that way to brace for its blows. announces its proximity to the Manokin “Because this is a rural, marginalized River: “It ain’t the end of the world,” its and sparely populated area, (experts) sign says, “but you can see it from here!” think people are crazy for living out Debby Holland, who has run the place there,” Johnson says. “They really feel for decades with her husband and store that this environment is prioritized namesake, and the other locals in Arby’s over their lives and their livelihood.” can provide point-by-point breakdowns So local residents and experts of which hurricanes hit hardest and why, from organizations like the Maryland how tides lined up to spinning w inds Department of Natural Resources, the

3

“People are struggling, but the option is quit or keep going. We choose to keep going because that’s what has always served us in the past.”

— Dave Webster Dave Webster, a pastor and waterman, looks at his catch in a crabshanty.

Chesapeake Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and the Somerset County planning and zoning office met at more than a dozen events over three years to discuss flooding, marsh restoration and local history. Those conversations built a network of 50 people and expanded into what infrastructure projects could mitigate environmental problems.

The first tangible result is thin white sticks poking up from marshes, marking study sites. Although the wetlands appear pristine at a passing glance, they are crisscrossed by Civilian Conservation Corps ditches dug in the 1930s to control mosquitoes by letting in fish to eat larvae. dnr is now studying whether plugging them will provide a better buffer from rising water.

“Change is just part of living in this dynamic environment,” says Sasha Land, a dnr coastal planner working on the project. “The difference now is that the magnitude of these impacts is changing.”

Although hundreds of islands, most uninhabited, have disappeared beneath the Chesapeake Bay, the rate of sea rise has sped up. The story of nearby Holland Island— once a thriving community with a school, church, post office and baseball team that eroded to a single abandoned home surrounded by water—looms in the Deal Island imagination like a Grimm fairy tale.

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Johnson, however, says experts must resist holding communities like Deal Island to different standards than equally threatened, but more populous and powerful, cities like Miami.

“Is it fair to say, ‘You need to move tomorrow’?” she asks.

4

Wearing a shirt from the 57th annual Deal Island Skipjack Races and a cap from the 50th, Andrew Webster, a historian with local lineage to the 1800s, points out stained glass windows in Rock Creek United Methodist Church, a more than 200-year-old congregation and the oldest on the peninsula. They show wheat, a lamb, the Alpha and Omega, and an anchor intertwined with a cross.

Webster, Paolisso and Johnson believe the strong religious heritage of the peninsula, once known as the “Garden of Methodism,” could be an asset in motivating residents to prepare for climate change.

“That’s the calling of the believer,” says Webster, a member of Rock Creek. “To see the things that need to be changed in the society around you.”

An immature religious infrastructure made Deal Island ripe for traveling preachers during the post-Revolutionary War fervor known as the Second Great Awakening. Local Methodist convert Joshua Thomas, the “Parson of the Islands,” traveled in a log canoe to hold revivals for thousands. When ordered to minister to British soldiers before they invaded Baltimore in 1813, he prophesied—correctly—that they would lose.

While the national Methodist church is more moderate today than its evangelical cousins—including supporting government-mandated emissions reductions—rural congregations still retain the antebellum lineage of lay, populist preachers who disdain hierarchical authority. The precincts with peninsula voters went overwhelmingly last fall for President Donald Trump, who has cast doubt on climate science and pulled the United States from the 2015 Paris climate accords.

Dave Webster (no immediate relation to Andrew) is the Methodist pastor for three peninsula churches: Rock Creek, St. John’s and St. Paul’s. A fifth-generation Dames Quarter waterman who has lived on the same road his whole life, “Dave-Dave” gets up at 3 a.m. to catch crabs and attend to his religious duties. He performs three services most Sundays.

Sitting in his home office after repairing some crab pots, Webster doesn’t disagree that the climate is changing, but says, “I don’t agree with who’s at fault or why it’s happening.”

“My book, that I go by, says God controls all these things,” he says, tapping the large, open Bible on his desk.

