Undergraduates

Morgan State University senior Tavon Pope is used to standing in lines at semester's start - to sign up for classes, to buy books. But this is the first year that the history major from West Baltimore has had to line up for money and a job. His mother was laid off from her computer programming job this spring because of the slow economy. That means she can't help with tuition, and so, for the first time at Morgan, Pope will have to take out loans and get a campus work-study job, probably for 25 hours a week.

A reception will be held Wednesday at the Peabody Conservatory in honor of the late Mary C. Walker, who upon her death donated $800,000 to the institution where she studied and worked for most of her life. The bulk of Walker's gift - $600,000 - is being designated for undergraduate scholarships, the Conservatory announced recently. The remaining $200,000 will be split evenly between the alumni fund and the archives. Walker was a granddaughter of a man who made his fortune in the 19 t h century in the meatpacking business.

Alas, poor Shakespeare, we knew him well.That was the baleful cry from conservative critics as they watched the Bard disappear from required reading lists across the United States, part of a wave of revisionism as colleges embraced multiculturalism.Two-thirds of the nation's top 70 universities no longer insist that English majors take a Shakespeare course, according to one recent study. Still more schools are considering whether to follow suit. To traditionalits, this is political correctness run amok, an academic mistake that challenges the cultural legacy of the greatest author in the English language.

Macy Bokhari felt anonymous at the University of Maryland, College Park, and disconnected from the professors to whom she looked for inspiration. So before her first semester was up, she adjusted her sights to another state university, up the interstate in Catonsville. On Wednesday, Bokhari, now a senior at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, held court in flowing robes of red silk, the formal garb of her native Saudi Arabia. She spoke to a stream of fellow students about her research on the implications of the Arab Spring protests for women's rights in the Middle East.

One of the Loyola College psychology professors conducting a controversial seminar on human sexuality for undergraduates denied last night that pornographic films are shown, as critics on and off the campus have contended."

Hood CollegeTime: 10 a.m.Date: May 18Graduates: approximately 400Speaker: Sharon Percy Rockfeller, president and CEO of WETA radio in Washington.Loyola CollegeTime: 11 a.m.Date: May 18Graduates: 700 undergraduatesSpeaker: Rev. J. O'Donovan, S.J., president, Georgetown UniversityUniversity of Maryland University CollegeTime: 10:30 a.m.Date: May 18Graduates: 650 undergraduates, 87 graduate studentsSpeaker: Melvin A. Steinberg, lieutenant governor of MarylandWestern...

Maybe now Hopkins can make Homewood a proper campus for undergraduates at a top college, and kick the extraneous bits out to Eastern High School.The Pope is coming to Baltimore after all. Quick, build us a bigger stadium.Eight hundred eighty-eight physicists have found the top quark. Can 888 physicists be wrong?

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Alex Myers sits down to breakfast inside Harvard's Memorial Hall. Amid the marble busts of graduates and historic stained glass, Myers fits right in. Dressed in a loose-fitting running outfit and wearing a baseball cap backward, he is every inch the Harvard stereotype: a lacrosse-playing Exeter preppie whose daddy went here.Except for one thing, which may be a very big thing or a very insignificant thing depending on how you think about things.Under the running outfit, or the conservative blue suit, or the hockey goalie's equipment, he -- strictly biologically speaking -- is a she. Without hormone treatment or a sex change operation, Myers is living as an articulate, intelligent, funny, straight young man with a bright future in science.

Here is some good news for single parents.A 1994 study by speech pathology undergraduates at Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio found that preschoolers coming from homes with two working parents were almost twice as likely to have speech delays than were children coming from homes with single working parents.The researchers concluded that the single parent is more likely to discuss the day's events with the child, while married parents returning from work turn to each other for such conversations.

SALISBURY -- Nearly 2,000 students and professors from 270 universities are converging on Salisbury State University today for what frazzled organizers say is the largest event ever held at the 73-year-old former teachers college.The National Conference on Undergraduate Research is intended to promote collaborative scholarship with faculty or other mentors. It takes place during the same week that a national report criticized research universities for neglecting undergraduates.Conference participants have booked nearly every hotel room in the town of about 20,000, along with another 500 rooms in Ocean City and a handful in nearby Princess Anne.

