Brooke Coley ’03, chemical engineering, remembers it as a dream play for a football defense. Two defenders burst through the offensive line just moments after the snap, trapping the quarterback in the backfield. One defender tackles the quarterback, allowing the second defender to zero in on the ball and yank it loose.

As the football falls from the quarterback’s hands to the turf, the second defender alertly scoops up the ball and scampers all the way down the field for a 41-yard touchdown. Coley was the second defender on the play, and the touchdown she scored were the first points ever tallied by the Pittsburgh Force: a women’s football team that began playing last year.

She still smiles broadly when she talks about the play. “I go in the history books for our team. For the first TD to be a defensive TD; I wasn’t expecting that at all,” says Coley. “It was cool. It was a really good feeling.”

Coley is a Tidewater, VA native who played four sports in high school. But as a member of the tenth class of Meyerhoff Scholars at UMBC (M10), Coley decided to limit her pursuit of athletic glory as she pursued a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering.

After graduation, Coley began working toward a Ph.D. in bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. She expects to receive her degree this spring.

But Coley heard the call of athletics – and the gridiron, in particular – as she sprinted for a doctorate. It began one night while she was playing pickup basketball one night, when she received an offer to try out for the Pittsburgh Passion, a team that was playing in a women’s football league. While Coley had played some rugby while she was at UMBC, she had never really considered playing football.

Coley made the team and quickly fell in love with the game. She joined the Pittsburgh Passion as a safety and linebacker in 2006. Coley played with the Passion for three seasons until moving to a new expansion team in the women’s league – the Pittsburgh Force – this past spring.

“I’m an aggressive person, but I’m always thinking, always calculating,” says Coley. “One thing that was hard for me for football was that our coaches tend to want us to be animated, and they want us to growl. They’ll say, ‘You girls aren’t mad enough, aren’t angry.’ If a player comes my way, I’m going to get her, but I don’t have to growl at her or anything like that.”

Coley prefers to let her play do all the talking. Another one of her favorite plays came when she had to cover a wide receiver who was talking trash at the line of scrimmage. Coley gave no verbal response, but instead flattened her talkative opponent when she tried to catch a pass only moments later. As the player lay stunned on the ground, Coley quietly reached down and helped her up.

“She didn’t say another thing the whole game,” recalls Coley with a smile.

Coley isn’t sure what the future holds for her professionally, but she professes that she’d love to return to UMBC – which she says is “like a second home to me” – as a teacher and researcher with Dr. Timmie Topoleski, who was a mentor during her undergraduate years.

Coley picked UMBC and the Meyerhoff program over Duke after receiving acceptance letters to the schools only one day apart. Coley said her trip to UMBC during the Meyerhoff selection process quickly sold her on the school, even though she had spent lots of time talking with her family about her love for Duke.

Though Coley is now busy crunching data and finishing her doctoral thesis, she says she will continue playing football this spring. She views the three-hour practices that the Force holds three times a week during the season as great outlets for relieving academic stress and staying in shape.

“Football used to be a game I watched on TV,” Coley said. “I watch the game differently now. Now I know what it means to be a player.”

— Jeff Seidel ’85

If you marvel at how well UMBC’s buildings have been maintained over the last decade or so, you can point to the hard work of James Donlan ’85, economics, who until recently served as the university’s director of facilities management.

In that position, Donlan supervised the maintenance of 3.6 million square feet in UMBC’s 49 buildings. He also guided the university through some of its most challenging renovations of major buildings and constructions of new buildings in the past 15 years.

And while his departure means the university has big work boots to fill, Donlan is tackling a challenge that will call on his organizational skills, and the experience he has gleaned from his years at UMBC and his experiences as a colonel in the United States Marine Corps Reserves: leading a project designed to combat the deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that are a favored weapon of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Donlan says that he is sad to leave UMBC. “But the opportunity presented itself to work on a project with a significant impact on saving lives,” he says. “That made the decision easier.”

It was Donlan’s work on a recent tour of duty as a Marine combat engineering officer in the Marine Corps’ War Fighting Lab in Quantico, VA, that led him to his new position. The lab, he says, “finds scientific and technological solutions to problems the Marines are having in combat.” The goals of such work, he observes, is to find ways to “harden vehicles and protect people.”

Donlan’s work in that group led him to participation in a joint working group on the deadly explosives culled from all branches of the armed forces by the Department of Defense. “It is sort of a Manhattan Project to predict and prevent IEDs,” says Donlan of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO.