Webster believes coastal residents are expected to drastically alter their lives even though scientists and politicians are unwilling to surrender SUVs and private jets. He chafes at the narrative that watermen are negligent, when northern pollution is one of the bay’s worst problems (the Susquehanna River’s leaking Conowingo Dam is a local bogeyman). The temporal nature of the land, he says, was one reason longtime residents built homes away from the shoreline.

But Webster has the same goal as the umd project: making the Deal Island peninsula as livable and sustainable as long as possible.

“People are struggling, but the option is quit or keep going,” he says. “We choose to keep going because that’s what has always served us in the past.”

The respect that Paolisso and Johnson showed for these disagreements was essential, says Andrew Webster. Less diplomatic academics “might have torpedoed it from the very beginning.”

Progress, he says, only occurs with room for beliefs of local people as well as scientific data. “It’s due to both of them that we have the world we live in today.”

now bay and vanishing beach. Thirty-foot-high dunes long used for Boy Scout camps and high school parties have faded into lapping water, leaving only a tiny strip between open waves and a marsh pond. If that buffer is eaten away, Tangier Sound will have an easy path to the island’s interior and one day during storms could cut off points further south, including Wenona.

The University of Maryland project made dnr aware of this crisis. As part of the new Coastal Resiliency Grant Program, the state will design, build and restore natural dunes and marsh grasses to slow the water’s advance, which has eroded the shoreline more than 275 feet since the 1970s. The project will use a combination of natural and engineered features to protect it and slow down accelerated erosion.

“Ultimately, that’s what the project is leading toward,” says Land. “Where are the opportunities for restoration that reduce the risk for communities and restore natural features that enhance resilience?”

Outside assistance will be critical. The entire 2018 operating budget of Somerset County is $38 million, one-hundredth that of Prince George’s County. Meanwhile, Somerset is still rebuilding from the damage of Hurricane Sandy back in 2012.

“We can do things to slow it down. And we can buy time,” says Nancy Goldsmith, a Dames Quarter resident. “But it’s going to take money, and it’s going to take will.”

In the sky over Princiotta’s house, an osprey lazily circled and occasionally dived to skip across the water’s surface. Its nest perched nearby on a wooden platform tower.

Ospreys usually mate for life and return each year to where they were born. Graceful and heedless, this one swung over where the fate of its home will depend on human action, human ingenuity and—just maybe—human conversation. TERP

5

As soon as Monica Princiotta saw the two-story Deal Island house with panoramic views of Tangier Sound, she told her husband, Bill, that she had to have it. For the last three years, the “come here” couple has split time between there and North Carolina.

A friendly demeanor belies her No Trespassing signs—meant not to scare strangers, but to keep them away from the rapidly eroding shoreline. When they bought the house, Princiotta says, they didn’t know how difficult and expensive it would be to stave off the waves year after year.

“Our fear is, if we don’t protect this side, we’ll be on an island,” she says. “It’s just so sad to see it being washed away.”

This is one of the most endangered points on the peninsula. Fifty years ago, the fronting road extended into what is

A “No Trespassing” sign put up by Monica Princiotta aims to keep people away from her eroding property. The state is planning to put a living shoreline here to prevent the Tangier Sound from cutting into the island’s interior.

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easing In Adventure Connects Terp Veterans to Campus and Each Other

by chris carroll

a flotilla of newly minted kayakers pulled up on the Maryland shore of the Potomac River after splashing through their first-ever rapids. Some were fast learners who had sliced between the rocks near Offutt Island without drama. Others spun in slo-mo over the breaking waves. One boater capsized with a roar and f lailed to the surface farther downstream.

Featherine Anderson emerged sitting upright, but she f loated near the riverbank looking markedly skeptical.

“It was … okay,” she said of the whitewater she’d just come through. She was envisioning two even more difficult stretches that awaited her downstream. “What did they say the rating was for this one?”

A fellow new paddler responded that he thought it was a Class II rapid, rated easy enough for novices, when Mike Beahm, who was lounging comfortably in his craft, broke in.

“That was a Class IV, no, make it a Class V—that’s what we’re going to tell people,” he exhorted, as the group prepared to shove off downriver. “We’re gonna do this and get through it just fine.”

