New University of Maryland President Darryll Pines has big plans for the new school year, which is happening amid a global pandemic and a movement toward racial equality.
Pines isn’t new to trying to open doors and generate opportunities in academia. As the former dean of the university’s A. James Clark School of Engineering, he said, “Over the 11 years I was dean, we doubled the number of female faculty members in the college of engineering, and we doubled the number of underrepresented minority faculty members.”
He also worked to diversify the student body at the school of engineering, and he wants to do the same across the College Park campus in all fields of study.
Pines also wants to establish a kind of geographic diversity. A look at the university’s enrollment revealed that among in-state students, the largest group of students who enrolled in fall 2019 came from Montgomery County at 9,901.
And while the College Park campus sits in Prince George’s County, only 3,094 students from Prince George’s County were enrolled at the same time.
Pines said he wants to change that.
“We intend to grow the number of students from this county that come to College Park,” he said.
He said there are already programs that reach out to students in Prince George’s County schools. Those efforts concentrate on students interested in the STEM fields, and Pines wants to expand that.
And that’s not the lone partnership he sees with education in Prince George’s County.
“We just established an MOU (memorandum of understanding) between our College of Education and the Prince George’s County Public Schools system, where some of our teachers in training could be used as early as this fall, for some of the online instruction to provide a service to the county.”
Pines also said there are plans to create dual-enrollment opportunities, where Prince George’s County schools students could enroll in college-level courses while still in high school and get college credit for their coursework.
“That’s actually one of our strategies — you’ll see a growth in that area during my presidency,” Pines said.
