By Ashley Miller ’12, UMBC Athletic Communications Intern

UMBC student-athletes are devoted to giving back to both the campus and neighboring community. These young men and women make significant contributions to society as often as they can. Teams as well as individual student-athletes are involved in numerous charity and community organizations.

“UMBC Athletics is proud of the work our student-athletes do in the community,” said Kelly Fahey ’07, coordinator of student-athlete affairs at UMBC. “We are excited to further develop our relationships with the surrounding community and our partnerships with local organizations.”

This fall has been a busy semester for the Retrievers, as they raised money for various fundraisers, collected shoes for the less fortunate, and even met with younger children to discuss the importance of education and physical fitness.

Read the full story about work done with Soles for Souls, Race for the Cure, Young Life Capernaum, Meadowood Education Center, League of Dreams, and the Casey Cares Foundation here.

The front page of today‘s Baltimore Sun highlights Operation Oliver, a local partnership that seeks to revitalize Baltimore’s Oliver neighborhood through community art, garbage removal, crime watch and landscaping, involving several UMBC students. The article follows Jeremy Johnson ’12, sociology, and two fellow volunteers as they walk through the neighborhood, noting both concerning conditions and exciting rehab projects.

Johnson is a board member of The 6th Branch, a nonprofit that applies the leadership and organizational skills of military veterans to local community service initiatives — one of two lead organizations for Operation Oliver. Incoming project coordinator Dave Landymore ’13, GES, is featured in a photo series accompanying the Sun article (images 1, 7 and 11), along with project volunteer Heather Hryczshyn ’13, GES (images 12 and 13).

The initiative’s next service day will be Saturday, 12/10, 9:00 am-1:00 pm. Several UMBC students have already signed up to help. To learn how to volunteer, visit Operation Oliver on Facebook.

Several students have received Huayu Enrichment Scholarships (HES) from the Taiwan Ministry of Education to study Mandarin in Taiwan from June-August, 2012. The students are Niesha Watts ’14, applied linguistics; Amy Fowler ’12, Asian studies and interdisciplinary studies; Vadim Rubin ’10, history, and ’12 Asian studies; and Jillian Long ’13, Chinese.

Initial contact with the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Representatives Office (TECRO) in Washington, D.C., was made by Eugene Schaffer, chair of education. The Asian studies program, including director Constantine Vaporis, organized an information session to inform students about the scholarships and to assist with the application process. Anna Shields, director of the honors college,William Brown, lecturer in Chinese, and Vaporis formed the selection committee.

The scholarships are being supplemented with funding from the offices of the Vice Provost, Academic Affairs, the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, Antonio Moreira and the Asian Studies Program.

Robert Deluty, associate dean of the graduate school, is published in the Fall 2011 issue of The Faculty Voice.

The paper, which is an independent newspaper published by and for all the faculty of the University System of Maryland, included 20 of Deluty’s poems along with commentary by editor William Hanna.

The English Alumni Association of Ravenshaw University in Cuttack, India, has invited Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, to give the first annual alumni lecture on January 8, 2012.  Spitz will also give the keynote address at the International Seminar on Children’s Literature and Politics, which will be held at the university January 9-10, 2012.

The Alumni Lecture and the seminar are expected to attract many distinguished alumni, including lawmakers from the Indian Parliament, writers, judges in the Supreme Court of India, the Chief Information Commissioner of India, civil servants, and academics.

In addition to these lectures, Spitz will also meet with Indian school children.

A transgender anti-discrimination bill went before the Maryland General Assembly in the 2011 session, passing in the House of Delegates, but ultimately did not pass. In the 2012 session, which starts in January, advocates are hoping to take legislation through the last hurdle it needs for passage.

Jodi Kelber-Kaye, interim associate director of the Honors College, said transgender anti-discrimination legislation has come up at the state level for many years.

“The problem has consistently been how we define transgender for the purposes of providing protections,” she said. “The concern for me as a gender researcher, on top of someone who’s politically supportive of this stuff, is the need for a space safe for women.”

The story, “Laurel delegate’s fight for transgender anti-discrimination legislation to continue in 2012 session” was published on ExploreHowardCounty.com and appeared on the Baltimore Sun website on December 7.

UMBC Political Science Professor Roy Meyers joined Yale’s David Mayhew and other scholars this week in providing PolitiFact with insight into Newt Gingrich, as the site explored David Axelrod’s claim that Gingrich is the “the godfather of gridlock.” The site offers evidence for Gingrich’s reputation as both a bare-knuckled fighter and a deal-maker, suggesting “Gingrich has been more of a prince of partisanship than a godfather of gridlock.”

Meyers also disputed the godfather characterization in his comments to PolitiFact, arguing that Gingrich is far from consistently quiet and disciplined, as the persona suggests. Meyers alternatively argued that Gingrich is the father of a different practice, using a technique Paul Krugman has called “doublethink” — believing in what he’s saying “even when he knows what he’s saying isn’t true” — to gain and retain party control through persuasive rhetoric.

UMBC Chair of Public Policy Donald Norris was quoted Tuesday in an Associate Press article on the conviction of Paul Schurick, political aide to former Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich. The article notes that Schurick was convicted of “conspiring to use Election Day robocalls in what prosecutors cast as an effort to suppress black voter turnout during the 2010 gubernatorial election.”

Norris commented that the robocall message was a clearly a misrepresentation of facts intended to discourage voter turnout. “This was free speech in the same sense that lying is free speech and lying is not permitted,” he said. “What they were perpetrating was a fraud.” The AP story was picked up by the Huffington Post, ABC News, Washington Post and several other news organizations.

Update: Norris discussed the ruling and its implications in greater detail on WJZ/CBS Baltimore on December 7 (see video).

Work by Steve Bradley, Visual Arts, will be featured in Radio Arts Space FM, an international radio art and sound art exhibition at the Škuc Gallery in Ljubjana, Slovenia, from December 7 to 16. The exhibition, which features audio works by 42 artists from 22 countries, is available as an audio stream at at the website radioCona.

Piotr Gwiazda, associate professor of English, has had a busy semester; his reviews, poetry and translations have appeared in a variety of outlets.

His reviews have appeared in:

• Rain Taxi, where he reviewed “Building the Barricade” by Anna Swir.
• The Times Literary Supplement, where he reviewed “Unseen Hand” (translated by Clare Cavanagh), by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski.
• EOAGH, where he reviewed The Iliad Book XXII: The Death of Hector by Lisa Jarnot.

His poems and translations can be found in:

• “Mudlark,” which published his poem “Time.”
• Vallum, which published his poem “Removable Tattoos.”
• And the Seneca Review, which published his translation of Grzegorz Wroblewski.

He was also published in two recent poetry anthologies.