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See a photo slideshow of the students’ adventure at terp.umd.edu.

Beahm, one of the trip’s leaders, has spent a good chunk of his life coaxing and cajoling people through far less appealing tasks than recreational kayaking. The 39-year-old retired from active duty in the Army National Guard last year as a sergeant first class in charge of his unit’s readiness.

The kayak trip was part of the Veteran Adventure Orientation Program, sponsored by umd’s Veteran Student Life office and RecWell’s Adventure Program. It’s just one of the ways the University of Maryland reaches out to this population that has different experiences, needs and concerns than most students, and begins knitting them into a mutually supporting group of friends and advisers based around the warrior ethos: Leave no one behind.

The nine participants on the mid-August overnight outing were veterans newly enrolled at the University of Maryland.

Highly trained, low-key, upbeat, diverse and polite (although a Marine sergeant in the group said he could “assemble an impressive string” of expletives if called upon), they’re typical U.S. military members. Most have seen more of the world and what it has to offer, both good and bad, than their nonmilitary peers.

Their accomplishments don’t always shield them from a range of doubts: about transitioning into college life; about how they’ll fit in socially or politically; about nuts-and-bolts worries like paying for school or balancing university studies and family life.

“For me, it was age—kind of a worry of being seen as the creepy old guy skulking around campus,” said Beahm, an information systems major. “So when I started, I was going to classes and just keeping to myself.”

A big mission of Veteran Student Life is to prevent isolation of the sort Beahm initially experienced. He found an encouraging network when he connected with the student group Terp Vets, and helped this summer in an effort to call

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every incoming student veteran to welcome them and invite them on the Potomac kayaking trip.

One of the seeming naturals on the water was Chris Beebe, a former cryptological technician who left the Navy in June to enroll as an undergrad in Maryland’s highly ranked electrical and computer engineering program.

“I expected to come here and fend for myself,” he said, taking a break from practice in the shade of a giant oak towering over the river. “It was really nice to get a call and be able to talk to someone for 45 minutes, ask questions and have them say, ‘Hey, we’re looking forward to your arrival.’ That sure never happened in the military.”

with us being a team is whats ingrained He’d spoken to Aaron Anderson, another kayaking leader and a graduate assistant in Veteran Student Life. Like many veterans, the former Army staff sergeant and current public policy grad student is into fitness, outdoor sports and the occasional adrenaline rush.

“I sort of integrated slowly into the campus,” said A nderson, who is not related to Featherine A nderson. “ The [Veteran Adventure Orientation Program] didn’t exist in this form when I started, but I think it would have been ver y helpful. I think I would have connected more quickly to this community we have here, and it’s a great community.”

U.S. military veterans on campus number about 1,200, about one-fourth of whom are in regular touch with Veteran Student Life, says Brian Bertges, an Army veteran who runs the office. “They may or may not want to be involved, but we want to make sure they know we’re here to help if they need something,” he says.

That help can range from social activities to career counseling to referrals to physical and psychological support for those suffering both visible and invisible wounds from the long wars of the post-Sept. 11 era, he says.

For Anderson, the No. 1 issue he needed advice about was navigating the bureaucracy around veterans’ tuition benefits.

“Sometimes it’s like, OK, I’m not working anymore; I’m in school. When is that payment coming?”

Day one of the kayak trip was dedicated to practicing near the shore. At dusk, the group hiked toward a campsite about a mile down the C&O Canal towpath. As they prepared to set out, the clouds released a drenching downpour, which seemed to bother no one.

“Rain only sucks if you say it sucks,” said Marine staff sergeant Ben Johanson. “We used to say, ‘Embrace the suck.’

If you try to fight it, you’re just going to hate life. Go with it.”

An astronomy undergrad, Johanson said he was grateful for the chance to ease into university life with other veterans through the adventure program. umd’s active veterans community was one of the top reasons he chose the university, and the husband and father of two says he expects to rely on the advice of more experienced students about how to balance academics and family life.

“What I’m hoping is that I can make this work like a job— work hard during the day at the university and then get home and focus on my family,” he says.

