“People know what NPR sounds like,” says Vikki Valentine ’96, English. “But they don’t really know what it looks like. And on the Web, it’s what you look like that’s important.”

That’s the daily challenge for Valentine, who is a senior editor in NPR’s science division – and recipient of the 2010 UMBC Alumna of the Year Award in the Humanities. Public radio is changing at light speed; so much, in fact, that National Public Radio isn’t even National Public Radio anymore. In July, the name became simply NPR.

“The core product of NPR will always be audio storytelling,” says Valentine. “But people aren’t buying radios anymore. If you listen to NPR, you’re streaming it on your computer, you’re listening to it through your iPhone or your iPod…. NPR is trying to branch out and figure out what NPR is in that digital space.”

Valentine’s career trajectory has followed that rise in digital storytelling. UMBC professor of the practice in English Christopher Corbett helped guide her to a print journalism job with Baltimore Style after graduation. But within two years, Valentine was lured to The Baltimore Sun to work on the newspaper’s website – learning the ins and outs of the new medium on the job. “I knew nothing about the Web when I went to the Sun,” she recalls. “The only thing I had formal training in was reporting. UMBC gave me this great foundation in learning and asking questions and how to ask about things.”

A lifelong interest in science eventually took her from the Sun to Discovery magazine’s website, where she wrote daily science news. When that magazine shut down Valentine’s department after the dot.com bubble burst, she ended up at NPR. Over the last nine years, and in a variety of jobs, Valentine has helped reshape the way the organization tells its stories. In a medium that’s constantly changing, she says that flexibility and a knack for telling stories are key elements in her task.

“Most often someone comes to me with a story idea and we sit down and talk about that story and flesh it out,” she says. “Then we figure out what’s the best way to tell this story.”

One of features that Valentine has created at NPR.org is the Tiny Desk Kitchen. Inspired by the DIY spirit of NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts, these videos examine the science behind popular notions about food (Does honey really have healing powers? Is grass-fed beef better for you than corn-fed beef?) and cap it off with a taste test in an improvised kitchen set up in an NPR cubicle.

In 2009, she was among a team of editors to win a National Academies of Science Award for excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering and medicine. The award honored “Climate Connections,” a year-long multimedia series of stories looking at the complexities of the interplay between humans and the climate. It’s the sort of hybrid project – reported stories underscored by sound, web graphics and video – that shows the power of web journalism to unlock stories at multiple levels.

More recently, Valentine has worked with veteran storyteller Robert Krulwich on a series of science video and animation stories. For instance, a story of a group of space enthusiasts who manipulate and trade images from the Hubble and other space telescopes is accompanied by jaw-dropping images of a developing galaxy. Another story describes the crowded insect highway above our heads (around 3 billion insects strong) with a whimsical animation that visualizes the scientific details of spiders and beetles at 6,000 feet.

In September, Valentine will expand her responsibilities when she becomes the senior editor leading NPR’s environment, climate, and energy beat across all platforms.

“It’s a really fun time to be here,” Valentine says. “NPR is always saying to its staff: ‘Come up with something interesting, come up with something innovative.’ I’ve had lots of opportunities to do lots of different things, which keeps it interesting.” Whatever radio becomes, will Vikki Valentine be one of the journalists who will take it there?

“Hopefully,” she says. “That’s what I’m trying to be. I’ll let you know in ten years.”

— Mark Trainer

After a stellar basketball career at UMBC, Rick Moreland ’83, interdisciplinary studies was drafted in the ninth round of the National Basketball Association’s annual draft by the Washington Bullets.

And though he never made a basket or grabbed a rebound for the Bullets (renamed the “Wizards” in 1995), Moreland eventually made the team in a different way – and he’s lasted 25 years with them.

“I have had a longer career than most of the NBA players,” says Moreland, who is the team’s senior vice president for corporate marketing and executive seating. Moreland’s job with the team is to make sure that the corporations and other big customers of the team have an ideal experience when they come to see the Wizards play at the Verizon Center in downtown Washington, D.C.

His mantra? “Find something you really enjoy doing and find a way to make money at it,” says Moreland, sitting behind his desk at the Verizon Center. He observes that some of the Wizards’ younger employees, after taking in his 6’ 7” frame, ask him if he ever played hoops. Moreland enjoys telling them that he was good enough to be drafted by the team back in the day.

