My first assignment with UMUC led to 18 years of globe-trotting to teach wherever I was needed. My second — researching and writing a history of the university — took only one year, but I covered even more territory: a half century and more than 50 countries on seven continents. The results are Never an Ivory Tower: University of Maryland University College — The First Fifty Years, slated for publication this spring (see ordering information on opposite page).

Writer Sharon Hudgins

I contacted more than 300 people in my search for historical information about UMUC and received an avalanche of replies: letters, postcards, and e-mail; official documents and personal diaries; unpublished travel journals, family newsletters, and memoirs; published articles and books; and photographs and even poetry.

I also conducted in-depth interviews with more than 40 persons who had been associated with UMUC. Some of the most moving and dramatic accounts came from people who had been involved with UMUC’s programs in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War era. And a number of inspiring stories were recounted by students whose lives had been changed forever by their experiences in UMUC classrooms.

One of the primary (and most colorful) sources was William Raymond ("Ray") Ehrensberger, known as "Big Daddy" to two generations of UMUC staff. Ehrensberger had been with the institution from the beginning — initially as a faculty member in the late 1940s, then as dean of the program, and finally as UMUC’ s first chancellor from 1970 until his retirement in 1975.

Ehrensberger gave me access to his personal notes, diaries, and photographs and entertained me for hours with tales of his escapades in exotic places around the world. He had a phenomenal memory. Whenever I wanted to double-check any information about UMUC, I phoned Ehrensberger. The last time I spoke with him — only a week before he died, in 1997, at 92 — he was still telling vividly detailed stories about UMUC in the 1950s (not all of which are printable).

In 1964 British historian Arnold J. Toynbee described the university’s overseas programs as "a noble experiment showing inventive imagination as characteristic of American genius." Despite such accolades by Toynbee and other notables, many people outside the institution are still unaware that UMUC was the first university to offer academic courses and degree programs, taught on site, at U.S. military bases abroad; the first to send its faculty to teach in a war zone, in Vietnam; the first to confer bachelor’s degrees at US military installations overseas; and the first to offer a joint Russian-American undergraduate degree program, taught entirely in the Russian Federation, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. My goal was to make this remarkable information available to a wider audience — as well as to record the historical facts and figures about UMUC along with many of the singular stories about its far-flung faculty, students, and staff.

Looking back at the whole process of producing this book, I can’t decide which was more fun — doing the research or writing the manuscript. In contacting "Marylanders," old and new, across the globe, I renewed old acquaintances from UMUC and also made many new friends.

Over the past 25 years, UMUC has given me the opportunity to see more of the world than most people ever see in a lifetime. I hope that Never an Ivory Tower will now give the world an opportunity to see UMUC as the pioneering institution that it has been during the past 50 years — with a view toward the greater global institution that it intends to become as this century unfolds.

Sharon Hudgins has worked for UMUC in Germany, Spain, Greece, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States. Currently she lives in McKinney, Texas, just north of Dallas, where she recently finished writing a book about her experiences with UMUC in Siberia and the Russian Far East (to be published by Texas A & M University Press). Her next book will be a travel guide to Prague and the Czech Republic.