Late last week, President Donald Trump made the unsurprising announcement that he would remove the United States from a pact with 194 other countries to mitigate greenhouse gas production and fight global warming. Here in Baltimore, three of the city’s most influential figures responded with criticism, resilience and promises.
Johns Hopkins is making another power play to support its undergraduate students, this time for those who are among the first in their families to attend college.
If Canada hadn’t opened its arms to Ronald J. Daniels’ father and his father’s siblings and parents in 1939, they may never have escaped the Holocaust and forged a new path in North America.
Last year’s unrest inspired Baltimore’s advocates of science, technology, engineering, and math education to go into high gear.
Congressional battles over how much money the government should spend (and how it should spend it) have impacted many different aspects of American life. The one that most concerns Johns Hopkins president Ronald Daniels, and Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab director Ralph Semmel is the decline in funding for research and higher education. “The potential impact on our young scientists is grave,” Daniels warns.
Maybe it’s something in the air, maybe it’s something he ate, maybe it’s just a case of good ol’ spring fever… but Johns Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels is being really fun these days. Point of evidence #1: the photo above, from April 16, in which he’s jumping rope (and getting some pretty impressive air) with students from the Johns Hopkins Tutorial Project. But there’s more.
It wasn’t so long ago that Johns Hopkins announced its intentions of raising $4.5 billion by 2017, its biggest-ever fundraising effort. (Here’s how the school plans to spend that money.) Well, we’re four years away from 2017, and the school has just announced that it’s halfway there — as of early November, 162,000 donors had pledged a total of $2.25 billion to Hopkins.
“We were America’s first research university and the model for higher education in this country and beyond,” Johns Hopkins President Ronald Daniels announced this week. “The time has come for a definitive book that chronicles our remarkable history.” So the school decided to commission one — from one of its own professors. What do you think are the chances that it’ll be anything close to objective?
Step one: Raise a gazillion dollars.
Step two: Dominate academia. (That is, make sure that at least two-thirds of the school’s PhD programs are among the top 20 in their fields.)
Last month, Johns Hopkins unveiled its brand-new logo. That may not sound like a big deal, but when you consider that the university comprises two dozen schools, research centers, and institutes, each with its own constituents and aesthetics, the task starts to seem quite a bit more complex.