Moreland played at Surrattsville High School in Prince George’s County before arriving at UMBC, which was still a Division II school at that time. He left the university as the leading scorer and rebounder in school history – tallying 1,728 points and grabbing 931 rebounds at UMBC.

Chris Farrell ’84, health science and policy, entered UMBC with Moreland in 1979 and played point guard for the Retrievers. “He was an excellent player and an excellent teammate,” says Farrell, who now works for a software company near Philadelphia. “He worked as hard as anyone on the team. I focused on assists and he made it so easy for me.”

Another teammate on the Retrievers teams of that era was Bill Larash ’82, economics, who works as a certified public accountant in Annapolis. Moreland “was offensively the best player I have ever seen,” he says. “He was unselfish on the court. I joke with him now that he could go out and play for the Wizards.”

Page Elliott ’82, health science and policy, was a co-captain with Moreland on the 1981-82 UMBC team. The two had previously played against each other in the Maryland state semifinals – when Elliott was a senior at Thomas Johnson High in Frederick – before becoming teammates. “It was a close-knit group,” says Elliott, who now lives in New Jersey. “[Current men’s basketball coach] Randy Monroe is doing a great job of keeping our team involved with the program.” says Elliott.

Moreland attended the Bullets’ training camp after being drafted in the spring of 1983, but did not make the team. So he switched gears and started looking at other career options in the business of sports.

Moreland had already honed his administrative skills at UMBC, working in the athletic department as a sports information director, an assistant athletic director, an assistant basketball coach, and as an acting athletic director. He started working for the Bullets in 1988 in the team’s public relations department, capitalizing on his experience as an intern at WJZ-TV in Baltimore during his college days.

“I wanted to stay in sports,” he says. Moreland also took charge of handling the game-day operations of the games that the Bullets played at the Baltimore Arena when the team was based in Largo.

Moreland assumed his current position in 1995. One of the highlights of his tenure with the franchise was a chance to work with NBA superstar Michael Jordan, who won six NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls before ending his retirement and joining the Wizards as a player and team executive for two seasons in 2001. “Michael Jordan, who after you get past the celebrity, is a great guy,” notes Moreland.

Moreland and his wife, Susan, have three grown children and live in Davidsonville. Their daughter, Ali, was a senior guard this past season for the women’s basketball team at McDaniel College.

— David Driver

Blair. P. Grubb ’76, biological sciences, is a distinguished professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Toledo’s College of Medicine. He was also a recipient of UMBC’s Alumni of the Year Award in 1994. But Dr. Grubb – who is one of the world’s foremost authorities regarding syncope (or “fainting”) and disorders of the autonomic nervous system – is also a widely published essayist. UMBC Magazine asked him to share his thoughts on the confluence of medicine and literature.

In the midst of the current debates on the future of American health care, a much less discussed crisis has been brewing: the growing estrangement of physicians from the very people they seek to treat.

As a doctor, I know well that modern medicine can do more than ever before to diagnose and often cure illness. But the patients we treat report an ever increasing sense of alienation and disenchantment with those who provide medical care.

And the patients are not alone. Physicians also report a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the current practice of medicine. This disenchantment is underscored by some grim statistics: among professions in America today, physicians now boast the highest rates of suicide, divorce, alcoholism and substance abuse. It is estimated that 300 to 400 physicians in the United States take their own lives each year, a number that is only projected to grow in the near future.

While the cause of these problems is both varied and complex, I have come to feel that part of the reason lies in modern medicine’s progressive dehumanization of both patients and the physicians who serve them. Once sacred bonds linking physicians and patients are now increasingly disrupted by market forces touting the “bottom line.”

To some extent, I believe we have forgotten that medicine is neither a science nor a business; rather it is an art that uses science and business as tools to aid in healing, and not as ends unto themselves. The increasing distance between medicine and the humanities only serves to aggravate the aforementioned issues. For if we think of the humanities as those activities that most reflect what it is to be a human, it could be argued that medicine is one of the humanities’ most prominent fields. What is more human than the act of healing? A patient is not merely a broken machine but rather a unique individual shaped by his or her family, environment, heritage and culture.