After Donlan’s tour was up, he was contacted by CenTauri Solutions – a defense contractor which had won an $11.7 million bid with the Pentagon and JIEDDO to work on new techniques to detect IEDs with aerial electromagnetic sensors. The group recruited Donlan as a project director on the new effort, dubbed “Yellow Jacket.” He began work on the project in the autumn.

On his tour of active duty in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 (including a stint in Fallujah), Donlan says that he “encountered multiple IEDs on a daily basis, either disarming them or finding them.” Helping his fellow solders identify and neutralize the threat, he adds, proved a strong lure to sign up for Yellow Jacket.

Donlan’s tasks at UMBC may not have taken on the life or death quality of his work as a Marine, but his steady efforts as the university erected new structures and renovated key buildings were a crucial element in UMBC’s growth. Donlan succeeded the late Richard Butler in 1994, first as associate director and later as director of facilities management.

In Donlan’s tenure, UMBC constructed the Information Technology and Engineering (ITE) building, the Public Policy building, the Physics building and a number of new residential buildings. “In the 1990s, there was construction fence everywhere,” Donlan recalls. “As I look back at it now, it seems like we were building everywhere.”

Yet Donlan feels that UMBC has retained a lot of what made it special for him as a student in the 1980s. “The campus has doubled in size,” he observes. “But it still feels small. It’s big enough that it has all of the amenities of a larger school, but it’s still small enough that it feels like a family.” (Indeed, his son Justin Donlan ’11 is a student in UMBC’s Honors College.)

Out of all his accomplishments at UMBC, Donlan points to the renovations of the biology and chemistry buildings as the most satisfying. “The biology and chemistry buildings were two of the toughest jobs we did,” he says. “We did both of them in occupied settings.”

The chemistry renovation posed vexing problems for Donlan and his team to solve.

“We were building a building on top of a building,” Donlan recalls. “The building was built like a tank. The air handling systems and everything else were in the basement. At [the time of the building’s construction], that was great idea. It worked well. But when you’ve got to replace those systems, there’s no way to get back in there. So we actually had to take the mechanical rooms that were in the basement and put them on the roof.”

Sensitivity to the important research that was happening in both buildings was also a key element in both successful renovations, Donlan says, because any mistakes “could have a devastating impact on researchers’ careers.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

Sideshows featuring amazing feats and astonishing freaks became an industry in the United States in the 19th century. But these traveling caravans have been on the endangered list in recent decades. Collecting the artifacts and celebrating the artistry of this vanishing industry has proven addictive to James Taylor ’73, interdisciplinary studies.

Taylor’s magazine about the sideshows – James Taylor’s Shocked and Amazed! On & Off The Midway – has been featured prominently in The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. His collection of sideshow memorabilia was the backbone of Baltimore’s late, lamented American Dime Museum, and it can now be seen as you sip a beer at one of Washington D.C.’s hippest taverns: the Palace of Wonders.

UMBC Magazine asked Taylor why he loves the sideshow – and keeps its manifold wonders in the public eye.

Why do I love sideshow and its talent: all the sword swallowers and magicians and knife throwers and jugglers and ventriloquists and fire breathers and human blockheads?

There’s an easy answer: Because it’s a kick, a rush, a thrill. Tell me anyone doesn’t get a bit of an adrenaline surge watching Zamora the Torture King launch into his body-skewering and literally electrifying (himself, that is) act? I once watched two guys – big as linebackers, the pair of them – pass out stone cold, falling over at the ankles while watching Zamora’s act. Another time, I watched a young girl, staring hard at his final stunt, sit and weep, her eyes never leaving his. Who wouldn’t be shocked and amazed at that show?

But there’s a more complicated answer, too. It might seem strange to most folk. It’s all about the love that these performers have for their craft and their audiences.

Whenever I deliver my “writing in the real world” spiel to a classroom of students, I tell them that you have to decide first what you love, and then whether you can (or even want to) make a buck off it. I don’t mean to be crass, but this is America: You better be makin’ the moolah, or you’re just un-American, some poor loser.

That’s a particularly brutal – and unlovely – life assessment for many creative folk in this country. But I make that judgment because I’ve seen that interplay of love and money at work – up close, alive, livin’ and breathin’, right in front of me – in the lives of the people who still work the midways. It’s a sight I’ll remember till the longest day I live, as the old-time sideshow guys used to say.

These oddball jugglers, hula hoop manipulators and fire breathers will tell you flat out that they’re in it for the money… which they’re not making. They’re starving to death. They’re limping along at best. Many of them can’t figure out how they’re going to make it to the next show.

Most people would ask: “Then why do you keep doin’ it?”

One of the best answers was told to me by showman Mark Frierson many years ago. When he mounted and trouped out his first show, Frierson told me he had so much fun while he made his money that he couldn’t believe that what he was doing was legal.

