Diversity & Inclusion

“When I look around at our college as a whole and at its component parts—if I do not see diversity, I will think that we have not yet achieved the excellence we are capable of achieving.”

Bonnie Thornton Dill, Dean, College of Arts & Humanities

UMD Advance Program Martha Nell Smith in English and Ruth Enid Zambrana in Women’s Studies served as 2011-12 ADVANCE professors, which are university appointed positions that provide mentoring and support, information and strategic opportunities for women and minority faculty in all areas of academia. Looking Forward

History’s Julie Greene will serve as ADVANCE professor for ARHU and the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism, and Lynn Bolles in Women’s Studies will serve as ADVANCE Professor for Women of Color in Non-Stem disciplines.

FAME Music Camp The School of Music and the Foundation for Advancement of Music and Education Inc (FAME), a nonprofit youth and music advocacy organization in D.C., combined forces last summer to offer the FAME Summer Music Technology Camp. The one-week music camp provided full scholarships for 16 minority students to work in the school’s Music Technology Lab with classroom instruction by professionals in the field, including the school’s music technology director, William Evans. The Digital Cultures and Creativity (DCC) living and learning community partnered with LIFT and Upward Bound to create a high school version of their honors program for 16 academically talented students from low-achieving schools. Last year’s participant, Emmanuel Esparza, was recently accepted into the UMD’s Honors College and selected DCC as his learning community.

The college’s new Diversity Task Force convened last year to “carefully examine” college diversity, including but not limited to its leadership, recruitment and retention, scholarship and curriculum and overall college climate. The group will report on their findings fall 2012. MITH is working on BrailleSC, a Word Pressbased accessibility tool that will create Braille content for end-users who are blind or low vision.

2011-2012 McNair Scholars

The following are ARHU juniors and seniors in UMD’s McNair Program who are committed to pursuing graduate studies in arts and humanities related disciplines:

Douglas Jiménez, Junior, American Studies Research Topic: Subprime Lending in the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Area Amongst the Latino Community Mentor: Perla Guerrero, assistant professor of American Studies

Elizabeth Morgan, Senior, Russian Research Topic: The Impact of Personal Attributes on Leaders’ Decision Making in Conflict Resolution, War and Preserving Peace Mentor: David Cunningham, assistant professor, governtment & politics

Jessica Archer, Senior, English Literature Research Topic: Race, Class and Community: Washington D.C.’s Black Renaissance Mentor: Kris Marsh, assistant professor of sociology

The Clarice Smith Center presented the New York Festival of Song’s “Manning the Canon: Songs of Gay Life,” a program created to celebrate the diversity of the gay community. The music, performed by four outstanding classically trained singers plus one UMD graduate student, ranged from classical to popular and from painful to funny. Profile: McNair graduate Robert Miller ’12, Music Composition/African American Studies major, was awarded the 2012 James Douglass Goddard Memorial Medal from the Prince George’s County Alumni Club in coordination with the university for demonstrating superior academic success. He now attends the University of California at Santa Barbara to pursue a M.A. in Media Arts and Technology.