Higher education

On Friday, more than 1,000 Naval Academy midshipmen tossed their “covers” in the air as part of the traditional hat toss, a ritual ending their four years in Annapolis and part of the moment that most become commissioned Navy and Marine Corps officers.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered a surprise address at Johns Hopkins University’s commencement ceremony via livestream Thursday morning.

Baltimore County is committed to making community college tuition free, and that educational opportunity needs to be available nationwide, say Baltimore County Executive John Olszewski Jr. and Community College of Baltimore County President Sandra L. Kurtinitis.

College was too expensive for Brenda Rivera, but she vowed her daughters would have the opportunity to go. Then she got the chance to go, too, graduating from Notre Dame of Maryland University.

The Naval Academy Class of 2026 on Wednesday morning joined a long list of plebes who, for over 60 years, have scrambled up an obelisk to swap a midshipman’s cover for a Dixie cup.

The goal of this rite of passage is for classmates to scale the monument, which is covered with shortening, remove the “Dixie cup” hat at the top and replace it with an upperclassman’s hat, called a “cover.” With this, the freshmen are no longer considered plebes.

New images offer the first look at a complex ring system of inner belts that surround a young, nearby star.

Book-banning and other censorship efforts were a threat to journalistic freedom 100 years ago, and they still are today, DeWayne Wickham, The Banner’s public editor, says.

Valerie Sheares Ashby will be inaugurated Thursday in front of the campus community and Gov. Wes Moore as the sixth president of UMBC.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Davids would become the first woman to lead the service academy in Annapolis.

Bard has worked as vice president for public safety for Hopkins since 2021.

Morgan State University has officially launched a new business hub in partnership with the PNC Foundation. The hub aims to provide people in the Black community with the resources and education needed to start and sustain their own businesses.

As of Tuesday morning, the wall — built on hate and oppression, according to the university president — was reduced to rubble.

Mayor Brandon Scott should remove Baltimore homeowner properties from the tax sale auction, as he did last year, Allison Harris, director of the Home Preservation Project at the Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland, says. Campuses of historically Black colleges in Maryland are among those urgently in need of modernization, Paul Clary, co-founder of MD Energy Advisors, says; the work of the state Attorney General's Office in the Baltimore Archdiocese sex abuse investigation merits praise, a city resident says.

Baltimore must find ways to rightfully honor writer, orator and abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the power of her legacy, author and Johns Hopkins History Professor Martha S. Jones says.

The Moore-Miller transition team gathered input from more than 5,000 Marylanders to identify the state’s biggest challenges, develop solutions and help set priorities, says Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller, who chaired the transition team.

Legislation sponsored by state Sen. Joanne Benson to overhaul Maryland 529 would dissolve its independent board and phase out the prepaid trust it manages.

The Baltimore arts college is among a number of small institutions finding themselves at a painful crossroads as the dust from the pandemic settles.

Excluding NORAD’s Christmas Eve Santa tracker, there may not be a world map viewed so many times as the one Johns Hopkins University engineers created to keep tabs on COVID-19.