Not that there aren’t trials. Sideshow folk talk endlessly about how horrific things are now or were in the past. My ma’s late boyfriend, carnival owner Jerry Farrow, owned a monkey show back in the ‘50s, a show with an assortment of monks, all of which escaped from the barn he’d housed them in, all of which ran riot throughout Glen Burnie for about a week, and all of which were shot dead by police before Jerry’s – and Glen Burnie’s – nightmare ended. A horrifying story by today’s standards, not so in the 1950s when I grew up. And in the telling, it remained one of Jerry’s most uproarious tales, a tale of near financial ruin for him but always hilarious despite that.

The wild stories are verbal armor against more truly horrific circumstances they face almost every day. But what you hear even more than that in these over-the-top, half-fabricated-for-entertainment-effect tales – the carnival folk call them “jackpots” – is the obvious love and the outrageous passion that these show people have for the work they do.

Take the late Jeanie Tomaini, a performer born with literally nothing below her waist. In her heyday in the 1930s and ’40s, she was billed as “the World’s Only Living Half Girl.” Put “on show” by her desperately poor parents, and later “adopted” by an evil stepmother from the orphanage where Jeanie’s father had abandoned her after her mother died, Jeanie only escaped the stepmother’s clutches when she married fellow freak performer Al Tomaini, “the American Giant.” Of course, they were billed as “the World’s Strangest Married Couple.”

When I met her toward the end of her life, I asked her what it meant to be a freak act in the sideshows. After hearing all that life drama, I asked her how she’d sum up such a life. Jeanie looked me dead in the face and with a grin said: “I had a ball.”

That’s why I love this weirdness that doubles as entertainment. I love knowing there’s a business, a world, where people so love what they do – entertaining us – that, even though they often pretend otherwise, they would work just for the thrill of thrilling us.

And while it may seem strange, weird, bizarre, exotic or unusual to you, love can look all of those ways sometimes, now can’t it?

When Laura Pasquini ’98, visual arts, started her studies in art at UMBC, she thought she wanted to be a museum curator, creating exhibits that set great art in narrative contexts.

Pasquini did end up working at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., one of the most prestigious museums in the United States. But she did so in way that’s making a difference for thousands of young people and their families by opening up the Corcoran’s magnificent collection and the gallery’s other assets for learning.

As the director of the Corcoran’s Youth and Family Programs, Pasquini has revamped and revitalized the gallery’s approach to education with the aim of “empowering kids to confidence.” Most notable among her achievements is the growth in Corcoran ArtReach – an after school program that collaborates with community centers to reach 150-200 disadvantaged students a year.

In one evaluation of the program, a parent called Corcoran Artreach “the best youth arts program in the area.” And this success has also brought Pasquini recognition, most recently as the winner of the 2009 UMBC Outstanding Alumni of the Year award for a graduate in the visual and performing arts.

Pasquini points to a junior year internship at UMBC in the university’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture as a key moment in choosing a career in arts education, one which she says “changed my career and life outlook.”

Working in conjunction with Arbutus Elementary School, Pasquini designed a program to introduce and integrate students into the world of art that included talks, tours of the UMBC Fine Arts Gallery and the creation of original works of art by students. The important thing, Pasquini recalls, was to find and reinforce connections between art and the students’ experiences.

Her enthusiasm for the project steered Pasquini away from an intended career as a museum curator. “I realized I didn’t want the academic, the behind-the-scenes,” she recalls. “It awakened a world I didn’t know was out there – a world of possibilities.”

After taking a master’s degree in teaching at the Corcoran, Pasquini ended up working at the gallery full-time. She quickly worked her way up into her present position as director of Youth and Family Programs, where she drew upon her UMBC experiences to spark a renewal in the Gallery’s Corcoran ArtReach program – which brings the gallery’s art to disadvantaged children in the Washington, D.C. area.

ArtReach works in partnership with community centers in District neighborhoods. Pasquini and other members of the Corcoran Gallery develop curricula specifically geared towards each individual community, complete with lesson plans, slides of Corcoran art exhibits and a brief outline of each work.

ArtReach students also get a chance to explore the Corcoran itself, and the program augments individual coursework with monthly family workshops that incorporate parts of the gallery’s exhibits collection into broader contexts. Pasquini points to “Creatures of the Deep” workshops that the program offered last October in concert with the gallery’s “Sargent and the Sea” exhibit. These family workshops used John Singer Sargent’s paintings as a springboard for an examination of sea creatures, providing a fun, kid-friendly science lesson communicated through art.

