The movers are taking Baltimore Hebrew University apart, clearing faculty offices, piling high the boxes and unplugged computers, rolling up the lobby's Oriental carpet and marking leather chairs with stickers identifying their next stop: "TU." That's Towson University, now officially the new home of BHU's graduate courses and community programs.
The Maryland Board of Regents voted unanimously Friday to approve the new partnership, closing one chapter in the life of the 90-year-old institution of Jewish learning and opening another. BHU will move with 55 graduate students, seven instructors and a library of about 70,000 volumes a few miles northeast from its building on Park Heights Avenue to the suburban Towson campus of more than 21,000 students.
BHU's graduate programs and the Joseph Meyerhoff Library collection will be in place at the public university this fall. BHU was forced into a move by declining enrollment and rising costs, but officials at both institutions are celebrating the partnership.
"I think it's very, very exciting," said Towson President Robert L. Caret. "It's an opportunity that just presented itself."
BHU's interim president, Erika Pardes Schon, said, "We are delighted by this decision. The faculty of BHU look forward to introducing a new tier of graduate courses at Towson University in the fall."
Earlier in the week, Schon conducted a brief tour of the mounting disarray that is Baltimore Hebrew University, which was going to have to move out of its 50-year-old building on Park Heights Avenue with or without the Towson merger. The building's owner and the school's chief benefactor, The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore, plans to raze the building and use the space for a parking lot for a new building planned across the street.
"Everything beautiful here is gone," she said, standing in the library, where furniture, rugs and display cases were already on a truck bound for Towson. The library's collection - said to be the largest array of Judaica in the mid-Atlantic region outside the Library of Congress - is to be moved in stages during the summer, with hopes to be open on the second floor of the Albert S. Cook Library at Towson University by the end of August.
BHU students were taking pictures off the lobby walls, pulling out stacks of folded cardboard boxes and rolls of bubble wrap.