Over time, I began to realize that every patient tells a story, a unique narrative that is critical to understanding not only his or her illness, but how that illness had affected his or her life. I also came to realize that sharing in each patient’s story deeply enriched my own life. I began seeing myself less a mechanic and more a partner in the healing process. More and more, I saw my patients’ struggles as reflections of the human condition itself, and our confrontations with fear, hope and mortality.

I began to write down these experiences in stories that tried to convey the lessons that I had learned from each patient. It was a process made difficult by an almost complete lack of exposure to the humanities throughout the entirety of my previous education.

Yet as I continued to write these stories about the patients I had treated and the “nobility of the spirit” that they showed in their struggles with illness, I found myself carried into the great repositories of wisdom found in literature, poetry, art and music. I discovered the Bible, the Divine Comedy, Maimonides, Camus and Buber. I listened to Mozart, Verdi and Glass, and stared in wonder at the works of Turner, Michelangelo and Rothko.

It was an exploration accelerated by my own confrontations with severe illness and loss, and those of my family.

What I have found in the humanities is a quest to understand the depths of the human condition, and a willingness to venture into places where pure science cannot go. No one turns to their chemistry book in times of deep emotional crisis.

I have come to believe that one way to address the growing frustrations of both physicians and patients is to reconnect medicine with the humanities, and allow both parties to the act of healing to see themselves more clearly as part of the ongoing human drama in which we each play a role. The humanities can help train the keen eye of the artist on the problem of illness, and aid in acknowledging the shared humanity of both those who suffer disease and those who seek to help them.

If we achieve this reconnection, a greater number of physicians can once again see ourselves not as mere biomedical technicians, but rather as “healers” in the truest sense of the word.

Three alumni — Aaron Moss ’07, Tootsie Duvall ’75, and Eric Messner ’01 — talk about their experiences as actors in the award-winning crime drama, The Wire.

Read more in the Fall 2010 issue of UMBC Magazine…

Are rulings by judges the best way to settle hot-button social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion? Maybe not, argues Georgetown University law professor and UMBC alumna Robin L. West.

By Richard Byrne ’86
Illustrations by Chris Buzelli

Justice is a concept that can enflame our passions and animate our actions. The urge to seek redress for wrongs is woven into the fibers of our government, our economy and our culture.

Courts of law are the main venue in which citizens seek justice. So it puzzles UMBC alumna Robin L. West ’76, philosophy – one of America’s preeminent legal scholars – that our nation’s legal establishment and its law schools have largely devalued and dismissed the concept of justice itself.

“In Paper Chase-type movies and in stereotypical accounts of law school,” West observes, “first-year students will often make an argument about a case being just or unjust. And they’ll be shot down by a professor for having said something overly emotional or childish, something inappropriate or not sufficiently thoughtful, or not sufficiently grounded in theory.”

As the Frederick J. Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy and an associate dean at Georgetown University Law Center, West has pursued her interest in legal justice in law and in literature through a dizzying array of books and papers. She now ranks among the most prominent and prolific legal scholars in the nation.

West’s investigations of the philosophy and history behind American legal justice have also prodded progressives to rethink their reliance on courts as the ultimate decider on hot-button issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion.

In books like Reimagining Justice (2003), West argues that contemporary ideas of legal justice have a historical and institutional tilt toward conservatism and libertarianism. In their place, she proposes a vision of American justice that creates greater social cohesion and acknowledges the positive and essential roles that government and politics play in public life.

A weak concept of legal justice “becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if nobody ever thinks about it, if nobody develops ideas about it, if nobody ever argues about it,” says West.

Justice on the Cutting Room Floor

That law schools and the legal system itself are dismissive of justice seems counterintuitive. Don’t Supreme Court judges answer to the formal title “Justice?”

But West observes that this state of affairs has both a long history and a powerful ripple effect in American culture: “The bad rap that justice has dates back to the late 19th century, when the various approaches to law that were competing for credibility in the legal academy both – for different reasons – dismissed justice.”

Those movements were called “legal formalism” and “legal realism.” Both philosophies are significant building blocks for today’s jurisprudence.