Pasquini says that exciting student interest is the key element in ArtReach’s success. “Art has value and meaning,” Pasquini insists. “It isn’t supposed to be dead on the wall. It isn’t about a lecture – it’s about the experience, about making a learning connection [for the students] between what they saw on the wall to what they see in their own lives.”

The culmination of the ArtReach experience is a chance for students to create their own works of art using techniques and knowledge gleaned in their classes. The work is both displayed in community galleries and professionally framed and hung (with accompanying silkscreen text) in the Corcoran Gallery of Art itself.

Pasquini says that ArtReach has become “a place of learning through visual learning, creating an experience for people that brings [art] to life… It empowers kids to talk about art. It ignites curiosity and higher thinking skills. Seeing [the students] gain confidence in themselves and their art…it’s incredible.”

— Holly Britton ’11

The magazine’s staffers have had their taste buds tickled and their bellies filled as we put together an issue that focuses on food. (Excuse us if we’ve put on a few pounds in the process.)

We also have not been starved for outside attention as a university or a magazine. Check out our “News” section (pages 6 and 7) for stories about Time magazine’s recognition of UMBC president Freeman A. Hrabowski, III and the bevy of awards that UMBC Magazine already has picked up in its first months of existence.

But I want to spend a few moments articulating a particular hunger that we have at UMBC Magazine that needs to be satisfied. A craving, really.

Feedback from the readers of UMBC Magazine.

In the coming months, we will be seeking out such feedback in formal ways, including a reconvening of the original focus groups that helped shape the initial vision of the magazine two years ago and a survey that we’ll be sending out randomly to a wide cross-section of readers.

But we really want readers to talk to us in other ways: especially with ideas for stories, letters to the editor, and submissions to our class notes section.

The first two elements are easy enough. We are delighted when we hear about an alumna or an alumnus whom a reader thinks we should profile, or a memory that a reader thinks would make a great article. And we are eager for any thoughts you have about the magazine in general or any stories in particular – positive or negative. Our decision to increase our type size between Winter 2009 and Summer 2009, for instance, was directly related to reader feedback.

Class notes, however, are a different issue. Traditionally, they are a vehicle to let your former classmates know about career achievements, marriages and new arrivals to your families. And we want all those submissions.

But we’re also hoping that you’ll share other thoughts and memories with us in the class notes: Have you run a marathon? Taken up a new hobby? Just returned from a fabulous trip? Let us know about it. You can submit a class note on our website, or send it along to UMBC Magazine, UMBC, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250.

Thanks again for reading! See you again in spring!

— Richard Byrne ’86

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III takes your questions.

Q. You are well-known for your unending energy. Many students and alums marvel at it and wonder: What is your secret? Do you have any advice for staying energetic and healthy while maintaining a busy work schedule?

— Julia Tillman ’07, Modern Language and Linguistics

A. Balance in life is so important. I am thrilled to be moving towards my 40th wedding anniversary and my 40th reunion from college. So I’m reflecting this year about what’s important in life. And what I’m thinking about more and more is balance.

That has everything to do with positive energy and creating a spirit of optimism and hope. Don’t allow things like financial difficulties to lead to depression and negative thinking, because it doesn’t help. It’s important to be realistic. But it’s also important to believe that where there’s life, there’s hope.

Laughter is the elixir. Laughter can be so rejuvenating even in the midst of great difficulties. I believe humor and positive energy go together. If you hear a room with laughter, you’ll hear a room where people can be far more productive. If everybody’s gloomy and there’s a self-pitying environment, you just don’t get as much done.

I also get such positive feedback from students, faculty and staff every day. People who are proud of UMBC and proud to be a part of this community. I am energized. I think we energize each other.

Q. This semester, the UMBC campus held a series of discussions and lectures marking the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s 1959 essay “The Two Cultures.” What’s your view on the relationship between the sciences and humanities at UMBC?

— Richard Byrne ’86, English, Editor, UMBC Magazine

A. In my speeches and talks, I like to quote Daniel Pink and his book, A Whole New Mind, about left and right brain thinking.

…Ours has been the [information] age of the “knowledge worker,”…but that is changing… We are entering a new [conceptual] age…animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life… Our brains are divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is sequential, logical, and analytical. The right hemisphere is nonlinear, intuitive, and holistic… Today, the defining skills of the previous era – the “left-brain” capabilities that powered the information age – are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the…“right-brain” qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning… increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders… [P]rofessional success and personal fulfillment now require a whole new mind.

This speaks to a need for people to be broadly educated, and to be able to put their lives in context. Whether they are planning to be an artist or a scientist, they need to understand the history of ideas, appreciate ethical thinking, and being able to think about the role of technology in society – including the growing relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence. These are all questions that educated people will have to grapple with for a long time into the future.