Another minor, yet common worry for him and other new veterans is politics: How will they be received as former warfighters on a university campus, an environment that military members sometimes envision as a left-wing funhouse?

“I’ve thought about that, and if politics comes up as an issue, I’m going to bite my tongue and agree to disagree.”

Dodging puddles during the hike, Featherine Anderson, a former captain in the Army Medical Service Corps who is pursuing an mba at Maryland, said an unspoken bond had already formed.

“I just met everyone here; I already feel totally comfortable,” she said. “There are shared values, things you hold near and dear to yourself and standards you hold yourself to. You look out for one another because it’s in you to do it. Maybe it’s a little different in the civilian sector, where there’s a more individualistic approach as opposed to a group effort. With us, being a team is what’s ingrained.”

The following day, Anderson conquered her apprehension, along with the more difficult whitewater farther down the Potomac. At Class III Stubblefield Falls, she wedged between two rocks, pointing in the wrong direction.

An Adventure Program guide tried to power upstream to free her, but couldn’t make it through the rushing torrent. Anderson realized what she would have to do: run the rapids in reverse.

“I thought about the training, where they told us, ‘Respect the water; don’t try to fight it,’” she said. “Going through rapids backwards probably isn’t the best thing to do, but I said a prayer, and pushed myself away from the rocks, and I made it.” TERP

PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI AND EDWIN REMSBERG

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Healing

AFTER HATE RABBI ADERET

While the arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, that has never meant it doesn’t need help, or that there aren’t forces trying to push it the other way.

Be they the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in our Declaration of Independence or our pledges of egalitarian education here at the University of Maryland, we work each day to strive toward goals that are difficult to meet—but all the more worthy for being so.

We seem to have entered a new era of divisiveness. From children spewing racial slurs in school hallways to protestors fighting in the streets, from workers donning bulletproof vests while dismantling Confederate monuments to congressmen being shot at baseball practice, hatred’s tide has seemingly risen again. umd itself was taken by the current in the early hours of May 20, when 2nd Lt. Richard Collins III, a Bowie State senior, was fatally stabbed,

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allegedly by a then-umd student who had once joined a racist group on Facebook.

“Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages,” said the abolitionist and Maryland native Frederick Douglass, whose statue watches over Hornbake Plaza. “They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship.”

The events of recent months have prompted concerned conversations in office corridors; debates online and in newspaper columns; pensive commutes to and from work.

Terp reached out to people from across the spectrum of our community—faculty, staff, students and alumni—and asked for their thoughts on hate in America and on college campuses, and how institutions and individuals can find a path forward. In the next pages, you can find excerpts from their responses.

For full transcripts of our conversations with these Terps and others, visit terp.umd.edu.

Drucker

DIRECTOR OF JEWISH LIFE AND LEARNING AT MARYLAND HILLEL

“There is something to be said about the responsibility of holding public office. When figureheads say certain things, their words hold weight and they are sending a message to people, whether they intend to or not. If the message is one of hate and discrimination, then it sends a message that hate and acts of violence are acceptable.”

PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

Ana Patricia

Rodriguez

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF U.S. LATINA/O AND CENTRAL AMERICAN LITERATURES

“We create landscapes of racism by having buildings named after racists or people who generate hate, like former university president Curley Byrd, like segregationists and all sorts of other people. If we invert that paradigm and start landscaping our university with figures that are more representative of the diversity of our country— Frederick Douglass; Parren Mitchell; the man whose name is on this building, Juan Ramón Jiménez, the first Nobel literature prizewinner of Spanish descent—we also recognize the presence of Latinos and Hispanics and others in the United States.”

Rashawn Ray

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY

“If people are going to engage in hate crimes, why wouldn’t it be in a setting that they feel that they are losing, that they feel they don’t control? Here, it’s much more pluralistic: For people who are used to different forms of segregation and certain forms of isolation from racial minorities, a place like the University of Maryland is a threat to them.”

