Faculty Senate

Faculty and other members of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County community have started circulating an online petition to protest a proposed ROTC unit at the Catonsville campus, which could open this fall. According to faculty senate President Terrance L. Worchesky, the U.S. Army proposed establishing the ROTC unit during an April 25 meeting of campus leaders. The unit, which would be housed in an unused campus building, would function as a Department of Military Science, said Worchesky, who was present at the meeting.

Freeman A. Hrabowski III, an energetic 42-year-old academic who has dreamed of running a college since he was a child, was named president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County yesterday.The University of Maryland Board of Regents gave Dr. Hrabowski the job he had held on an interim basis since the resignation of former President Michael K. Hooker last summer.Dr. Hrabowski becomes the first black president of a predominantlywhite campus in the Baltimore area. He is also one of only five blacks in the nation now running a predominantly white research university.

Towson State football coach Phil Albert said he would not object to working without the benefit of scholarships, a prospect many other Division I colleges would face in the next three years if a reform proposal is approved at the NCAA convention in January.The Tigers' program might be suspended at the end of this season. There is little hope that a proposed increase in the student athletic fee from $270 to $370 will be approved, and Towson State is looking at other ways to solve a budget deficit in its athletic program.

FREDERICK -- Hood College has decided to allow men to live on its campus, becoming fully coeducational for the first time in the school's 109-year history, officials announced yesterday. Hood President Ronald J. Volpe and board of trustees Chairwoman S. Deborah Jones made the announcement to a subdued audience in the college chapel, where some students wept as they learned men will be moving into the college's residence halls as early as next fall. Founded as the Woman's College of Frederick, Hood has been a brand name in women's higher education for more than a century, although the school has admitted a small number of men as commuter students since 1971.

Barrett Scoville, Hopkins professor, dies at 55Dr. Barrett Scoville, vice president of a pharmaceutical firm and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School, died last Sunday when his single-engine airplane crashed shortly after takeoff from Great Barrington Airport in Massachusetts. He was 55.A memorial service for Dr. Scoville, who lived in Washington, will be held 2 p.m. Sunday at Cornubia Hall in Cornwall, Conn.Since 1985, he has been vice president for clinical development at Otsuka America Pharmaceutical Inc. in Rockville.

Alan L. Keyes, former diplomat, college president and U.S. Senate candidate, said last night that he is running again for the Senate because Barbara A. Mikulski has lost touch with Maryland and is part of a spendthrift Congress fueling the recession."

In an unprecedented restructuring, the University of Maryland Board of Regents last night approved a plan to eliminate or scale back some 100 academic programs at 10 campuses statewide.Moving quickly and with little public discussion, the regents voted unanimously to approve the plan just five days after it was unveiled.The vote came during a sometimes raucous meeting at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Hundreds of students and faculty members from around the state crammed the meeting room, holding signs and chanting opposition to the plan.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening backed yesterday a state initiative to create a "prepaid tuition" program, saying it could help ensure that low- and middle-income Marylanders could afford to send their children to college.The program would enable Maryland parents to purchase a contract today that would pay their children's future tuition payments at the state's public campuses. Similar programs exist in at least 10 states.The American dream, Glendening said, is that the members of each generation will surpass the prosperity of their parents.

Maryland's secretary of higher education is asking the General Assembly to delay the April 30 deadline for submitting a new state plan for higher education after the first draft received heavy criticism from the academic community. "From the beginning of this process, the time frame has haunted me," said Patricia S. Florestano, who acknowledged that she sought ideas from too few people while writing the initial draft. Florestano wants to extend the deadline for the new plan to June 30 and anticipates getting legislative approval to do so. The plan -- required by last year's legislation that overhauled the organization of higher education, upon recommendations from a commission headed by Retired Naval Academy Superintendent Charles R. Larson -- is supposed to create a blueprint that schools will follow during the next decade.

Naval Academy instructors and officials have begun to speculate this week on whether academy Superintendent Vice Adm. John R. Ryan would stay for another four years after his first term ends a year from now. After faculty members passed a resolution Tuesday saying Ryan has provided the school with "extraordinary leadership" and asking the vice admiral to stay, many senior officials are wondering if he might become the first superintendent in more than...