YES, THAT was the president of Morgan State University feeding the meter in the visitors' lot of the University of Maryland Baltimore County on Thursday afternoon.
And what brought Earl Richardson into the den of one of Morgan's rivals? A demonstration of the new Baltimore Collegetown Network World Wide Web site, the latest example of detente in the Baltimore higher education turf wars.
UMBC and Morgan are two of the 23 Baltimore colleges and universities sharing the Web site, an ambitious attempt to bring information and entertainment to students and faculty members at the schools and, for that matter, to anyone on the planet with a computer, a telephone, a modem and access to the Internet.
The Collegetown Network (http: //www.colltown.org) was 2 months old yesterday, and its organizers are still feeling their way. But the implications of the collaboration are staggering -- for student recruitment and enrollment, for sharing of research and academic papers, for public relations and (eventually) for conducting classes in a cyberspace classroom.
The network is not the only evidence of a new attitude among the city's higher educators.
Larry Wilt, director of the UMBC library, told the assembly Thursday that eight private and public college libraries are now fully sharing their holdings. A Villa Julie College student who lives closer to Catonsville can study and check out books at UMBC's new library. A Morgan student who wants to study the classics can go to the Loyola-Notre Dame library (itself a rare example of early cooperation between rivals). And a Loyola student who lives in Northeast Baltimore can study at Morgan's library.
These are hypothetical examples, but Wilt said he encountered a Towson State student checking a book out of his library recently. "She said she lived closer to us than to Towson, so it was much more convenient," he said.
Campuses of the University of Maryland System have a long history of sharing with other UMS schools, but what is significant here is the inclusion of private colleges. Villa Julie, Loyola-Notre Dame, Goucher and Baltimore Hebrew University have joined UMBC, Towson State University, Morgan State and the University of Baltimore in the library pool.
"What makes it exciting," said Wilt, "is that some of these libraries, particularly the private ones, have specialized collections that are now available to the rest of us." Baltimore Hebrew is an example. There, a sophomore at Towson State can check out books in Hebrew or read back issues of the Jerusalem Post.