So I believe that a liberal education is more important than ever. Teaching students how to think critically and write clearly and express themselves orally with confidence will be increasingly important as we find ourselves challenged by new problems.

More and more, leaders on the political side and the scientific side need to recognize what different disciplines bring to the table as we try to solve these problems. The more grounding leaders have in different disciplines, the more comfortably they can discuss the integration of perspectives.

People are starting to understand, too, that it’s not enough to be trained in one discipline. The most interesting discoveries will come through interdisciplinarity and collaborations across disciplines and across institutions.

That’s the point Daniel Pink is making. The logical analytical approach is just not enough. Innovation and creativity have a lot to do with being able to get beyond a traditional approach and connect ideas that may seem distant from one another in interesting ways.

Judge Dana M. Levitz ’70, theater and Alicia Wilson ’04, political science, have more in common than legal careers. Both are also winners of UMBC’s Outstanding Alumni of the Year Award (Judge Levitz in 1993, and Wilson in 2009).

Levitz was a member of UMBC’s first graduating class. He retired from a long and distinguished career on Maryland’s Circuit Court last year. Wilson is an associate at Gordon, Feinblatt, Rothman, Hoffberger and Hollander. She was a Sondheim scholar and the recipient of a prestigious Harry S. Truman scholarship.

How did studying drama help you become a good trial lawyer, Judge Levitz?

Judge Levitz: I think the vast majority of college students who think they want to be lawyers major in political science…. Political science has nothing to do with law school or the practice of law. I’m not saying that it’s not worthwhile. It’s certainly as valuable as any other liberal arts major – other than theater, in my opinion. But there’s no advantage to it… What did you study?

Wilson: Political science. (Laughs.)

Judge Levitz: See? (Laughs.) Theater was a phenomenal preparation. When I started at UMBC, the major was called “speech and theater….” You took not only courses in speech, giving a speech, but also in oral interpretation. How do you read something? How do you take a script or a document and read it for dramatic effect…There were courses in performance…. You have to read, understand the motivations of a character, the emotions, and convey it to an audience. What better preparation could a trial lawyer have than that? It literally is the ideal preparation.

How did liberal arts help you prepare for law school?

Wilson: Political science exposes you to so much of the world. It shapes your views of those issues that you want to advocate for, and that you become passionate about, because you gain knowledge of the intricacies of those issues.

What was it like in the early days of UMBC?

Judge Levitz: My wife and I started UMBC the first day it opened. We were two of the original 600 students in September 1966. There were three buildings built…. It was all mud. They put down wooden planks so you could walk from the parking lot to these three buildings.

But the great part of it was that everybody knew everybody… and since they had the vision of what this was going to become… they brought in some really high powered professors to start the departments. And the neat part about being the first students was that we were always the senior class… and we always had the top professors throughout our four years…. I found one of my bills and it was $250 a semester.

The UMBC campus in that era reverberated with social and political issues of the day. What about your generation, Alicia?

Wilson: Before 9/11 we were a different generation. I think 9/11 made us more aware of the significance of the actions we take on a daily basis and how they impact the world. And also gave us a greater awareness of how the world views us… and our responsibility not just to those we pass on the street or see on a daily basis but our responsibility to people that we never see. And people who may not yet be born. We have an obligation to make an informed decision on how we live daily. That fired a lot of my generation up to promote change and feel like we had the power to do so.

So what attracted you to attend UMBC?

Wilson: Dr. [Freeman A.] Hrabowski. His passion for this school and for the students really inspired me. Knowing that I would have somebody who made a conscious effort to know my name, learn about my background, and try to help me achieve my dreams was so appealing that once I came to UMBC… I didn’t want to go to any other school.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Arbutus UMBC

UMBC is a community that is surrounded by two other communities – Arbutus and Catonsville. But many who work and study at the university don’t know much about their neighbors.

In August, Arbutus did its part to change that dynamic by welcoming UMBC back to campus with snazzy black-and-gold “Retriever Believer” banners, emblazoned with the names of local businesses and hung along the town’s main drag. Arbutus’ Hollywood Theater even put the welcome up on its marquee.

The initiative was spearheaded by Terrence Nolan ’82, political science, president of the Arbutus Business and Professional Association. “UMBC represents multimillions in state payroll as well as millions in student purchases,” he observes. “That’s a huge economic growth pull for Arbutus that in 35 years has never actually come to fruition.”

Arbutus has also taken up other outreach initiatives in concert with the Greater Catonsville Chamber of Commerce, and its president, George Brookhart, including a survey of the UMBC community on its views about its neighboring towns.

