Campus

Haven't paid your city property taxes? Then you're on the city's list of owners whose properties could end up in tax sale this May, along with nearly 27,000 others who (as of last week) were behind on taxes, water bills or other city tabs. That's more than 10 percent of city properties, located in neighborhoods as varied as Poppleton and the Inner Harbor . If previous years are any judge, many owners will pay up quickly and avoid tax sale altogether. Here's an interactive map that shows where all the properties are. You can click on the dots for more details, including the address, who owns and how much the city says they owe. (Keep in mind that some may have paid already -- and at least one is an error .)

The vision is this: At a six-acre wooded campus in Pasadena, Hospice of the Chesapeake has its headquarters, counseling program, a conference center and hospice facility. But the setting includes services, including tutoring and transportation, offered by others. The organization is about to start making that a reality. Ailing trees are being removed in preparation for a $2 million renovation of the offices of a defunct engineering company on a site tucked off Ritchie Highway.

I am writing in regard to Childs Walker 's excellent article ("Campus visionaries," Aug. 9) that described some of the planning work our firm did for the Johns Hopkins University. While we certainly appreciate the kudos our firm received in the article, we would be remiss if we did not point out that the evolution of the campus has been a team effort which included many other talented consultants including RK&K Engineers, Mahan Rykiel Landscape Architects, and Michael Vergason Landscape Architects.

The program at Goucher College's 121st commencement ceremony Friday listed speaker Ira Glass' main connection to the Towson college: His grandmother was a member of its Class of 1931. In the public radio host's remarks, he added that college President Sanford J. Ungar was his former colleague at NPR and had coaxed him into appearing. But Glass shared another connection that only a college student could best appreciate - that he lost his virginity in one of the campus dorm rooms.

UPDATED at 1:15 p.m.: Police are now saying that the shooting was part of a robbery in the woods near the SSA, and not on the campus. Baltimore County police department spokeswoman Elise Armacost said the victim was shot on Walden Circle, but was able to walk to Parallel Road, where he collapsed. Parallel Road is near the entrance to the SSA campus, but Armacost said, "It has nothing to do with the Social Security Administration. " From Baltimore County Police: Baltimore County Police are on the scene of a shooting in the woods near Walden Circle.

University of Maryland College Park police are looking for two men who robbed a student at knifepoint Thursday evening. University police said the robbery was the first reported on the campus in the past 12 months. The male student was alone, walking from a parking lot near Cecil Hall, a women's dormitory, at about 11:45 p.m. Two men, dressed in dark clothing and wearing masks, approached and threatened the student with a knife, police said. Police did not disclose what was taken from the student, whose identity and age are not being released.

The winner of a national competition to build an office campus for the Social Security Administration unveiled a preliminary design for the project Thursday at a meeting of Baltimore's Urban Design and Architecture Review Panel. The $200 million office campus, which will house 1,600 SSA employees in Northwest Baltimore, will be anchored by two office buildings — one five stories, the other seven stories — connected by a large glass atrium. One of the largest and most costly projects planned for Baltimore, the campus will also include a six-story garage, cafeteria, fitness center, day care center and parking spaces for 80 bicycles.

One could think of the two electric vehicle charging stations on the Catonsville campus of the Community College of Baltimore County as points in a widening state-, region- and nation-wide grid. But tucked away in a fenced-in storage lot behind the school's automotive department, they don't get much use. Though available to the public, their presence has not been widely advertised. Most of their use comes in charging a low-speed car and a high-speed car owned by the college and used to train future technicians on electric vehicles.

Merritt Properties announced that four companies recently became tenants at bwtech@UMBC, adjacent to the campus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Communications Scientific International, an aerospace technology and services company that provides communications and information systems for satellite, airborne and ground applications to the Department of Defense signed a lease for 2,804 square feet of office space at 5523 Research Park Drive. Tech Edge USA, an IT solutions company, signed a lease for 2,825 square feet of office space at 5523 Research Park Drive.

The University of Maryland, College Park has begun negotiations with The Cordish Cos. to lead the redevelopment of the eastern part of the state's flagship campus, school officials said. The Baltimore-based company, which has developed projects such as the Power Plant complex at Baltimore's Inner Harbor, was selected through a request for proposals process that began in April. The approximately 38-acre, mixed-use redevelopment will include stores, eateries, entertainment and graduate student housing, which proponents hope will revitalize the area around the U.S. Route 1 corridor.

