Goucher College

Goucher College has narrowed its search for a new president to three finalists -- an administrator at Southern Methodist University, a historian from Stanford University, and the longtime No. 2 official at Baltimore's Loyola College.The next president will succeed Rhoda M. Dorsey, who will retire in May after 20 years running the liberal arts college in Towson.The finalists are Judy Jolley Mohraz, associate provost for student academic affairs at Southern Methodist; Judith C. Brown, a Stanford history professor specializing in Renaissance Italy; and Thomas E. Scheye, the provost and acting president of Loyola.

Janet Jeffery Harris, who devoted much of her life to her alma mater, Goucher College, and became the first woman to head its board of trustees, died Friday at age 90 of natural causes at her Towson home. A Baltimore native, she was the daughter of Nellie French and Elmore B. Jeffery, a founder of the now-defunct Equitable Trust Co. She graduated from Girls' Latin School in 1926. "I never really wanted to go to Goucher in the first place," Mrs. Harris said in a 1981 interview with The Sun, explaining that she was made to enroll by her millionaire father, a Goucher trustees chairman who died a few months before the 1929 stock market crash.

Gary Lakes is the musical equivalent of an endangered species.The 42-year-old singer, who will appear Sunday at Goucher College with several winners of the Rosa Ponselle Competition in a concert celebrating what would have been the 95th birthday of the great diva, is one of the handful of genuine heldentenors in the world. These are the tenors with voices large and brilliant enough to ride over the Hurricane Andrew-sized waves of sound in Wagner and a few other composers. The reason there are so few of these tenors around is that nature endows very few men with the appropriate genes, Lakes says.

What attracts me to art is the same thing that attracts me to friendships: an intimate connection communicated in an unsettling package." So writes curator Cara Ober in her catalog essay to Inward Gazes, the intriguing show of 13 women artists on view at the Rosenberg Gallery on the campus of Goucher College. Intimate and unsettling are indeed apt descriptions of the two dozen or so feminist-inspired works in this exhibition, which are both intensely personal and, in many cases, quite deliberately provocative.

Almost 200 students, faculty and staff gathered at Goucher College last night to protest anti-gay sentiments that have been scrawled recently in the college's four dormitories."

Goucher College has received a $3.3 million donation from a trust set up by a former college trustee -- the largest one-time gift in the school's 114-year history.The gift from the Edwin T. Stackhouse Trust of New York also places Stackhouse -- a college trustee from 1922 until his death in 1951 -- among the four largest donors in the school's history. The Shickshinny, Pa., native created the trust through his will, which benefited his family throughout their lives and also named Goucher as a beneficiary.

Convicted rapist Keith W. McCormick Jr. has been sentenced to 29 years and five months in federal prison without parole on kidnapping and two other felony convictions tied to the abduction and rape of a Goucher College student last year.McCormick, 34, of Edgewood, received the sentence in U.S. District Court in Baltimore Friday, two days after he was sentenced in Harford County to two consecutive life terms for the knifepoint rape and sexual assault of an Aberdeen woman the same day he abducted the student.

The city of Annapolis and Goucher College are negotiating a deal that would allow the Towson school to do historic preservation fieldwork in the state capital, which city and college officials say would provide an ideal laboratory for budding archaeologists. Talks are in the preliminary stages, but Mayor Ellen O. Moyer has set up a volunteer group to help Goucher develop a curriculum. Fred Mauk, the school's associate dean for graduate and professional studies, said, "We're very enthusiastic about the possibilities."

It used to be that his playing wasn't the only thing about Santiago Rodriguez that was hot. The Cuban-born, American-trained pianist got bent out of shape whenever he saw less talented players achieve celebrity."

At a ceremony stocked with political notables and shadowed by the war on terrorism, journalist Sanford J. Ungar formally took the helm of Goucher College yesterday, saying he looked forward to leading the school in a time of crisis. "It feels just wonderful," said Ungar, 55, as he headed into his inauguration at Kraushaar Auditorium, two months into his first semester as president. "This is the best place I've ever worked." Ungar, a native of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and a graduate of Harvard University, arrives at the 2,000-student private college after a journalism career that included being a co-host of "All Things Considered" at National Public Radio and contributing to The Washington Post.