TA M A R A A DA M S ’ 1 8 CRIMINOLOGY & CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND ECONOMICS MAJOR; PRESIDENT, BLACK STUDENT UNION

“If we all tried relating to each other more often, we wouldn’t be so separated by stereotypes or previous incidents. For me, being an African-American student on this campus, it could mean supporting the Latino Student Union, or even going with someone who has completely opposite views from me to their event and kind of seeing what their views are and why they think that way. I think that can, in some sense, make you feel safer, if you seek to understand instead of combat.”

PHOTO OF TAMARA ADAMS BY JUSTIN DERATO

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Kai Kai

MASCAREÑ AS M.ED. ’1 6 COORDINATOR FOR ASIAN AMERICAN & PACIFIC ISLANDER STUDENT INVOLVEMENT & ADVOCACY

“The university needs to own its history because it needs to say what direction it wants to move in.

Something as simple as installing a plaque at Maryland Stadium to explain why its name was changed from Byrd Stadium, or to even say, 'Go online to read more about this' would be one way to recognize that

TA R I F

organizing efforts didn't come out of nowhere.”

Shraim ’01 MUSLIM CHAPLAIN

“We’re clearly witnessing a significant rise in not just hate crimes, but in the language and speech that dehumanizes the other, that marginalizes that other, that is an expression of people’s hate to each other. It’s witnessed in people’s communication, in social media and social culture, in entertainment and in the way that people interact with each other.”

Shannon

GUNDY

DIRECTOR OF UNDERGRADUATE ADMISSIONS

“I work with students all the time who are searching for colleges and searching for their home for the next four years, and while education is the central part of that, also important is the sense of community that they want to have. So I think it’s important for people to understand who we are purporting to be as a community, so that students know this is a place that’s going to be comfortable for them and a place where they want to live, learn and grow.”

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Steps Toward Solutions

Darrell

Peoples M. ED. ’19

“The fact that a lot of people fought and died for the right of free speech doesn’t necessarily mean people should go around saying hateful things just because they have this right to freedom of speech.”

JV SAPINOSO M.A. ’03 ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, DEPARTMENT OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

“For folks who experience racial privilege, there’s a notion of, ‘I didn’t ask for it, I’m not doing anything to hurt other people.’ Well, if you’re not examining your privilege, then you are maintaining and supporting racism. With privilege goes responsibility.”

This summer, turning introspection into action started with a bagged lunch.

The Office of Undergraduate Studies organized a weekly discussion series for faculty and staff to work to understand the complex problems of hate and divisiveness, just one way the university has sought to confront and identify steps to address them.

Over their lunches, hundreds of members of the Terp community came together for conversations on such topics as free speech versus hate speech, identity privilege and teaching strategies for sensitive issues.

“They liked being together with people from all over campus,” says Cynthia Kay Stevens, associate dean of the Office of Undergraduate Studies, who helped organize the sessions.

“Being able to have some pretty frank conversations on issues of race and how that can create challenges was helpful.”

Other recent campus actions include: • Convening a task force on hate-bias and campus safety, co-chaired by Lucy Dalglish (dean, Philip Merrill College of Journalism), Warren Kelley (assistant vice president for student affairs) and Ja'Nya Banks (Student Government Association diversity chair)​.

• Creating a trained, rapid-response team for hate-bias incidents.

• Observing a campus-wide moment of reflection in conjunction with Bowie State University on Aug. 30 to honor Collins.

• Introducing “March: Book Three” by U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell as this year’s First Year Book.

The 2016 National Book Award-winning graphic memoir is about Lewis’ landmark civil rights work.

• Welcoming U.S. Rep. Anthony Brown (D-Md.) to speak on campus about race, politics and reconciliation on Aug. 31.

• Organizing a series of campus discussions through the Anti-Defamation League and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

• Strengthening Intercollegiate Athletics policy to explicitly prohibit hate-bias symbols or actions and to add fake weapons and flammables to its list of items banned from athletic venues.

• Planning a university-wide survey on the campus climate.

For details, visit umdreflects.umd.edu.

PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

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LIVING Forward Noted Diversity Scholar Helps Lead Campus Through Grief

joined a racist Facebook group, and many observers suspect hate led to the killing.

