Campuses

The Catonsville campus of the Community College of Baltimore County is closed Monday due to a power outage in some buildings. According to the college's web site, all day classes at CCBC Catonsville are canceled, and a separate decision will be made later for evening classes. Classified staffers do not need to report. Faculty and administrators may report, but Buildings B, D, E, J, K. L and R do not have power. All other CCBC campuses and extension centers are open as usual.

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.

Though they have stopped short of endorsing a full merger, the presidents of the University of Maryland campuses in College Park and Baltimore have begun discussing possible collaborations that they say could improve both universities. In their shared vision, engineering professors from College Park could devise new technologies with doctors from Baltimore. Students from the law school in Baltimore could take public policy classes in College Park. Top researchers could be attracted with joint faculty appointments at both campuses.

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.

In his years as a chef, Chris Shoul had never thought much about the feelings of a lifelong vegetarian, unable to enjoy the cheesesteaks his buddy scarfed down. But last year, after Towson University began offering a vegan version of the sandwich made with substitute beef, the campus' top chef got a note from just such a student. "Because of you, I got to have my first cheesesteak!" the student raved to Shoul. Such moments are the reasons why Towson and the University of Maryland, College Park rank among the most vegan-friendly campuses in the U.S. and Canada, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Joe Camel's nicotine is not the only threat to young people's health; alcohol is also a perennial competitor in this category. That point is driven home in a new report from a blue-ribbon panel that points to a "startling" increase in binge drinking on college campuses. That's bad news for health and bad news for education: Drinking contributes to a range of physical -- and academic -- problems.The study reports that 40 percent of students with academic problems drink too much and that alcohol is a factor in 28 percent of drop-out cases.

If other state officials were as aggressive as Towson State's President Hoke L. Smith in coming to grips with Maryland's pending budget deficit (which could run as high as $400 million), the Schaefer administration would have a far easier time reducing government spending. Dr. Smith is taking the prudent and conservative view that times are bound to get tougher and that the sooner budgetary reductions are made at Towson State, the easier it will be over the long haul.That's why Dr. Smith not only embraced the governor's order to curb expenses by 6 percent but went one step beyond, lopping off 12 percent.

The actions of the Board of Regents eliminating programs a campuses of the University of Maryland show so little knowledge of higher education, so little attention to facts, and so blatant a disregard of the board's own policies that they pose a great danger to one of Maryland's most valuable resources.Clearly some programs on all campuses should be cut, and some of the cuts were obvious and appropriate. However, the report contains no evidence to justify any of the cuts and many cuts were incomprehensible.

ANNAPOLIS -- A House of Delegates committee yesterday easily approved a proposal to merge the University of Maryland's Baltimore City and County campuses.The bill now goes to the full House, but it's expected to face its real test in the Senate, where Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. is opposed to the plan.The combined Baltimore campuses would have about 15,000 students, less than half College Park's enrollment of 35,000. The governor envisions the merged institutions as a specialized center for the study of life sciences and medicine.

LOS ANGELES -- Far fewer black and Hispanic students will enroll as freshmen at the University of California's most prestigious schools this fall, although their numbers will drop only slightly throughout the state system and some campuses will experience an increase, officials said yesterday.The freshmen class of 1998 is the first to be admitted since California banned consideration of race in college admissions in 1996.The release of the new figures comes seven weeks after an announcement that minority applications at Berkeley and Los Angeles had dropped sharply.

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.

Today, with the Maryland Board of Regents discussing a first-in-the-nation policy regulating entertainment events on its 13 campuses, we are proud to say that students have stood up and said: "No policy." As the student representative on the Board of Regents and the student body president of the University System of Maryland's flagship university in College Park, we don't support porn. Rather, we support the right of students and student groups to host entertainment events on their campuses without the fear of censorship by a university administrator or a state politician.

Meet Keith. He comes from a good, Christian home. His parents were strict about dating. But he didn't care -- their fears of sexual immorality kept him from exploring some funny feelings.Until he went to college."I didn't think I fit the image my church had planted," said Keith, now a junior at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, recalling his biases toward gay men. "I imagined a guy walking down the street in flaming pink with swaying hips and a high voice, having sex for money and dying in despair."

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.

Towson University will be allowed to construct and operate a new branch on the campus of Harford Community College, under a decision released Friday afternoon by the state's interim secretary of higher education. The $25 million project will proceed despite previously expressed reservations from Morgan State University leaders, who questioned the fairness of allowing Towson to stake a foothold in Harford County, a growing suburb with a rich base of military jobs and no four-year universities.