All posts by: UMBC News Staff

Women’s Soccer Team Wins America East Championship!

On Saturday, November 9, the UMBC women’s soccer team made the Retriever family proud as they clinched the America East Championship with a 2-1 win over defending champion Stony Brook.

This is the first-ever tournament title for UMBC women’s soccer. It was also the biggest team turnaround in America East Conference history as they achieved a school record of 13 wins!

Read the press release or check out video highlights from the game.

Show your #UMBCgrit and celebrate our 2013 women’s soccer team and coaching staff with a gift to the women’s soccer team!

New Bike Sharing Program on Campus

As of late October, students, faculty and staff now have access to six hybrid road bicycles to rent for a ride across campus, or throughout Catonsville, Halethorpe and the greater Baltimore area.

The Retriever Activity Center (RAC) has eight bikes available for rent, for free, and the UMBC community can borrow the bikes for an hour or even a day. Each rental comes with a bike lock and helmet.

“The initial roll-out of the program is going to be essentially a no-cost program for the students,” said Mike D’Archangelo, assistant athletic director at UMBC . “In other words, they’re just going to fill out a sheet of paper with their name, their student ID number; there might be a small waiver piece. And then they’re going to be able to access this bike to get to the local Catonsville and Arbutus communities.”

Scott Westcoat of C’Ville Bikes & The Hub has partnered with UMBC to offer the bicycles at no cost. The bikes come at a minimal cost from Diamondback Bicycles, for whom Westcoat’s shop is a designated dealer.

For more information or to rent a bike, please visit the Retrieverfleet Bike Sharing Program myUMBC page.

Pete Caringi III Earns 2013 America East Men’s Soccer Fans’ Choice Player of the Year

Earning 2,002 of the 5,523 total votes, UMBC senior striker Pete Caringi III (Perry Hall, Md./Cavlert Hall) earned the 2013 America East Men’s Soccer Fans’ Choice Player of the Year award.

Caringi III received 36 percent of the vote, just barely edging out New Hampshire’s Ugochukwu Uche who had 35 percent and a total of 1,906 votes. Hartford’s Damion Lowe came in third with 12 percent of the vote (688) and Binghamton’s Robbie Hughes had nine percent (497).

Caringi leads the conference and ranks 15th in the nation with 10 total goals, while also leading the league with 22 points. He helped UMBC capture the men’s soccer regular-season title and the No. 1 seed in the America East Championship.

This is the fifth straight year America East has given out a Caringi is the first repeat winner (2012 & 2013).

John Rennie Short, Public Policy, on KCBS News Radio

The start of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia is just three months away, and the deadline to apply to host the 2022 Winter Olympics is Thursday.

John Rennie Short

John Rennie Short, professor of public policy, was interviewed by KCBS News Radio in San Francisco about his proposal for a permanent site for the Summer Olympics.

“It seemed like it was becoming more and more expensive and more and more disruptive for cities to host the games,” Short said.

With stiff competition to host the Olympic Games and economic benefits for host cities that can often be smaller in scope than anticipated, Short said it’s logical to host the games in one location to avoid disruption and prevent dislocation of residents in host cities.

“If you could get a place that minimized any social disruption, there’s vast dislocation, often to lower income, marginal groups. Beijing for example, almost 500,000 people were displaced from their homes to host the games,” Short said.

He added a strong cost-benefit analysis is necessary to question the economic benefits of shifting the host city for the Summer Olympics every four years.

Donald Norris, Public Policy, in The Baltimore Sun

Election-year calls for tax cuts in Maryland have triggered several campaigns to ensure they are kept. Many advocates of environmental, health and social service programs have formed focus groups and commissioned studies to support their cause and demonstrate their taxes serve a public good.

Donald Norris UMBC

Some politicians have called for a stormwater fee repeal, the corporate tax rate to be cut, and relief for the business community. With the economy improving, many new taxes and fees have become targets, launching campaigns to support those taxes.

Donald Norris, public policy professor and chair, was interviewed for an article in The Baltimore Sun about the campaigns that have been formed.