“First, we had to identify what the students, faculty and staff’s needs are,” Nolan says. “And then focus on what Arbutus can do to make that happen.”

Nolan also cites a bus tour of both communities for incoming freshman during fall 2009 orientation as a big success. He adds that Arbutus is well past the planning stages to provide an even quicker link between UMBC and its businesses via a bike and walking path. Approval and funding await other two other communities’ completion of similar plans.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Prized Profession

UMBC Magazine may be a relatively young publication, but in two recent competitions, our peers have already taken notice of the new kid on the block.

The first issue of the magazine – Winter 2009 – received an Award of Excellence in the 39th Annual University & College Designers Association Design Competition. The contest recognizes the best of the exceptional design work done to promote educational institutions at the college and university level.

UMBC Magazine’s first two issues – Winter 2009 and Spring 2009 – also garnered two awards in the 2010 Council for Advancement and Support of Education District II Accolades competition, which honors a range of materials published by colleges and universities in support of their mission.

UMBC Magazine took a bronze medal in the category which judged four-color magazines in their entirety. The magazine also took home an Honorable Mention in the category of staff writing, including features on UMBC “artist-in-residence” Kevin “Kal” Kallaugher’s collaborations with the Imaging Research Center, a profile of American Studies professor Ed Orser, and other feature articles.

CASE’s District II is the largest geographic unit of the worldwide organization, comprising more than 700 colleges and universities in Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, West Virginia and the Canadian province of Ontario.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Time Keeper

UMBC alumni know that the university’s president, Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, is one of the most highly-regarded figures in higher education leadership. But that notion recently received some concrete acknowledgment from one of America’s leading newsweeklies.

In the November 23, 2009 issue of Time magazine, Hrabowski was ranked among “The 10 Best College Presidents” in a special education package published by the magazine.

“This recognition reflects the campus’ success and the high quality of the academic experience here,” says Hrabowski. “It’s an honor for each of us to be a member of the UMBC community.”

Among the impressive company that UMBC and its president are keeping? The head of the University of California system (Mark Yudof), the presidents of three major public research universities (E. Gordon Gee of The Ohio State University, Mary Sue Coleman of the University of Michigan, Michael Crow of Arizona State University), three leaders of elite private schools ( John Sexton of New York University, Scott Cowen of Tulane University and Ronald Liebowitz of Middlebury College) and two innovators tackling challenges at the state and community college level (Juliet García of University of Texas at Brownsville and Eduardo Padrón of Miami Dade College.)

Hrabowski used the national platform to talk about UMBC’s national reputation for diversity and excellence in science and engineering, but also pointed out its role as a liberal arts institution. “I often say to people that yes, over half of our students are in science fields, but the other half are in [liberal] arts,” he told Time. “We’re working to build a university that has first-rate research across all disciplines.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

Socks, Squirrels and Songs

You’re UMBC’s Office of Alumni Relations and Annual Giving. You want to motivate the university’s alumni to participate in a new “GOLD Challenge” program to get 1,000 new graduates of the last decade to give at any amount before June 30, 2010.

Start with a sock puppet. Throw in a song. Then get busy social networking.

The GOLD Challenge campaign launched in December with a video starring Professor T. a. Skwirl, one of a pair of sock puppet squirrels fashioned by Jenny O’Grady, director of alumni and development communications, and Erin Ouslander ’03, visual arts, designer for the university’s creative services team, over a November lunch hour.

“We were looking for something all alumni have in common,” O’Grady says. “No matter when you attended UMBC, everyone remembers the squirrels.”

The first ad focused on Timmy, a student who’s coping with the high costs of college and needs a helping hand from young alumni. Using a modified Subway jingle to tell Timmy’s story, UMBC’s a capella singing group Mama’s Boys provided the human talent. Thus was a campaign aimed at raising money for student scholarships launched on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

O’Grady is proud of the results – achieved with maximum ingenuity and minimum outlay. “We did it with zero budget,” she says.

Look for more videos featuring squirrels and other UMBC a capella groups – as well as the stories of current scholarship recipients – in coming months. And check out the first one at the GOLD Challenge’s Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/umbcgoldchallenge.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Wanna be a celebrity culinary entrepreneur like Ace of Cakes star Duff Goldman ’97? UMBC’s Outstanding Alumnus of the Year in the Humanities for 2009 offers a few hints: Don’t sweat the numbers. Don’t get complacent. And prepare for some hard knocks.

By Ana Marie Cox
Images courtesy of Charm City Cakes

Look at the numbers and Jeffrey “Duff”Goldman ’97, history, is a business whiz of the first order – a thriving entrepreneur whose successful cake making business was launched into the stratosphere by a hit reality show.