“The formalists gave us the case method – one of the modern ways of legal reasoning,” West says. “Basically they viewed justice as unnecessary; they thought that law was sufficient to answer all legal questions. You could do it all through deductive reasoning. The realists thought that where there were gaps in legal reasoning, the gaps should be filled with the social sciences, which were just emerging as a major way of thinking about political issues at the beginning of the 20th century. So for these different reasons, both camps put justice on the cutting room floor.”

West observes that these movements also aligned with a third notion: the idea that a lawyer’s education should reflect the proper role of law in society and focus on the courts as opposed to the legislatures which create laws. The concept of law as a defender of the individual right against political power has deep roots in the Enlightenment and is manifest in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

“We inherit these ideas about the state potentially being the overreaching Leviathan, and our needing common law and judges to clamp down on it,” says West. “That then gets blended with our constitutional ideas. Separation of powers, individual rights, and so on. What you get out of this by the middle of the 20th century is a lot of rhetoric and ideology and philosophy about the role of law as that which constrains politics. Why does the rule of law clamp down on the state? It’s in order to free the individual to do what they’d do if the state wasn’t there.”

This is a narrow view, argues West, which not only casts the state as a perpetual bad guy, but also negates any useful role for politics.

“Oftentimes the law serves other and nobler and life-enhancing purposes,” she observes, “where the state has to step in and protect people from pernicious private power – or protect people against natural disaster or inevitable tragedy. You don’t get that sense of law intruding into the social world for good ends from the rhetoric of law as the counter to the evil state that emerges from the common law period.”

West suggests that one corrective is for law schools to “open up the subject of what legislatures ought to do to inquiry and study and teaching…The question of the common good has been left out of legal education for the most part. Why? Because the common good, the social good, is what legislators do.”

Courts as a Dead End?

As a legal theorist, West has expended a great amount of energy puzzling through a conundrum: If the dominant notion that law exists largely to police the state for its infringements on individual rights has such a profoundly libertarian and conservative tilt, then why have progressives embraced the courts as a primary vehicle for social change?

West’s work points to a number of problems with that tactic. The first? Courts are far from immutable. They do change – and largely as a result of politics. One example, observes West, is the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this year in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – which struck down a key provision in federal campaign finance law which limited corporate expenditures in elections.

“The main way to think about that case among [progressive] constitutional scholars is to say that the case is just wrong,” says West. “And I have no quarrel with that. But it also is representative of the dominance of constitutional thinking on liberal political action that comes out of law schools. It’s a bit of getting hoisted on your own petard. You have several generations having gone through the legal academy thinking that the Supreme Court is the vehicle for progressive policy, and that the way to go about it is to have the Supreme Court do something that clamps down on the political branches. OK. So here you have the Supreme Court doing something that clamps down on the political branches. And the result is pretty much a disaster across the board.”

West argues that choosing to litigate social change has boxed in progressives. “Somehow we’ve gotten into the position – we, meaning, basically progressives and liberals – of constantly turning to the Supreme Court to decide these questions of fundamental political choices,” she says. “You keep going to the courts to represent things like social welfare, and you’re just wasting your time. The time would be better spent organizing people.”

The problem manifests itself clearly in legal wrangling over same-sex marriage and abortion.

In the case of same-sex marriage, West observes, the conceptually attractive notion of “formal equality” – or “treating like cases alike” –which dominates current legal thinking tends to run aground on the issue of how to decide what constitutes a married couple: traditional male-female pairings only or stated desire by two people to be married, regardless of gender.

“We have not thought very deeply or thoroughly about the politics of marriage per se,” West observes. “Instead, we take marriage as a given, and then ask why these people are treated like these people. It’s a classic ‘treating likes alike.’

“But what’s gotten completely dropped from that conversation is whether marriage – as presently constructed – well serves people,” West continues. “Obviously, it serves some people really nicely. Other people it doesn’t serve so well at all, particularly, for example, folks who want to parent and are poor. Why? Because if they want to parent but can’t access marriage – can’t find someone they want to marry – they’re disadvantaged quite substantially by virtue of not being married but wanting to parent.”

Rights aside, West points out, the stakes remain high: “The number of privileges and economic goodies that married partners have simply by virtue of being married number in the thousands. It’s an extraordinary statistic.”

Marriage’s role as a de facto social safety net may have made sense in the 19th century, she adds, but the present world of single parenthood and extended life spans present different challenges for today’s families.