“Advocates will always defend whatever they’re getting out of the budget, but I don’t recall a time when people were defending taxes,” Norris said.

You can read the full article in The Baltimore Sun here.

Faculty and Alumni of Umbilicus Perform at The Parlor

The percussion quartet Umbilicus, featuring Tom Goldstein, music, Shelly Purdy ’10, Will Redman ’98, and Rob Wolk ’11, performs Friday, November 15 at 8 p.m. at The Parlor, in a program including a set with new Department of Music faculty member, Patrick Crossland, trombone. Umbilicus’ set will include work by Anna Rubin, music.

The Parlor
800 St. Paul Street
Baltimore, MD

Umbilicus was founded in 2012 in reaction to the generic contemporary percussion quartet, with the intention of promoting and performing a more experimental repertoire, much if it composed by its members.

The suggested donation for this event is $5-$7.

UMBC: Voices Carry

Voices Carry

Gus Russo ’72 Traces the Lesser-Known Tales of the Kennedy Assassination

Ask Gus Russo’72, political science, where he was on November 22, 1963 and he recalls it instantly. He was a student at Mount Saint Joseph High School, plunged with his fellow Roman Catholic school classmates into a deep communal grief over the assassination of John F. Kennedy – who was the first Roman Catholic president of the United States.

“One of the guys sitting next to me in that classroom was the jock of all jocks,” Russo recalls. “A five-letter guy. He was the star of every team he was on…And the most macho guy of the macho guys was crying more than anyone else.”

But for the past year, Russo has been asking other people to recount their memories of that tragic day for Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination – a new NBC documentary hosted by Tom Brokaw. The interviews for that NBC special (with a foreword by Brokaw) have also been compiled and edited by Russo and Harry Moses into a book with the same title published by Lyons Press.

Russo says that many of the people that he and Moses interviewed for the project – including prominent politicians and celebrities – had the same reaction 50 years later that his high school classmates had on that dark day in American history.

“I can’t tell you how many people on set just lost it,” observes Russo. “Tears came to their eyes. Jane Fonda did on the very first question. [Secretary of State] John Kerry welled up. [Former U.S. President Bill] Clinton choked up. A lot of people just had to pause and take a breath.”

Russo is an accomplished investigative journalist and author, with six books to his credit – including books on the Mafia and a memoir titled Boomer Days (2011) that recounts parts of his time as student at UMBC.

Also among Russo’s publications are two books on the Kennedys and Cuba: Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro (1998) and Brothers In Arms: the Kennedys, the Castros and the Politics of Murder (2008). His expertise on the assassination has led to his involvement not only in the new NBC documentary, but in numerous other works about Kennedy’s murder including ABC’s 40th anniversary documentary and (as a technical adviser) on Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK.

Though the NBC documentary boasts a lot of star power (actor Tom Hanks and talk show host Jay Leno also make appearances), Russo says that it is the stories of lesser-known people whose lives were transformed by the events that November day in Dallas that interest him the most.

Indeed, a key impetus for creation of the book was Russo’s desire to give the stories of figures close to the drama such as Marie Tippet (widow of the Dallas police officer J.D. Tippet, who was murdered by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as he fled the scene) and Buell Frazier (a friend of Oswald who drove the assassin to the Texas Book Depository on the day of the murder) greater prominence in the retelling of the story on this anniversary.

“This year, Frazier started to open up,” observes Russo, “but for about 25 or 30 years he didn’t talk to anybody. He was traumatized. Marie Tippet had never been on national television.”

He adds that the stories of these often-neglected eyewitnesses to history help build the case for his view that Oswald was solely responsible for Kennedy’s murder. “If you piece together what is known inarguably about Oswald’s chronology,” he says, “you gain a picture of a man who was capable of doing awful things.”

Russo started investigating the assassination decades ago from a viewpoint that there may have been a conspiracy against the president. “But I wasn’t going to turn my brain off to new evidence…. I think it’s a sign of intelligence when you can change your mind. Some people think that’s flip-flopping.