But as any viewer of Food Network’s Ace of Cakes can tell you, the 34-year-old celebrity cake maker has become a financial success and certified phenomenon in the exploding media niche of televised cooking without compromising his scruffy, scrappy look and ethos – tattoos, goatee, baggy jeans and all.

Catching up with Goldman on tour for his newly released book, Ace of Cakes: Inside Charm City Cakes (William Morrow Cookbooks), it seemed a good moment to ask him to play professor for a day. What would be his advice to a class of business students looking to adapt his life lessons into a crash course of entrepreneurship?

1. Lose the Fear

Goldman’s first lesson is, if nothing else, a great attention-getting device. “I’d take everyone out in the parking lot,” he says after some thought, “and make everybody punch somebody else in the face.”

How’s that, again? “Well, it’d be fun, first of all,” he says. Beyond the shock value of the experiment, though, Goldman points out there’s an enduring – if painful – wisdom to be won from any parking lot beatdown.

The lesson goes back to Goldman’s own coming-of-age woes in junior high. “It used to be the scariest thing, getting punched in the face,” he recalls. But after being on the receiving end of his first major fist-to-face encounter, Goldman gleaned a crucial insight: “All of a sudden, I was over my fear and I was able to fight better.”

It’s a benefit he sees accruing to his class of fledgling M.B.A.’s-cum-pugilists. “There’s something about losing your fear [and] being able to do something without worrying about failing… if you’re worried about failing, the chances are you will,” he says.

Fearlessness has served Goldman well. He started Charm City Cakes in 2000, baking pastry in his Baltimore apartment after a decade and a half in the restaurant business left him feeling like he “didn’t have balance” in his life.

What he really wanted was to be in a band, he reminisces. But he also needed to make a living. He hatched a plan, and rehearsed it to himself: “Alright, here’s what I’m gonna do: make cakes, out of my apartment, guerilla style… and be in a band,” he says. He planned on baking cakes for 10 months out of the year and touring during the other two.

Almost 10 years later, Goldman’s band – “…soihadto…” – has a record deal and toured for two months in 2009 and into 2010. It will be an eight-week working vacation from the multi-million dollar business that Charm City Cakes has become.

And Goldman’s 15 employees? They get two months vacation as well. “Paid,” Goldman says. “We seem to attract the kind of people that need [that time] to take off and do whatever.”

2. Slap Some Color on It

The baking side of Goldman’s baking/band business plan has attracted a lot of business, a lot of attention and a lot of money. Plus, the runaway success of Ace of Cakes – now in its fourth season on Food Network – allows Goldman and colleagues to turn down most of the orders that come through the transom. They’re often too busy baking cakes for, say, a Harry Potter premiere. Or the cast of Lost. Or Michael Jordan.

As Goldman warms to the idea of his own business class, he has another important lesson to impart: “Go paint some stuff.” Preferably public property, he adds. Preferably in the middle of the night. Preferably in letters three feet high. “When you do something, and really throw caution to the wind,” he observes, “it makes taking on a new venture not as scary.”

Goldman was an ardent graffiti artist in his youth. He recalls being chased out of train yards, cops at his heels. And just as the hidden lesson of face-punching is fearlessness, so the lesson he takes from graffiti boils down to a business-worthy slogan: “Never get complacent.”

“That’s the worst thing in the world,” Goldman continues. “In business, in entertainment, in anything in your life, is to get complacent. Never get complacent, never ever ever. That’s when ratings go down.” Avoiding complacency isn’t just about not getting caught. It’s about getting better.

“Things can always get better,” he says. “We’re not the best cake decorators on the planet, but we’re pretty goddamn good, and when we do stuff, we’re always like: ‘How can we make this better? How can we make this more accessible, how can we make this edible?’ We’re constantly perfecting and changing the way we do things.”

3. Get a Good Number Cruncher

Goldman’s quest for perfection doesn’t rule out practical considerations, though. Hence the third lesson in Goldman’s emerging curriculum: “Choose a good accountant.”

It’s an important step for any business, and Goldman admits that he didn’t get it quite right at the beginning. “My first accountant would just yell at me: ‘You have to do the business part! You have to do the business part!’ And I would say, ‘Hey, man, I’m just a cake decorator.’”

Eventually, Goldman found a more understanding numbers guy who has let him take care of the creativity and the cakes. “I found the ones with the nicer offices and the friendlier staff,” he says. “It’s almost like when you go to Chinatown, if you go to a restaurant and there’s no white people in there, chances are the food is really good. Look for an accountant who looks like he’s got his finances in order.”

