Midday

Today, it’s Midday on the Family.  How can we raise children to value diversity and equity? And why do some kids grow up to be adults who are racist?

When the American Psychological Association met this summer for their annual conference in Minneapolis, one of the panel discussions was about the Science of Racism. Researchers and clinicians discussed how racism is studied, who is studying it, and what the data is revealing. One of the panelists at that session is also a good friend of Midday, and we're delighted to welcome her back to the show.

Dr. Charissa Cheah is a developmental psychologist who is a professor in the Department of Psychology and Asian Studies, and the director of the Culture, Child and Adolescent Development Lab at UMBC.

Dr. Charissa Cheah joins us on Zoom from Ellicott City…

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Today on Midday, we’re going to talk about sex.

Tom's guest is Deborah Roffman, a human sexuality educator and consultant who has been talking about sex to kids and their parents and teachers for 50 years. She’s a longtime faculty member at the Park School here in Baltimore, and she has worked with more than 400 schools and community groups across the country, helping kids with their needs around healthy sexual development.

She's authored four books about sexuality, including Sex and Sensibility: The Thinking Parent’s Guide to Sex; Talk to Me First. Everything You Need to Know to Become Your Kids’ “Go-To” Person About Sex; and But How Did I Get In There In the First Place? Talking to Your Young Child About Sex.

Her latest is The Science of Babies: A Little Book for Big Questions About Bodies, Birth and Families, a colorful board book designed for parents to share with their 3½ - 6 year-olds to introduce them to ideas about conception, gender and human development.

Deborah Roffman joins Tom in Studio A.

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After the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, Black student enrollment in college grew exponentially, from fewer than 300,000 students in 1966 to two and half million in 2010. But in the decade between 2010 and 2020, overall college enrollment fell, and Black enrollment plummeted even more.

The Supreme Court will take-up two affirmative action cases this term, which begins in three weeks. If race-based consideration in college admissions is disallowed, what will that mean for diversity on college campuses moving forward?

We’ll consider that question a little later in the show, but first, we begin with Oyin Adedoyin, who writes about campus culture for The Chronicle of Higher Education.  She joins Tom here in Studio A. Her article in this month’s issue is entitled “What Happened to Black Enrollment?”

And Tom is joined on Zoom by Jon Marcus, a writer and editor focusing on higher education for The Hechinger Report, which covers inequality and innovation in education. He published a story last month called “How Higher Education Lost its Shine.”

Tom's guests for the second half of the show are Dr. Glenn Altschuler, a professor of history and an administrator at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; and David Wippman, the president of Hamilton College, a private liberal arts institution in Clinton, New York. They are co-authors of a recent article in The Hill called, “What colleges are up against if the Supreme Court bans affirmative action.”

Both men join Tom on Zoom.

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Today, a conversation about race and real estate. Tom's first guests are here today to talk about an experience they had that demonstrates the continuing problems that Black homeowners and homebuyers encounter in the housing market.

Dr. Nathan Connolly and Dr. Shani Mott teach at Johns Hopkins University. Nathan Connolly is an Associate Professor of History who studies, among other things, redlining and race. He’s the Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship at Hopkins, and the author of book called A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida.  Shani Mott is a lecturer in the Africana Studies Department. She studies the use of racial language in fiction and non-fiction in American popular culture.

They live with their three children in Homeland, an affluent neighborhood in northeast Baltimore. They are African American. And what happened when they attempted to re-finance the mortgage on their home is the subject of a lawsuit that alleges discrimination in the appraisal process. 

They join Tom in Studio A.

Later in the hour we are joined as well by Dr. Andre Perry. He’s a Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro and a scholar-in-residence at American University. He’s the author of Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities.

Andre Perry joins us on Zoom from National Harbor.

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On today's special edition of Midday, a remembrance of Queen Elizabeth II, who died Thursday at the age of 96. Britain's longest-reigning monarch, she served for 70 years as the matriarch of the Royal Family and Britain's ceremonial head of government. She is succeeded on the throne by her son, now King Charles III, who addresses the nation on Friday at 1pm (Eastern).

Tom gets perspectives on the extraordinary life and legacy of Queen Elizabeth from University of Baltimore president and former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, who hosted the Queen during her visit to Baltimore in 1991.

We'll also be joined on Zoom from Somerset, England by Dr. Tony Steele-Perkins, a retired physician in the Royal Navy who served as the Surgeon Commander on the Royal Yacht Britannia from 1983-1985. In that capacity, he provided medical services to the Queen and other members of the Royal Family.

And we'll get historical perspectives on Queen Elizabeth's impact on Britain and the world, and what will likely follow her reign, from two scholars of British history:

Dr. Amy Froide, Chair of the History Department at UMBC, who is currently doing research at the Huntington Library in San Merino, California (which houses the largest collection of British papers outside of England); and

Dr. Julie Anne Taddeo, Research Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Both scholars join us via Zoom.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

The ongoing water contamination problem in West Baltimore will likely prove to be a rare, acute problem. But Baltimore is not without its chronic problems, too. One of them is the challenge of vacant and abandoned housing.

