Campuses

With a bagpiper, a chorus of bow-tied vocalists and all the pomp of a college graduation, the Community College of Baltimore County officially celebrated yesterday the arrival of its new president. Sandra L. Kurtinitis described the opportunity to lead the college's three campuses as the capstone of her 39-year career as a professor and administrator of community colleges in Maryland and Massachusetts. "I have been in training for this day and this job for my entire life," she told the audience that crowded into the Catonsville campus's theater and gave her several standing ovations.

After final exams and graduation every spring, America's college campuses become junkyards of abandoned stuff - providing, some say, a snapshot of a generation of students raised in a throwaway culture. Take Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. A cleanup of the dormitories last week filled hallways and lounges with about 50 unwanted mini-refrigerators, 40 computer printers, scores of microwave ovens and window fans, mounds of mattresses and couches, piles of pillows and clothes, a store's worth of detergent, shampoo, books and ramen noodles, not to mention bicycles, stuffed animals, crutches and exotic underwear.

Maryland's two largest public research universities launched a joint public health program Tuesday, the first of a series of planned collaborations designed to break down barriers between the two campuses. Officials say the joint program will enable students to draw upon the University of Maryland, College Park's expertise in subjects such as biostatistics and the social sciences while benefiting from opportunities for clinical research at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

YOU NEED an appointment to get in a few words with Veronica L. Austin. By day, the 33-year-old East Baltimore resident, single with a 12-year-old daughter, works full time as a staff assistant in neuroscience and psychiatric nursing at Johns Hopkins Hospital. By night, she pursues a bachelor's degree in business administration at Strayer University's White Marsh campus. "I guess you could say I'm driven," says Austin, who hopes to earn the degree in the winter of 2006. When she looks around her Strayer classroom, Austin says, "I see lots of people my age and older, lots of single people and very few African-American men."

MADISON, Wis. - The bricks are still charred in one corner of the Red Gym at the University of Wisconsin here, burned by a bomb hurled by anti-war protesters trying to destroy the offices of the ROTC, or Reserve Officers' Training Corps. But that was another time and another war. Today, even on this legendarily radical campus, uniformed ROTC members drill at will and train to become military officers without fear of disdain or worse from what one student newspaper calls "the peace-mongers."

Students tell colleges to sell stocks tied to IsraelANN ARBOR, Mich. - On this legendarily activist campus, where previous generations of protesters opposed the war in Vietnam and apartheid in South Africa, students have launched a similarly ambitious movement that promises to be even more divisive: to force Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories. Students at the University of Michigan and about 50 other campuses across the country are petitioning their schools to divest themselves of stock holdings in companies with ties to Israel to protest the country's treatment of Palestinians.

State Sen. Thomas V. Mike Miller supports merging the University of Maryland, College Park campus and University of Maryland, Baltimore professional schools in order to raise their national rankings based on total research funding. Compilers of the most widely used rankings, however, are already on the lookout for public university system "mergers" that seek to game the rankings system by combining distinct campuses into a single "merged" entity with a much larger total haul of research dollars.

The Board of Regents of the University System of Maryland approved increasing in-state tuition by 5.5 percent at the state's 10 campuses yesterday, breaking a 5-year-old pledge to limit raises in college costs. Regents said yesterday that the increase is needed because the system is receiving far less state funding than they had sought. The state budget approved last month gives the system $2.6 million over the current budget, or less than a 1 percent increase, leaving universities looking to cover about $50 million in fixed-cost increases, system officials say. "The reductions in the budget were tough," said C.D. Mote Jr., president of the University of Maryland, College Park, where in-state tuition will increase from $4,334 to $4,572, in addition to $1,098 in mandatory fees.

In better times, Maryland's public college and university leaders might take little notice of the governor's race going on outside their ivy-covered walls. But not now. With the state facing a $1.7 billion deficit and its campuses fearing that they're on the front line for cuts, the state's higher education officials are watching the race to replace Gov. Parris N. Glendening with mounting worry, unsure of what to expect from the two candidates. At the same time, the state university system is the subject of increasing attention from gubernatorial candidates looking for ways to balance their budget plans and to rid the university system's highest ranks of what they see as unacceptable cronyism.

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.