4. Right = Not Wrong (101)

Goldman circles back quickly to the quality control side of things, with a deceptively straightforward fourth principle of business success: Don’t do it wrong.

He lays out this lesson as a Zen koan. “I had kind of an epiphany,” Goldman says. “At a restaurant, the service was great and the food was really good and there was a cool vibe. I get up and go into the bathroom and the bathroom is beautiful. Really nice bathroom. I was like, ‘Wow.’ I’m kind of always sizing thing up, whether it’s a cake or a business.”

Goldman emerged from his pit stop, he says, with a simple realization: “Succeeding in business is not difficult. The way to do things right is to not do them wrong. I know it’s a really simple, stupid idea but I came out of the bathroom with this idea.”

Goldman interrupts his epiphany in the rapid-fire free-associative manner that fans of Ace of Cakes will readily recognize: “That’s the name of my class! ‘The way to do things right is to not do them wrong.’” 101. Or something of that sort. “There’s no get rich quick; if there was, everyone would be doing it.”

5. Sure, Hire Your Friends

It turns out that one critical key to not getting things wrong is solving a critical issue facing most company managers: Finding the right kind of employee.

Any viewer of Ace of Cakes knows that this is yet another instance where Goldman has stood conventional wisdom on its head. The show’s opening features a catchy little summation of Goldman’s career that ends with the declaration, “So I decided to make cakes my way, and hired the most talented people I know: my friends.”

Sure enough, even a casual viewing of the show gives a glimpse of a workplace full of inside jokes, affection and camaraderie. Thus lesson five in the Goldman plan: Go ahead and hire your friends.

“I think most Harvard M.B.A.s would probably say: ‘Don’t hire your friends, you don’t want to deal with the nonsense.’ And I can understand why. I think you have to have a certain kind of friend and a certain kind of business,” says Goldman. “But our business has grown so organically… I have a lot of friends, and I haven’t hired them all. I’ve only hired the ones that have a knack for making beautiful stuff. For making nice cakes.”

6. Keep it Loose. But Keep it Tight.

This organic process feeds on itself, Goldman insists. His already close-knit team tends to select for people who aren’t intimidated by personal banter in close quarters, and who tend to pick up quickly on inside jokes.

Conversely, Goldman says he’s also developed a heightened sensitivity to people who could introduce disputative or disruptive vibes into his hyper-collegial workplace. So, lesson number six: Make sure the person you hire belongs on the team.

“Like when they were looking at Terrell Owens for the Ravens, I was, like, ‘Oh no, that’s horrible, he’s a team killer,’” says Goldman. “I’ve played a lot of sports and in a lot of what I do, I’m more like a coach than a business owner. Who’s going to work? Who’s going to step up? Who’s going to have the team’s best interest at heart? Especially now that we’re all famous and stuff.”

7. Happiness Rules. For You. For Everyone.

Of course, before hiring one’s friends and building a team, one needs a strong sense of mission. That’s not just found in the casual corporate-branding sense of the term, but via what Goldman calls a “philosophy of cooking.”

Goldman’s final lesson? Do whatever you do not just because it makes you happy, but because it makes other people happy.

Goldman says he’s still a little shocked when he thinks back to his years in culinary school and realizes that “nobody ever asked me why I wanted to cook – and that is a huge part of cooking. If you don’t love [cooking], it’s the worst job in the world.”

A lot of people who become chefs because of what they’ve seen on cable – whether it’s his show, Top Chef, or The Next Food Network Star – are destined to be bitterly disappointed. “One thing that’s very dangerous is that the Food Network and Bravo and all these shows glamorize being a chef,” Goldman says. “If someone wants to become a chef with the goal of getting on TV, it absolutely, 100 percent, will not happen. Period.”

A more appropriate goal, Goldman insists, is “being an awesome chef. That’s the only goal you can have.”

But experience has taught him even that’s not enough. “You have to ask yourself, why do you want to be an awesome chef? You want to be an awesome chef because you want to give people joy. You want to give them that piece of magic that you have brought to them. That you have brought to your kitchen… To be a chef is to want to please people. I had a job where I was making $14,000 a year but I knew people were enjoying my food, and that was all I needed. Well, that and the food I stole out of the locker.

“Now, having worked in the business for as long as I have,” concludes Goldman, “my greatest joy is not just creating, but creating and seeing the look on people’s faces when I give them something…. Seeing that reaction and knowing I’ve made someone smile. And that mortgage payment or that problem at work or that problem in their love life or whatever it is has gone away, just for a second. Because I made ’em a cake. I love that.”

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