Undergraduates

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.

LOST amid the heat and smoke of the debate regarding public schools is the equally tragic failure of our elite private research universities. A startlingly frank report recently issued by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has put this issue squarely in the public eye.The report takes the country's research universities to task for largely ignoring their duty to undergraduates and for substituting platitudes and slick public relations for...

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.

Some years fade fast. Others keep coming back again and again. More than any other single year in the last half-century, 1968 is the year nobody forgets, the year everyone remembers, the year when apocalypse and the millennium both reared their heads.Even in the midst of 1968, we knew it was special. I know I did. I was a professor of English literature at the State University of New York and at the same time a member of Students for a Democratic Society.Thirty years ago this spring, I was arrested and locked up in jail along with nearly 700 other protesters on the campus of Columbia University.

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.

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.

BALTIMORE'S STANDING as a college town owes much to the eminence of Goucher College among small liberal arts institutions that give undivided attention to the complete education of undergraduates. Anything that helps Goucher grow stronger, do its job better and face the future with more confidence is good for all of Central Maryland as a center of learning.The Campaign for Goucher College, now on its way to increasing the endowment $40 million by June 1999 (it is $93 million today), will provide stronger foundations for the college now numbering 1,050 full-time undergraduates and 200 graduate students on 285 forested acres just north of Towson's shopping district.

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?

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."

Quality Ph.D.sIn Mike Bowler's Jan. 10 column on black Ph.D. degrees, Frank L. Morris Sr. of Morgan State University laments the large number of Ph.D.s being awarded Asians or students on temporary visas.I would imagine the number of top degrees awarded to Asian-Americans is also high, although that statistic is not shown.The complaint used to be that many of the foreigners receiving degrees here were not going home and taking jobs away from Americans.Now the complaint is that they are taking degrees away from Americans.

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.

Gov. Martin O'Malley, sleeves rolled up, perched on a stool in the Towson University student union Thursday, moments after the Board of Regents voted unanimously to freeze in-state undergraduate tuition for the fourth straight year. "That is quite an accomplishment," he told a group of students. Regents said they would have raised tuition by 4 percent, but the governor provided the state system with an extra $16 million to hold the line. The accomplishment, then, was as much O'Malley's as the regents', and he savored the victory yesterday in a year that has not always been kind to him. "Our state's future competitiveness, our global strength, depends on our ability to invest in the skills of our people," O'Malley said.

Oregon's state Board of Higher Education is expected to vote this morning to select University of Baltimore Provost Wim Wiewel as the next president of Portland State University, Oregon's largest college, officials said yesterday. Wiewel, 58, chief academic officer at the 5,400-student downtown Baltimore school since 2004, would replace Daniel O. Bernstine, who stepped down last year after about 10 years in the president's office to head the Law School Admission Council. In a statement yesterday afternoon, University of Baltimore President Robert L. Bogomolny thanked Wiewel for his "many contributions" and congratulated him on his appointment.

Anyone sending a child to an expensive college these days undoubtedly looks askance at the difference between the high cost of tuition and the amount of financial aid available. Some members of Congress are also skeptical, and they have floated the idea of requiring universities to spend 5 percent of their endowments each year to give students and their families more tuition relief. Given the value of higher education and the tax-exempt status of universities, it's fair to ask them to do all they can to make higher education accessible and affordable to as many students as possible.

The nation's colleges and universities may need better ways to show that they are doing a good job of educating students, but giving standardized tests to undergraduates shouldn't be one of them. That's the least plausible part of an otherwise sensible plan to make more information about higher-education institutions available to students, parents and the public. Many critical elements of the college experience simply can't be captured by uniform tests - and efforts to homogenize that experience should be discouraged.

The University of Baltimore will offer every freshman who enrolls in the fall of 2007 a one-year scholarship covering all out-of-pocket tuition and fee expenses - a bold move designed to attract students to its first freshman class in three decades. University officials hope that the one-time grant program will help publicize the downtown college's conversion from a school serving only junior and senior undergraduates - as well as graduate students - to one offering a full four-year undergraduate education.

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.

Greater accountability - via standardized testing of undergraduates - is a concept whose time has come in higher education. This is partly the result of sharply rising costs and partly a logical extension of the test-based reforms that have swept through elementary and secondary education. In Maryland and elsewhere, virtually every public or private college these days is studying or trying out some means of better demonstrating the overall learning gains of its undergraduates. But now the Bush administration has a commission looking at the feasibility of comparing colleges by administering nationally standardized tests to their students - a superficially appealing but highly questionable proposition.

Shaw in the Barn This may be Theatre Hopkins' final season in the Merrick Barn on the Homewood campus of the Johns Hopkins University, but to launch it, director Suzanne Pratt is going back to the beginning - the beginning of four plays by George Bernard Shaw, that is. Opening tomorrow under the title Shaw: Four Starters, the production includes the first acts of Arms and the Man and Too True To Be Good, as well as the prologue to Androcles and the...

At a time when Maryland college students are under increasing financial pressure, the state's flagship campus has collected more than $1 million from them that it has yet to spend. The $100-per-student fee - one of many imposed on undergraduates each year at the University of Maryland, College Park - was adopted two years ago by the Board of Regents to bolster technological infrastructure. The charge was initially set at $50 a year, and the first year's money was distributed by a committee to various projects.