The University of Maryland owns more than 1,000 buildings dispersed throughout Maryland. 36 had readily available information about the prominent figures from which the buildings derive their names.
Thirty-two of these buildings are named after men. Just four are named after women: Marie Mount Hall, Adele H. Stamp Student Union, Preinkert Field House, and the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. There are no buildings on the campus named after women in STEM careers.
As a woman pursuing a major in the STEM fields, I was disappointed — but ultimately not shocked — to read up on the namesakes of our campus’ buildings and find that such a negligible amount are dedicated to myriad prominent women that have made an impact in Maryland. I can think of several women the University has cheated when naming buildings: Rachel Carson, the environmental guru behind Silent Spring, who wrote the book while living in Silver Spring; Elaine Johnson, the first African-American female student to graduate from this university in 1959; Elizabeth Hook, Charlotte Vaux or Grace B. Holmes, three of the first women to graduate from this university; Juanita Jackson Mitchell, the first black woman to graduate from this university’s law school; even Harriet Tubman only finds her name dedicated to an eight-chair meeting room in the second floor of Stamp Student Union.
This university’s negligence towards honoring prominent women does not stem from a lack of people to choose from; there are as many notable women who made their impact in Maryland as there are men. Rather, it reflects an unfortunate trend in our society to celebrate men while ignoring women of equal or higher stature. There is no doubt that the figures for which our buildings are named have importance in their own right; researching the namesakes makes it easy to see how someone like Millard E. Tydings or Glenn L. Martin made their marks in Maryland.
However, this university’s indifference towards important women from this state is a blatant show of disrespect for the high achievements women have made in this world.
I’m not saying that we should take to the streets and aim to strip every honorific building of its current dedication; besides, University President Wallace Loh issued a moratorium on doing just that for the next five years. Rather, students and this university should focus on dedicating unnamed campus buildings toward prolific women in the primary field studied within their walls.
The plant sciences building, chemical and nuclear engineering building, chemistry building and animal science and agricultural engineering building are just a few of the undedicated buildings on the campus that could pioneer the way for normalizing building dedications to women.
Logan Kline is a sophomore environmental science and policy major with a concentration in marine and coastal management. She can be reached at lkline12@umd.edu.
