Maryland Day

The tradition & historical record

The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States, near Washington, D.C. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of Maryland. The University of Maryland is the largest university in Maryland and in the Washington metropolitan area. Its eleven schools and colleges offer over 200 degree-granting programs, including 113 undergraduate majors, 107 master's programs, and 83 doctoral programs. UMD's athletic teams are known as the Maryland Terrapins and compete in NCAA Division I as a member of the Big Ten Conference. A member of the Association of American Universities, the University of Maryland's proximity to Washington, D.C. has resulted in many research partnerships with the federal government; faculty receive research funding and institutional support from many agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – very high research activity" and has been labeled a "Public Ivy". According to the National Science Foundation, the university spent a combined $1.14 billion on research and development in 2021, ranking it 17th among American universities. ¹

On March 6, 1856, the forerunner of today's University of Maryland was chartered as the Maryland Agricultural College. Two years later, Charles Benedict Calvert (1808–1864), a future U.S. Representative (Congressman) and descendant of the first Lord Baltimore, purchased 420 acres (1.7 km2) of the Riversdale Mansion estate nearby today's College Park, Maryland. Later that year, Calvert founded the school and was the acting president from 1859 to 1860. On October 5, 1859, the first 34 students entered the Maryland Agricultural College. The school became a land grant college in February 1864. ¹

During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers under Brigadier General Bradley Tyler Johnson moved past the college on July 12, 1864, as part of Jubal Early's raid on Washington, D.C. By the end of the war, financial problems forced the administrators to sell off 200 acres (81 ha) of land, and the continuing decline in enrollment sent the Maryland Agricultural College into bankruptcy. The campus was used as a boys' preparatory school for the next two years. The Maryland legislature assumed half ownership of the school in 1866. The college thus became, in part, a state institution. By October 1867, the school reopened with 11 students. In 1868, the former Confederate admiral Franklin Buchanan was appointed president of the school. Enrollment grew to 80 at the time of his resignation, and the school soon paid off its debt. In 1873, Samuel Jones, a former Confederate Major General, became president of the college. Twenty years later, the federally-funded Agricultural Experiment Station was established there. During this same period, state laws granted the college regulatory powers in several areas—including controlling farm disease, inspecting feed, establishing a state weather bureau and geological survey, and housing the forestry board. Morrill Hall (the oldest instructional building still in use on campus) was built the following year. ¹

On November 29, 1912, a fire destroyed student housing, school records, and most of the academic buildings, leaving only Morrill Hall untouched. There were no injuries or fatalities, and all but two students returned to the university and insisted on classes continuing. The first building built after the fire was the Calvert Hall in 1914. A new administration building was not built until the 1940s. ¹

During Phillips Lee Goldsborough's tenure as Governor of Maryland, the state purchased Maryland Agricultural College, taking control of the school in 1916 and renaming it Maryland State College. In the same year, the first female students, Elizabeth Gambrill Hook and Charlotte Ann Vaux, enrolled at the school. On April 9, 1920, the college became part of the existing University of Maryland, replacing St. John's College, Annapolis as the university's undergraduate campus. In the same year, the graduate school on the College Park campus awarded its first Ph.D. degrees and the university's enrollment reached 500 students. In 1925 the university was accredited by the Association of American Universities. By the time the first black students enrolled at the university in 1951, enrollment had grown to nearly 10,000 students—4,000 of whom were women. Before 1951, many black students in Maryland were enrolled at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore. In 1957, President Wilson H. Elkins pushed to increase the university's academic standards. His efforts resulted in creating one of the first Academic Probation Plans. The first year the plan went into effect, 1,550 students (18% of the total student body) faced expulsion. On October 19, 1957, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom attended her first and only college football game at the University of Maryland after expressing interest in seeing a typically American sport during her first tour of the United States. The Maryland Terrapins beat the North Carolina Tar Heels 21 to 7 in the historical game now referred to as "The Queen's Game". Phi Beta Kappa established a chapter at The University of Maryland in 1964. In 1969, the university was elected to the Association of American Universities. ¹

In 2004, the university began constructing the 150-acre (61 ha) "M Square Research Park", which includes facilities affiliated with the U.S. Department of Defense, Food and Drug Administration, and the new National Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In May 2010, ground was broken on a new Physical Science Complex, including an advanced quantum science laboratory. The university experienced multiple data breaches in 2014. The first resulted in the compromise of over 300,000 student and faculty records. A second data breach occurred several months later. The second breach was investigated by the FBI and Secret Service and found to be done by David Helkowski. Despite the attribution, no charges were filed. As a result of the data breaches, the university offered free credit protection for five years to the students and faculty affected. In 2017, the university received a record-breaking donation of $219.5 million from the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation, ranking among the country's largest philanthropic gifts to a public university. Darryll J. Pines became the 34th president of the university in 2020. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “University of Maryland, College Park”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Maryland Day is annual event at the University of Maryland, College Park, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²