Harvard University has a research forest.  So does Duke.  Yale has multiple forests.  The University of Maryland has “the wooded hillock. " a 24-acre patch of trees at the northern tip of the state's flagship public campus. Though tiny, largely unheralded and perhaps a bit scruffy by comparison, the forest near the Comcast Center is brimming with biodiversity, no less valuable to the faculty and students who use it than its more heralded Ivy League counterparts. Targeted for bulldozing a few years back to provide parking for buses and other support services, the hillock was spared after months of passionate protests by students and faculty, who argued the woods were a green oasis worth preserving on the sprawling 1,400-acre flagship campus.

College students are gluttons for catching rays - now schools are getting in the act, too. In a bid to shrink its carbon footprint, Johns Hopkins University has put 2,900 photovoltaic panels on the roofs of seven of its buildings, on its Homewood and East Baltimore campuses and on the old Eastern High School building in Waverly that JHU has converted into offices. The JHU panels are expected to produce 997,400 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, officials say.  Though that sounds impressive, it's about the same amount of power as 34 average homes consume in a year.

Mount St. Mary's is well aware that a win against Northeast Conference rival Wagner this Saturday propels the team into the league tournament as the No. 4 seed. But before the Mountaineers can focus on the Seahawks, they will get a visit from No. 8 Maryland, last year's national runner-up that will travel to Emmittsburg for a Wednesday night meeting. Mount St. Mary's coach Tom Gravante said the players should expect a very motivated Terps squad after falling to No. 4 Duke, 6-5, in Friday evening's semifinal of the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament.

T. Rowe Price will likely occupy two new buildings at its Owings Mills campus next year, more than three years after the Baltimore money manager put its expansion plans on hold during the recession, the company's chief executive said Tuesday. James A.C. Kennedy said Tuesday that the company would make a decision about opening the two buildings in the next month or so. "So the likelihood is sometime in the second half of 2013 we're moving in," he said after Price's annual shareholder meeting at its Owings Mills campus.

Savannah Bass, 21, who grew up in Ruxton and graduated from Roland Park Country School in 2008, is working to curb binge drinking on college campuses and along the beach during spring break. As one of 13 University of Alabama students in charge of LessThanUThink, she is using a humorous approach to convey the message that excessive drinking can have unintended, even embarrassing consequences. "We found through research that students don't respond to messages that are negative," she said.

Shiraz Maher went to the mosque in search of answers. Why, he wanted to know, had 15 young men from Saudi Arabia, the country where he spent most of his childhood, just crashed jetliners into prominent U.S. buildings? The men who gave him clarity wore fashionably tailored suits and spoke as easily of Shakespeare and Hegel as they did of the Quran. The 20-year-old Briton found these Muslims - as urbane as they were devout - completely alluring. By the time U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan three weeks later, Maher was a recruit of Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation, an organization devoted to creating a pan-Islamic state ruled by religious law. "America, in my mind, had gone to war with Islam," says Maher, now 30, from a sunny patio on the campus of Washington College.

Facing financial difficulties, Yeshivat Rambam is trying to sell its Park Heights Avenue campus. Officials at the Orthodox Jewish day school said Thursday the school would remain open through the end of the academic year, helped in part by short-term financing from the Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore. After this year, however, the school will have to relocate. In a letter to parents this week, officials referred to "perennial rumors of insolvency" and said the sale of the campus at 6300 Park Heights Ave. was inevitable.

Baltimore County Police say reports Tuesday morning that an armed man was coming to the Community College of Baltimore County's Essex campus were unfounded. Police say they alerted campus officials that an employee of the school was involved in a domestic dispute about 4 a.m. in Harford County. The man's girlfriend told police that the man could be suicidal, and that he was headed for the campus. But a police spokesman said the man instead stopped by a police precinct and filed an incident report against the woman.

Possibly the only thing more disturbing than the realization that someone was on campus at a school in Harford County this week making threats to kill people is the reaction of the school and its public safety component. On Monday morning, the administration at Harford Community College decided not to immediately alert the campus about what police would later describe as a "homicidal/suicidal" person wandering the campus. At around 10:30 a.m., a student was heard making "dangerous threats" near the library on the campus east of Bel Air. He was taken into custody about 50 minutes later and is not expected to be charged.

Prosecutors on Tuesday filed seven additional charges against the teen who police say threatened to go on a shooting rampage at the University of Maryland, College Park last month. In addition to disturbing the administration of activities and classes at the college, Alexander G. Song 2nd, 19, has been accused of charges including making false statements, misusing university facilities and equipment, sending harassing email and disturbing the peace, according to a statement from campus police.