On a campus seeking healing and assurance that everyone is equally valued, Worthington realized that he had something to offer beyond professional expertise.

In 1969, his father, an Army warrant officer, was killed in combat in Vietnam.

As a young Mexican-American boy from a poor household in the gritty end of Orange County, Calif., he took for granted a life of dim prospects.

“A college education was never discussed as part of my future,” he says.

Worthington even dropped out of high school, but when his older brother began using his father’s veterans benefits to attend college, it motivated him to reenroll. He found that he had an aptitude in psychology and eventually received a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from the University of California-Santa Barbara.

He made his mark in his field at the University of Missouri, both as a researcher and as chief diversity officer from 2006–11, and was a founding board member of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.

Worthington’s low-key warmth, humor and listening ability help him connect, and his knowledge, creativity and determination allow him to effect greater campus equity and inclusion, says a longtime colleague and friend.

“You’ve hired someone who can see the systemic issues that exist, and approach them in very real ways, and encourage that healing that needs to go on,” says Shirley Collado, president of Ithaca College.

The ethic that he has applied to his own life, particularly in times of pain, could apply to umd as well, Worthington says.

“Live forward,” he says. “We’re never going to get over this, but we can continue on and not be defined by tragedy. We can decide to fight injustice and improve the lives of others, or we can get lost in the grief.”—cc

“We’re never going to get over this, but we can continue on and not be defined by tragedy. We can decide to fight injustice and improve the lives of others, or we can get lost in the grief.” when the position of chief diversity officer for the University of Maryland opened in January, it was nearly a given that Roger L. Worthington would be asked to apply.

He’s a nationally known scholar in diversity and inclusion, editor of the field’s academic journal and a veteran administrator who co-authored the professional standards for diversity officers in higher education.

But Worthington, chair of the Department of Counseling, Higher Education and Special Education, agreed only to help lead a candidate search committee.

After the panel identified several contenders, however, university leaders made a final plea, and Worthington relented. Other committee members agreed unreservedly, and in early July, he was named interim associate provost and chief diversity officer, a position that soon will be elevated to vice presidency status.

“The search committee, Provost [Mary Ann] Rankin, and I are very appreciative Professor Worthington accepted the call to service in these fraught times,” umd

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President Wallace Loh wrote to the campus.

So why did Worthington end up accepting a job he never sought?

The answer lies in two recent instances of grief: one private, one shared.

Worthington came to umd from the University of Missouri-Columbia in August 2014, less than a year before his wife, Maria del Rosario Gutierrez, a umd Counseling Center psychologist, succumbed to pancreatic cancer. Worthington was left a widower raising their two young children.

“My personal tragedy prompted me to maintain a commitment to my kids and my family,” Worthington says. “I was not going to pursue a position like this that would change the nature of my priorities.”

The May 20 murder of Richard Collins III turned his perspective outward.

Collins, an African-American Bowie State University senior and newly commissioned Army lieutenant, was fatally stabbed on campus. The suspect charged in the crime, a then-umd student, had

PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

And Bring it on

COME HOME, TERPS! Watch the Maryland Terrapins trounce the Indiana Hoosiers at Homecoming on Oct. 28. Plus, connect with old and new friends at a festive alumni tailgate party with food, drinks, music, games and tons of TERP SPIRIT.

Join or renew your Alumni Association membership

by Nov. 1 and receive a free T-shirt. Show your Terp pride all year long! alumni.umd.edu/TerpSpirit

ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

STAY CONNECTED

EVENTS HOMECOMING TAILGATE: OCT. 28 3 hours prior to kickoff Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center Calling all alumni, friends and fans: Join the Alumni Association for its annual Homecoming Tailgate. Come explore our first beer garden and sample beers from three Terp-owned breweries in the Denise M. Moxley Gardens. Enjoy food, music and games in a festive atmosphere before heading to Maryland Stadium to watch the Terps take on the Indiana Hoosiers.

Visit alumni.umd.edu/tailgates for more information.

DISRUPTORS The Alumni Association is co-sponsoring a new discussion series featuring four quick talks that will change your world. Next up: a showcase of Terp experts in the health field on Nov. 14 in New York City. For details and to register, visit disruptors.umd.edu.