“When you constitutionalize something like same-sex marriage,” she says, “you’re limited to talking about whether this couple is like that couple, rather than opening up the question of what’s being served by virtue of the state’s role in marriage. Some of it may be worth retaining. Other parts of it may be worth thinking through and doing differently.”

Abortion rights are another issue where West sees the courts as a dead end for progressives. She points out that the Supreme Court’s 1972 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion has been under steady assault since the day the ruling was announced. Now, it may hang on a single vote.

“I think it was unfortunate that that issue was constitutionalized,” West says. If keeping abortion rights legal is a progressive goal, she continues, “Roe v. Wade and its aftermath are not doing a very good job right now. The list just goes on and on of the undermining of Roe through state legislation.”

West argues that pro-choice advocates should place greater faith in politics and organizing. “I don’t think it’s true that the political process is going to yield these horrific results on the abortion side,” she says. In fact, the emphasis on the courts as a battleground for the issue has created “this huge brain drain of smart pro-choice people focusing entirely on litigation and courts, rather than on organizing in those states where it seems like a little organization might help.”

By the Book

Literature has been another wellspring in West’s work on justice. She is one of the leading figures in the law and literature movement – which gleans insight about the law from novels, plays and other literary forms.

West distinguishes between this sort of analysis and cultural studies – which examines representations of law in popular media. Her work mines novels and stories by Herman Melville (Billy Budd), Tom Wolfe (I Am Charlotte Simmons) and Franz Kafka to illuminate legal argumentation on capital punishment, war crimes and definitions of non-consensual sex and rape.

Her interest in this sub-discipline of law came from reading Kafka’s work and realizing the dualities of his occupations as writer and as a lawyer.

“I was reading a biography of Kafka and about his career as a law student, and then as a lawyer,” West recalls. “He was a workman’s comp lawyer, processing workman’s compensation claims. So he knew a lot about law. It wasn’t just a day job. It was a pretty demanding day job. It’s not one that you could just do in your sleep. And it turned out that he did think a lot about law.

“So it dawned on me that you might be able to read some of these parables and short stories he had written – as well as The Trial – and see what Kafka said about law itself,” she says, “and not just law as a metaphor for something else like ‘the father’ or ‘religion.’”

West’s work consciously harks back to the law and literature movement’s heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, when the scholars who worked in it sought to recapture and reevaluate philosophical ideas about the nature of law expressed in great works of fiction. What can lawyers – and even the larger public – take from the conflict between competing notions of law and conscience in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd? That novella’s depiction of its title character – tangled in a knot of false accusations and murder that leads to his execution – raises many of the same compelling questions about justice and law that West investigates in her work.

“A lot of Herman Melville’s work has to do with law,” West observes. “People have been thinking about what Melville had to say about law in Billy Budd since its publication. And it’s interesting to trace the different critical theories about what Billy Budd is about through the decades, because you can really see political differences.”

Shari Elliker ’83, interdisciplinary studies, and Neil Beller ’83, interdisciplinary studies, spend Thursday mornings together on WBAL-AM in the glow of the “On Air” sign, with Beller as a regular weekly co-host on Elliker’s successful AM talk radio show.

Read the full story in the Summer 2010 issue of UMBC Magazine…

The Erickson School’s masters program for the Management of Aging Services (MAgS) counts among its alumni 08professionals as diverse as lawyers, publishers, artists, nursing directors, and, of course, seniors housing executives – hailing from states as far away as Texas. But one small retirement community in particular – Quaker-directed Broadmead in Cockeysville, Md. – dominates the school’s young crop of alumni with seven graduates, including the company’s CEO, Rich Compton ’08.

Read more in the Summer 2010 issue of UMBC Magazine…

When Robin Keller Mayne ’69, American studies, graduated from UMBC, she wore no robes and no mortarboard. There was no crowd to cheer her across the stage. In fact, there was no stage. It was 1969, just three years after the university opened its doors, and one year before its first official commencement ceremony.

Read more in the Summer 2010 issue of UMBC Magazine…

When Reid Thompson ’85, biological sciences, was named chairman of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Neurological Surgery this past fall, it was yet another big step forward on a road that began at UMBC.
Read more in the Summer 2010 issue of UMBC Magazine…