Stan Carey (You do read his posts, don't you? You should) has an excellent post on the whom quandary , and at Johnson R.L.G. has a follow-up worth reading. As usual, the comments on each article are instructive, though not necessarily in the way the commenters intend. I have trod this hard-packed ground myself at "For whom, the bell tolls" and return only to make some practical remarks. Historical patterns, usage authorities, questions of register and all else aside, these are things I see as a working editor and teacher.

What lies at the center of that giant ball of gas we call Jupiter? When you cut through the incredibly dense atmosphere of Venus, what's happening on the planet surface? These are the questions that dance in the mind of Johns Hopkins University student Jessica Noviello. For her, they are not the idle musings of a child but a calling, pulling her life's path into space. "To think of being part of a mission that might answer things people have been wondering about for decades, that's very alluring," says Noviello, a sophomore from Smithtown, N.Y. Hopkins professors say this curiosity makes Noviello the perfect trailblazer for the university's new minor in space science and engineering.

Who says sitting in the back of a packed lecture hall trying to absorb the intricacies of trigonometric functions or the chemistry of organic molecules is the only way to teach aspiring young scientists the tools of their trade? Well, tradition mostly. That's how generations of undergraduate math and science students were trained, and for a long time the system seemed to work. But there was always a downside to the method: Far too many of those budding Einsteins and Edisons never made it past Chemistry 101. Discouraged by the impersonal formality and isolation of a hard sciences education, they dropped out to pursue less abstruse fields of study.

Beginning in 1968, when the first Sophie Kerr Prize was awarded, each graduation at Washington College built to a moment of exquisite tension. Which one of more than 20 aspiring writers would receive the nation's most lucrative undergraduate literary prize, the kind of money that could jump-start a career? Each year, the aspirants and all of their college classmates found out at the same moment. But this year, the college's best-known tradition will not be carried out at graduation.

David Simon rolled up his sleeves as he prepared to hit the hall full of Johns Hopkins students with his sermon of disillusionment. "There is nothing that makes me optimistic about the future of the country," he said, responding to one student's question about hopeful signs for her generation. Simon's Baltimore-based crime drama, "The Wire," is now part of the curriculum at Hopkins. Students had spent three months admiring the show's painful candor as it tackled the issues facing their newly adopted city.

There are times when Ronald Daniels feels like a kid with the coolest chess board in the world. As president of the Johns Hopkins University, Daniels might spend one week in Uganda, learning how his university's researchers spent painstaking years developing methods to slow the spread of HIV. The next, he might hold a chat with undergraduates on the Homewood campus about enriching their college experience. The beauty of Daniels' gig is that, if he wants, he can put the Africa piece and the Homewood piece together.

Determined to bolster revenue in the wake of repeated cuts in state funding, the University of Maryland College Park plans significant increases in tuition for Maryland residents over the next four years.The increases for in-state undergraduates at Maryland's flagship campus will average between 8 percent and 9 percent a year -- pushing tuition costs from $2,669 this coming year to $3,669 in 1998 -- under a proposal by College Park administrators. The first year of that plan is likely to be approved by the University of Maryland Board of Regents this week.

As a teenager, Mary Sanford Williams yearned to become a lawyer. But at the time, there was no money for college. Finally, now that she has graduated from Baltimore City Community College - at age 80 - the West Baltimore resident is closer to her goal. BCCC's oldest graduate this year plans to become a legal assistant. According to The Sun's Sumathi Reddy, Ms. Williams, who had a 3.5 grade-point average, did not attend the graduation ceremony last week because she is in summer school and has started course work at the University of Baltimore on the way to getting her bachelor's degree.

The Prince George's County Police Department needs to do a lot more than blame three officers for the brutal beating of a University of Maryland student after the Terps men's basketball team's victory over Duke in March. Chief Roberto L. Hylton is right to condemn the officers' actions, which were captured on video; they were completely unjustified, as there is no evidence that the student, John McKenna, had done anything to warrant so much as a rebuke from police, much less physical force.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County topped a list of "up-and-coming" national universities in the annual college rankings released today by U.S. News & World Report magazine. Students and administrators said the ranking confirms what they already knew: that UMBC has set itself apart by encouraging undergraduates to publish research, by recruiting minorities to study science and math and by emphasizing excellent teaching. "I can't think of a better description for us than 'up-and-coming,' " said Katie Dix, a senior from Baltimore.