Our city has the third highest rate of vacant and abandoned properties in the country. This is according to a new report from the Johns Hopkins 21st Century Cities Initiative, which has compiled data from sources that include research done by the University of Baltimore’s Neighborhood Indicator’s Alliance and Open Baltimore, the city government’s repository of data.

The report seeks to better understand the “measurable” costs to the city of carrying a large inventory of houses that do almost nothing to add to the city’s tax base, but do, do a lot to add to crime and bad health outcomes for the people living in those neighborhoods that are rife with blight.

The new report is called The Costs of Baltimore’s Vacant Housing.  Tom's first guests today are its co-authors, Mary Miller and Mac McComas, who join us today in Studio A.

Mary Miller is a senior fellow at the 21st Century Cities Initiative. After a long career at T. Rowe Price, she served as Under Secretary for Domestic Finance in the U.S. Treasury Department during the Obama Administration. In 2020, she placed third in a crowded field of candidates in the Democratic primary for Mayor…

Mac McComas is the Senior Program Manager at the 21st Century Cities Initiative, and co-author of the book, Unlocking the Potential of Post-Industrial Cities.

(Full disclosure: Mary Miller and Tom Hall have been friends for 30 years. Mac McComas is also a friend, and a member of the WYPR Board of Directors.)

Later in the hour, Tom speaks with Hallie Miller of our partner news organization, The Baltimore Banner. She covers housing and city services for the Banner, and she joins Tom in Studio A.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Welcome to another edition of Midday on Higher Education, our continuing series of conversations with university and college presidents across the state of Maryland.

Today, Tom's guest for the hour is Dr. Valerie Sheares Ashby, a chemist and university professor whose tenure as the new president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County began August 1. The first woman to hold the post, she succeeds Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, who retired this spring after 30 years at the helm of the prestigious Baltimore institution.

Dr. Ashby comes to UMBC's Catonsville campus from Duke University, where she served as the Dean of the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, a division of Duke with nearly 40 departments and programs and a faculty of 700. She has also held positions at the University of North Carolina and Iowa State University.

UMBC is recognized as one of only 146 R1 institutions, the highest ranking afforded to the country’s most prestigious research institutions. UMBC has also been a model of diversity and inclusion, which have long served as fundaments of Dr. Ashby’s career as a leader and a scholar as well. UMBC has produced more Black M.D. and Ph. D. degree-earners than any other college in the country.

Dr. Valerie Sheares Ashby joins us on Zoom from the president's office at UMBC.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

And now, it’s the Midday Healthwatch.  Tom's guest is Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and visiting professor at George Washington University. She’s also a former Health Commissioner of the city of Baltimore, and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, as well as a commentator for CNN and a columnist for the Washington Post. Her latest book is called Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health.

Dr. Leana Wen joins us on Zoom to discuss the new COVID boosters, masking in schools, new worries about E.coli contamination in West Baltimore's water, and other public health issues.  And as always, she answers your questions.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

It was a rain-soaked Tuesday morning, but for folks in West Baltimore, it was water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. E. coli bacteria has been detected in part of the water supply, and joining Tom with an update is Jason Mitchell, the Director of the Baltimore Department of Public Works…

John Bullock joins us as well. He is the member of the Baltimore City Council who represents the ninth district, which includes Sandtown-Winchester and Harlem Park, the two areas most directly affected by the DPW's Boil Water Advisory…

Both our guests join us via Zoom.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(The original broadcast of this program on January 7, 2022, featured musical examples of Paul McCartney’s work. Due to copyright laws, we could not include them on this Webpost or on Midday's podcast. The audio we've posted contains the complete conversation between Tom Hall and Paul Muldoon.)

Rolling Stone Magazine called Paul McCartney's"Yesterday" “the best song of the 20th century.” It’s been covered and recorded by thousands of artists, and it is universally loved.

Paul McCartney wrote it in 1965, when he was 23 and in the middle of his stint with The Beatles. Sir Paul turned 80 in June of 2022, and he’s still writing, recording and performing. In a prolific musical career that began in 1956, McCartney has written or co-written more than 400 songs. The lyrics to 154 of them are included in The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, a new, two-volume set of books that place the words to the songs next to McCartney's back stories for each of them.

Today on Midday, Tom's guest is the wonderful poet Paul Muldoon. Muldoon was tapped by Paul McCartney to help him with the book. Muldoon wrote an introduction, and edited conversations with McCartney into the essays that accompany each song.

Paul Muldoon is perfectly positioned to curate such a collection. He is a song lyricist himself, and a member of a band called Rogue Oliphant. He even teaches a course in songwriting at Princeton University, where he’s been on the faculty for 35 years.

He is also the author of 14 poetry collections and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. His latest collection is called Howdie-Skelp. We’ll talk about that book as well later in the program.

Paul Muldoon joins us on Zoom from New York…

(Because this conversation was recorded, we can't take any call or comments today.)

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.