T R AVEL

1 GOLDEN TERPS REUNION, MAY 20

Members of the Class of 1967 proudly displayed their medallions at the Golden Terps‘ 50-year reunion on May 20 at the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center.

2 FEARLESS IDEAS: LOS ANGELES, JUNE 20

President Wallace Loh (second from right) met LA Terps, including (from left) Christina Diggs, Manuel Ruiz ‘09, Monica Gibbs ‘02 and Zuleima Hidalgo ’11 at the Fearless Ideas: The Campaign for Maryland preview event held at The Ebell.

3 GRAD BASH, MAY 8

Class of 2017 graduates celebrated their achievements at the Alumni Association’s annual party at the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center.

JOIN THE #TRAVELINGTERPS

In 2017, Terps visited the coastal towns of Alaska (above), cruised along the Rhine River and journeyed off the beaten path in Italy. Next year, see the world with fellow Terps through the Alumni Association’s travel program.

Where will 2018 take you?

VISIT ALUMNI.UMD.EDU/TRAVEL OR CALL ANGELA DIMOPOULOS AT 301.405.7938 TO LEARN MORE.

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4 TERPS ON THE HILL, JULY 12

Alumni working on Capitol Hill and in the federal government gathered for an evening of networking and advocacy with fellow Terps and delegates at the Rayburn House Office Building. Pictured, from left, are Itay Balely ‘14, Brooke Parker ‘14, Liz Wasden ‘15, Tchad Bruce ‘14 and Jessica Lee ‘14.

STAY FEARLESS

STAY ACTIVE

A L U M N I . U M D . E D U

Leading With Pride favo r i t e c a m p u s h a n g o u t : The front steps or the TV room of the Phi Sigma Kappa house back in the 1980s, before the Internet, when we’d be watching or talking sports—we were all from different backgrounds so we rooted for different teams—or going to the 7-Eleven after a party for a Big Gulp run and sitting outside and shooting the breeze with a bunch of fraternity brothers who today are some of my closest friends. m e e t k i r k b e l l ’ 88 , who began his twoyear term as president of the Alumni Association Board of Governors on July 1.

He’s the director of application quality assurance at Fannie Mae, and he and his wife, Eileen, sit on the Parents Advisory Council and support the Terrapin Club. Bell is down to earth but revved up to grow the alumni network. He tells Terp more.–lb prou de st m a ry l a n d mom e n t:

My first is graduating, of course. My second is that my daughter just graduated in 2016, one son is a senior and a second son is a freshman. So I’m proudest that as a family we’re all big Maryland supporters, and we’ll always have that connection together.

Connections Beyond the Classroom Mentorship Platform Joins Alumni With Future Terp Leaders

mo s t i m p orta n t t h i ng you l e a r n e d : Pride. I feel like I had Maryland pride before Maryland pride was a thing. I’ll never forget that when my first son got in (to umd) through Freshman Connection, he was thrilled. He said, “It was all I wanted my entire life.” My kids have grown up on it.

t h e ro l e you ’ l l p l ay i n f e a r l e s s i d e a s : t h e c a m pa i g n f o r m a r y l a n d :

I’ll be out there, speaking about the campaign, raising awareness, really being a champion for it, encouraging people to donate and be active supporters of your alma mater. h ow y o u h o p e t o l e av e y o u r m a r k at m a ry l a n d:

If we can find a way to connect alumni to current undergrads and establish a greater tradition that says, “I want to be part of this, and part of making it better for the future,” we’ll be better off.

w h at you m i s s mo s t at u m d:

A lack of responsibility (laughs), to be free and easy and enjoy life. You’re not worrying about paying a mortgage or your kids’ tuition or raising them. You’re just getting to explore different things.

WELCOME TO THE NEW MEMBERS OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION’S BOARD:

y o u r g oa l s a s p r e s i d e n t o f t h e

DANIEL ROCHKIND ’98 • JUSTIN ROSS ’98 MADIEU WILLIAMS ’03 • TIANA WYNN ’05

b oa r d o f g ov e r n o r s :

One of my biggest goals is to raise awareness of the

that she’s taken on a long-term mentor role.

