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.

Harford Community College students created fleece no sew "comfort" blankets to donate to the Upper Chesapeake Medical Center's pediatric emergency department on April 25.

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.

An 18-year-old man was arrested and accused of making a false bomb threat on Thursday that targeted the Old Mill school campus in Millersville, Anne Arundel County police said. Matthew Permenter, 18, of Baltimore, was charged with disturbing school operations, threatening to detonate a destructive device and giving a false statement. It could not be immediately determined whether he had obtained a lawyer. Police spokesman Justin Mulcahy said police received a call from the school at around 8:46 a.m. A current student at the school had said a former student posted an item online that a bomb would be placed near the school and target a "Relay for Life" cancer walk event scheduled to take place on Friday evening.

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.

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.

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.

While the University of Maryland won't be able to reap most of the rewards of joining the Big Ten athletic conference until the move becomes official in July 2014, it will start benefiting from its academic counterpart — the Committee on Institutional Cooperation — this year. Officials from the university and the CIC met this week in College Park to start hammering out the details in preparation for this July, when Maryland and Rutgers University are set to join the 13-member cooperative, which includes the 12 Big Ten schools plus the University of Chicago.

As President Fred Lazarus IV expanded the Maryland Institute College of Art over the past 35 years and helped turn it into one of the nation's leading arts colleges, supporters say, he has also focused on Baltimore - to the betterment of his college and his city. Lazarus, 71, announced Monday that he would retire in May 2014. Upon hearing the news, the city's cultural and civic leaders praised his foresight, saying he realized early on that improving life both in Baltimore and at the 187-year-old school went hand-in-hand.

Our nation has laid to rest another hero. Officer Sean Collier, police officer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was tragically killed in the events that led to the capture of the Boston Marathon bombers ("Slain MIT police officer remembered," April 25). At the young age of 27, Officer Collier had always wanted to be a police officer and chose to do so protecting the campus of MIT. At the Maryland Classified Employees Association, Inc., we have the honor of representing university police officers across the state from Salisbury University to Bowie State University and Frostburg State University.

College junior Steve Moirano has no children of his own, but he played the proud parent Saturday as a pair of foals debuted to a crowd of onlookers at the University of Maryland campus farm. "What was it like?" Brandon Hurn, a sophomore chemical engineering student, asked Moirano, referring to a mare known as Amazin'. "Were you there?" "I actually pulled the foals out," answered Moirano, an animal sciences major planning to go into veterinary medicine. He and a few classmates were on hand to show off the foals - the first born on the farm in 30 years - and answer questions at Maryland Day, the university's annual campuswide showcase.

The last time Johns Hopkins freshman Gracie Golden rode in a shopping cart before Saturday was during her toddler years in a grocery store - and those carts weren't covered in duct tape or pushed at breakneck speed while she held on for dear life. Golden, a member of student radio station WJHU, joined her colleagues and other groups of students in Saturday's Red Bull Chariot Races, an uncanny but festive collegiate event that the energy drink maker holds on campuses nationwide each year.

A Cuban Revolution has come to East Baltimore. The city's Middle East neighborhood is just a few blocks away from Johns Hopkins Hospital, but there was seldom any reason for outsiders to wander in. That has changed. Amid protests from some longtime residents and others, most homeowners in the area were relocated and their houses — along with many that were abandoned and dilapidated — were torn down. Now Middle East is being developed as a mixed-use life science campus. The anchor tenant is the Science & Technology Park at Johns Hopkins, but the 80-acre area will include other research facilities along with new housing, parking and a six-acre central park.

AT THE UNIVERSITY of Texas in Austin, as on campuses across the country, freshmen are hooking up their stereos and buckling down to the business of learning what they should have learned in high school -- particularly English composition. Thousands of young Texans will take English 306, the only required course on composition. The simmering controversy about that course illustrates the political tensions that complicate, dilute and sometimes defeat higher education today.Last summer an attempt was made to give a uniform political topic and text to all sections of E306.

BOSTON - I like the old maxim that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. How else to explain the intramural conflicts that erupt over such searing campus issues as tenure and parking? But now it seems there's an extramural furor over politics itself. Conservatives have long regarded universities as the last spider holes of liberalism. They regard professors as lefty holdouts who spend their days indoctrinating the younger generation on the virtues of Che Guevara.

This week, as the Supreme Court took up two historic cases pertaining to same-sex marriage, it's been an exciting time to be a college student. Huge numbers of young people on Facebook and Twitter continue to post pictures and status updates in support of marriage equality. Kids proudly walk around campus sporting red clothing in support of the Human Rights Campaign, a national organization that seeks to promote equal rights for gays, lesbians, transgender people and bisexuals. The enthusiasm, from the quad to the blogosphere, is infectious and inspiring.

Towson University is trying to reassure its student population and address the concerns of national civil rights groups after a pro-white race student group recently announced it would conduct crime-watching patrols at night. Matthew Heimbach, a Towson senior and founder of the White Student Union, made headlines across the country earlier this week for the patrols, which he said were in response to a spike in black-on-white crime. Heimbach said the patrol members would be unarmed except for flashlights and pepper spray, though he had previously told Towson's student newspaper his members have gotten firearms training.