University of Maryland

Overview

The University of Maryland is part of the University System of Maryland, which was created in 1988 to be a statewide higher education system bringing all state universities and colleges under one board of trustees. ²

The University of Maryland, College Park is the flagship school of the state’s university system, and refers to itself as “The Flagship Institution of the State of Maryland.” ¹ It has more than 40,000 students and offers 106 undergraduate majors, 118 master’s programs, and 85 doctoral programs. ³

Activities and Policies

COVID-19 Pandemic

The University of Maryland responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by closing the school one day early before its planned Spring Break on March 12, 2020. ⁴ The university went to online education for the duration of the school year, before implementing a hybrid online/in-person model in the fall of 2021. ⁵

In April 2021, the university announced that it would be requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for students, faculty, and staff on its campuses, as well as full-time masking in all public spaces. ⁶ In January 2022, university policies were updated to require all students living on campus to receive a COVID vaccine “booster” shot. ⁷

In July 2021, then-Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and UMD President Daryll Pines announced a “VaxU” program to award $50,000 college scholarships to 20 Maryland middle school and high school students who had received the COVID-19 vaccine, in an effort to increase vaccination rates among younger people in the state. ⁸

Later that year, the university implemented a new COVID-19 policy requiring any student living on campus to leave school property and “isolate at their permanent home or another off-campus location if they test positive.” ⁹ Students who were not able to return home and instead had to rent hotel rooms at their own expense criticized the policy, which was later investigated by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. ¹⁰ The university later reversed its policy, allowing students who tested positive for COVID to remain on campus. ¹¹

The university’s COVID vaccine and booster requirements remained in force until February 2023. ¹²

Transgender Identification

The University of Maryland’s University Health Center offers a “Gender Affirming Care Program” that will start or continue hormone replacement therapy for students on request. ¹³ The cost of the services is covered under the university’s Student Health Insurance Plan. ¹³

The university’s policy is that “your gender identity or expression is how you identify,” and students can change their official gender in university records at any time by updating their own profile in the university’s online system. ¹⁴

The university’s official policy is that people using locker rooms, restrooms, or other gender-segregated campus facilities may not be denied access based on their gender in university records, or required to show identification to access a gender-segregated facility. ¹⁵

DEI Programs

A June 2024 review of annual diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) reports from the University of Maryland’s campuses by the Maryland Association of Scholars identified what its authors characterized as Constitutional and legal violations, including issues of compelled speech and equal protection under the law. ^{16 17} The report’s authors also noted that the university’s DEI programs were arguably in conflict with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College, which banned affirmative action in higher education. ¹⁸

A 2022 review of public data by Fox News found that the University of Maryland was among the top six universities for spending on DEI initiatives, noting that the university employed 71 people in DEI roles and that its top DEI official, vice president of diversity and inclusion Georgina Dodge, made $358,000 a year. ¹⁹

Controversies Around President Darryll Pines

University of Maryland, College Park president Darryll Pines, who joined the university in 1995 as a mechanical engineering professor and became president in July 2020, has faced allegations of enabling antisemitism at the university, engaging in plagiarism in his published research, and of using artificial intelligence tools to generate work he publicly attributed to UMD scholars. ^{20 21}

Misrepresentations of Scholarship and Pro-Palestinian Bias

In August 2024, Pines approved the use of university property on October 7 by anti-Israeli and pro-Hamas activists to mark the one-year anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel. ²⁰ The decision was widely criticized by the university’s Jewish community and others, many of whom criticized Pines for an insufficient response to anti-Israel protests in November 2023 that had included chants of “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution!” and the message “Holocaust 2.0” chalked on a university sidewalk. ²²

Pines responded to criticism from one Maryland resident who analogized the Palestinian flag to the Confederate flag by citing a “general consensus opinion” from “Middle East Scholars and Historians on our campus” that the flag was not an anti-Israeli symbol. ²⁰ However, a Daily Wire investigation found that the alleged scholarship had likely been generated by ChatGPT artificial intelligence software rather than by university scholars as Pines had claimed. ²⁰

Other emails from Pines responding to critics of his decision included threats to involve the university’s police department if they did not stop emailing members of the university’s antisemitism task force. ²⁰

On September 1, the regents of the University System of Maryland overruled Pines and issued a prohibition against student groups holding events on October 7 related to the conflict in Israel and Gaza. ²³

Plagiarism Allegations

After uncovering Pines’s likely use of ChatGPT, a subsequent investigation by the Daily Wire found that roughly 1,500 words of a 5,000-word paper by Pines and a co-author were apparently taken without attribution from the 1996 work of an Australian college student. ^{24 25}

Pines claimed that the “recurrent language” was in the introductory sections of his paper and had no impact on its findings, and called for the university’s Office of Research Integrity to investigate his scholarship and release a public report. ²¹ In October 2024, the regents of the University System of Maryland approved the review, to be supervised by an outside law firm. ²⁶