“Students have contacted me wanting

WANIKA FISHER ’10 • JAMES GIANGRANDE ’90 CHRISTOPHER GRANT ’13 • JEFFREY RIVEST ’75

been successful in their careers to give back to their alma mater and educate the

to know how to get into social work, what

next generation of Terp leaders,” says Chris

my path was and how they can explore that

Johnson, the Alumni Association’s director of

option,” Collins says. “I got a lot more hits

campus relations.

than I anticipated, and it’s been great.”

When Jessi Collins ’05 signed up for the

Alumni Association, getting alumni to join and support Maryland for the next generation. I want them to be active, to participate, to connect and to enjoy.

Collins is among more than 1,500 mentors

Nicki Jackson ’17 first connected with Collins via video chat in January. Since then,

Alumni Association’s online mentorship

and 3,800 mentees who have joined the

they have kept in touch via email and phone,

platform two years ago, she wondered if any

Alumni Association’s online mentorship

discussing everything from Jackson starting a

students or young alumni would reach out to her.

platform since its Fall 2015 launch. While Ter-

master’s program in social work—the same one

rapins Connect provides the initial connection,

that Collins completed—to work-life balance.

They did. Through Terrapins Connect, eight students have sought her out, eager

individuals decide what level of communica-

“Hearing her experiences helped me be

to learn from her experience as a social

tion ensues. This fall, the Alumni Association,

at peace, to know this was the right thing for

worker. She has reviewed resumes, provided

in conjunction with the Career Center, has

me,” Jackson says.

interview coaching and candidly answered

enhanced the program with updated technol-

questions about her career.

ogy to make it even easier for students and

The mentees, she says, are “very prepared.” In fact, two impressed Collins so much

alumni to connect with mentors.

“It’s a great way for individuals that have

— Daryl Lee Hale, Alumni Association staff TO LEARN MORE ABOUT TERRAPINS CONNECT, VISIT TERRAPINSCONNECT.UMD.EDU.

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INTERPRETATIONS

New Beginnings, Grand Ambitions

You can reach Dr. Loh at president@umd.edu and follow him on Twitter: @presidentloh

we begin this academic year by reaffirming our campus commitment to the core values of diversity, inclusion, respect and civil discourse. Given the acts of hatred afflicting universities around the nation—including ours—we are doing all we can to make this campus as inclusive and respectful as possible.

Once again, our new freshman class is highly diverse. It is also the most academically accomplished in our history. Many freshmen also come to us with an impressive record of innovation, entrepreneurship and philanthropy.

They join our highly innovative students in fields ranging from material science to architectural design. One example is the team of bioengineering undergraduates who just won a $20,000 prize from the National Institutes of Health. They developed a prototype device that promises to detect Alzheimer’s disease before symptoms appear.

We also begin the first full year as a Do Good campus—an initiative that has inspired our students to develop creative solutions to pressing social issues such as hunger.

Our students have now begun using the Edward St. John Learning and Teaching Center. Its high-tech classrooms support innovative faculty approaches to teaching. A. James Clark Hall will soon open for bioengineering. Athletics is now using the new indoor practice facility at the renovated Cole Field House, and work has begun on the project’s connected research and clinical facilities.

The privately financed, four-star Hotel at the University of Maryland just opened. It has spurred nearly a billion dollars in private investment in our city and launched our Discovery District, home to new businesses eager to partner with our faculty and students.

Next spring, we will launch our largest-ever fundraising campaign, an opportunity to keep your alma mater one of the nation’s most accomplished public research institutions, creating innovative solutions to the world’s greatest challenges.

I hope you will take the opportunity to see the latest campus developments during Homecoming week. We will mark Maryland’s 125th season of football on Saturday, Oct. 28, as the Terps take on Indiana.

I hope to see you then!

“ ​W e begin this academic year

by reaffirming our campus commitment to the core values of diversity, inclusion, respect and civil discourse.

”

Wallace D. Loh, President

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