COLLEGE PARK — The University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism has selected its 2025 Hall of Fame class, featuring four outstanding alums who have built accomplished careers in journalism and related fields, and faculty honoree Dr. Maurine Beasley.
The new class of alums includes Ira Allen (B.S. ’70), Jeanne Cummings (B.S. ’79), John McNamara (B.S. ’83) and Kimberly Thomas (B.S. ’94). The 2025 Hall of Fame class will be inducted April 3 at Knight Hall. Registration for the event is open at go.umd.edu/MerrillHall25.
“We are beyond excited to honor this remarkable class,” Merrill College Dean Rafael Lorente said. “This year, we honor three accomplished journalists, a newly elected justice on the Michigan Supreme Court and the first woman to earn tenure at the college.
“This class demonstrates the heights our alums can reach after leaving UMD — both in and out of journalism — and the impact they can make as mentors and role models. And we are delighted to induct Dr. Maurine Beasley, who paved the way for many amazing women at our college to make a difference for our students.”
The class was selected by a Hall of Fame committee that consists of members of the Board of Visitors, as well as students and faculty.
Induction into the Hall of Fame recognizes an alum honoree’s lifetime professional achievement in their chosen field, and a faculty honoree’s contributions to Merrill College. This will be the fourth class inducted into the Merrill College Hall of Fame.
2025 Hall of Famers
Ira R. Allen, a 1970 University of Maryland journalism graduate, was managing editor of The Diamondback and a prominent columnist, focusing on political outrage and satire. His column, “The Nitty Gritty,” was one of the most read and most provocative during his years at The Diamondback.
As a reporter with United Press International, he covered the student protests that resulted in the UMD campus coming under martial law, Watergate, the Reagan presidency and Capitol Hill. He also covered the Terps, Baltimore Orioles and Baltimore Colts.
During his reporting career, Allen was a journalism adjunct lecturer at UMD for 10 years. For 20 years, he was a member and president of Maryland Media Inc., the independent corporation that published campus media following the effort to take student journalism out of the hands of the UMD administration. As an alum, faculty adjunct and MMI board member, he actively aided numerous students in getting their first jobs.
Allen later served as a congressional press secretary, edited local newspapers and practiced media relations for the UMD Medical System, the NIH Fogarty International Center and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Dr. Maurine H. Beasley is professor emerita at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where she was a faculty member for four decades and the first tenured woman. She was previously education editor at The Kansas City Star and a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post.
First employed at the UMD College of Journalism in 1974 as an adjunct faculty member, Beasley rose to full professor. At times, she directed the college’s graduate program. During her career, she supervised 27 students who received Ph.D. degrees with her as their primary advisor. In 2000, she was a Fulbright senior lecturer at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China, and also lectured at Sophia University in Japan. She has been a member of the U.S. Department of State’s reviewing panel for foreign service officers.
The author, editor or co-editor of eight books and author of dozens of articles in academic publications, Beasley’s scholarly interests center around the history of women in the Washington press corps, including Eleanor Roosevelt, herself a journalist. Beasley’s book, “Women of the Washington Press,” won the national Kappa Tau Alpha prize for the best book on journalism history published in 2012. She is a past national president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the American Journalism Historians Association. She won awards from each organization, as well as from the Washington chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, of which she also is a past president.
At UMD, she was president of the campus Phi Beta Kappa chapter and received recognition as the 1993 outstanding woman on campus.
Jeanne Cummings served as a deputy bureau chief in Washington for The Wall Street Journal from 2015 until 2024. She previously served as The Journal’s political editor, overseeing coverage of the 2016 presidential race and 2018 midterm elections.
Before rejoining The Journal, she was a founding member of POLITICO and served as assistant managing editor in charge of enterprise. She wrote a regular column, “Pitboss,” that focused on the connections between business and politics. Cummings won acclaim in 2008 for breaking the story about the Republican National Committee’s $150,000 in wardrobe payments for then-GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
In her first tour at The Journal, she spent 10 years covering Congress and the White House and won the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage in 2000. She also won a National Press Club award for her coverage at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s rise to power and the ethics investigation of him in 1995.
Cummings earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland College of Journalism in 1979, with a minor in political science.
John McNamara, a 1983 University of Maryland alum and former sports editor at The Diamondback, was a journalist, author, mentor and role model.
Along with four colleagues, he was killed in a shooting rampage at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, on June 28, 2018.
During a career spanning four decades, he covered all sports, but had a special affinity for basketball, a sport he wrote about with authority and passion in newspaper articles and books. He was also the consummate “inside baseball” authority, known for calling out answers to questions in press boxes long before Wikipedia existed. His enthusiasm for the Terps was matched only by his love of the Orioles and the Senators in their first and second terms in Washington. During his career, he covered Maryland athletics for The Herald-Mail in Hagerstown, The Capital in Annapolis and The Prince George’s Journal.
He wrote two books about Maryland athletics — “University of Maryland Football Vault: The History of the Terrapins,” and “Cole Classics! Maryland Basketball’s Leading Men and Moments” with David Elfin. He also contributed to the “University of Maryland men's basketball 2002 national champions,” a memento of the Terps' championship season. His third book, “The Capital of Basketball: A History of D.C. Area High School Hoops,” was published posthumously after being completed by his wife, fellow 1983 UMD journalism alum Andrea Chamblee.
Kimberly A. Thomas is a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. She was elected in November 2024 in a statewide election and took office on Jan. 1, 2025. Before joining Michigan’s highest court, Thomas was on the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School for more than 20 years. As an experienced trial and appellate litigator, she was co-founder and director of the law school’s Juvenile Justice Clinic and taught students the ethical practice of law. Thomas was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in 2017, teaching at the University College Cork School of Law in Cork, Ireland.
Among her other professional activities, Thomas served on the bipartisan Michigan Task Force on Juvenile Justice Reform. She was also engaged as an expert for the Rule of Law Initiative of the American Bar Association, where she worked on law school curriculum development and experiential education in Jordan, Egypt and Turkey. She started her legal career as a clerk for the Hon. R. Guy Cole Jr., for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and as a staff attorney with the Defender Association of Philadelphia.
Thomas is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. She earned her bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, in 1994 from the University of Maryland College of Journalism. After graduating from UMD and before enrolling in law school, Thomas was a metro desk reporter for The Detroit News.
Thomas resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with her husband and their two children. She is active in her community, including as a volunteer Science Olympiad coach.
For more information, contact:
Josh Land
joshland@umd.edu
301-405-1321