“I was friends with all the [conspiracy writers],” Russo continues, “but when I saw the evidence and said, ‘It is what is. Oswald did it,’ I became the black sheep and persona non grata with these people. They don’t want to incorporate new evidence. They’re stuck in 1963.”

While five decades separate us from November 22, 1963, Russo concludes that the recollections of those who were touched by those events “are best road to understand the event in human terms, especially if you’re trying to relate it to a generation who didn’t live through it.”

(Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination was published on November 9, 2013 by Lyons Press. The NBC documentary for which its interviews were gathered will air on November 22, 2013 at 9 p.m. EST.)

(11/11/2013)

Donald Norris, Public Policy, in The Baltimore Sun

In a letter sent out Thursday by his federal political action committee, Gov. Martin O’Malley called for support for a higher minimum wage in Maryland. The letter was coordinated with a social media push urging supporters to sign a petition for an increased minimum wage.

Donald Norris UMBC

Public Policy Professor and Chair Donald Norris was interviewed for an article in The Baltimore Sun about O’Malley’s call for support. By sending out the message through his federal PAC, he is reaching a national audience while considering a run for president in 2016.  

“He’s using his federal PAC to say, ‘Here’s what I’m in favor of’ to build support among those folks,” Norris said. 

The state’s minimum wage is among the leading issues in the race to succeed Gov. O’Malley. 

You can read the full article in The Baltimore Sun here. 

Amy Berbert ’17 is Winner of USM Foundation Art Contest

Freshman Amy Berbert was awarded the grand prize last month for her submission in the second annual USM Foundation Art Contest. The winning art piece meant to illustrate this year’s theme — a Steve Jobs quote, “I want to put a ding on the universe” — will be featured in December on the cover of the USM Foundation Annual Report.

The winning entry, one of 88 submissions from faculty, staff and students throughout the University System, was selected because Berbert’s artwork “was clear, concise, and offered a literal and thoughtful translation of the quote.”

Read more information about the contest and the four runners up at the USM Foundation’s blog. Berbert’s artwork along with the pieces submitted by the runners up will be presented on the blog this December.

Yvette Pappoe ’13, sociology, on UMBC’s BreakingGround

Yvette_Blog110713Yvette Pappoe ’13, sociology discovered her passion for learning during her time as a student at UMBC. Now, an intern with the Maryland Business Roundtable for Education, she’s continued pursing that passion after graduation. Her current project is to develop a strategy to recruit and engage college students with the Maryland Scholars Speakers Bureau.

I believe it is our responsibility as members of the community to be directly involved in shaping the lives of our next generation.

Learn more about Yvette and find out how you can help.

Carole McCann, Gender and Women’s Studies, in ABC 2 News article

The term “birth control” was first coined almost 100 years ago, and several laws and practices have changed over the last several years.  ABC 2 News recently published an article about the history of birth control in the United States and how it has evolved, and interviewed Gender and Women’s Studies Chair and Professor Carole McCann for the story.

Carole McCann

“What you see is women struggling to find a means that works for them,” McCann said. She described how throughout much of the 20th century it was a violation of federal law to share information about contraceptives.

“We have a long history of women’s health needs being tied up with politics and sexual propriety,” McCann said. “That issue continues to plague the provision of women’s health care.”

The article examines several key dates over the history of birth control in the United States, including the 1965 U.S. Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut.

You can read the full article on the ABC 2 News website here.

Kate Brown, History, Presents Social Sciences Forum on “Plutopia”

Kate Brown, Associate Professor of History, presented the Social Sciences Forum “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters,” to a large audience Wednesday afternoon in the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery.

Brown spoke about the plutonium disasters of the United States and Soviet Union, telling the stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia. They are the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. She described how American and Soviet leaders created plutopias, which are communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized atomic cities.

Kate Brown presents Social Sciences Forum on

For many, living in these cities was like “winning the golden ticket,” Brown said because families could achieve great prosperity. She also told stories of many temporary workers forced to live outside these communities who often performed the most dangerous tasks. Because the communities were so secret, Brown said they did provide prosperity for many, but also concealed disasters that remain unstable to this day.

Kate Brown is author of A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland and Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. 

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