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Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, III
I am delighted to be here. Marilyn Reznick and others have been very supportive of us on our campus (University of Maryland--Baltimore) and when Sheldon (Caplis), my colleague, suggested that I speak at this conference, I said I would definitely do so, especially because I believe in the topic and because I am very familiar with the work of the fellowship program. I want to commend the company for its work.
I recall being at a National Science Foundation program in the 60’s in Alabama, and I remember meeting for the first time a Black with a PhD. This was a guy who was a Dean and a Mathematician. I was so impressed because he could do two things. He could do math and he could talk. It was very interesting. And he could challenge us. He would come by this group of smart high school kids' classroom and just throw a problem up and look at us as if to say “and who can do this?”
I was always just so challenged. So I began saying, literally when I was about thirteen, “I am going to be like him.” And every morning I would look in the mirror as soon as I would get up and say, “Good morning, Dr. Hrabowski.” I never let anybody hear me because I was thirteen years old but I said that every day from age thirteen until I finished.
People ask why do I tell that story? Somehow, one of our challenges as we talk about creating a climate of change, is to do something that will have children, little Black and Hispanic girls and boys, wanting to be scientists, wanting to be Engineers. When I talk to groups of little Black boys and you ask them what do they want to do, you know what they are going to say. They are going to say basketball, football, or rap.
I’ve never heard a child say, I want to be a scientist. You’ve never seen a show like
"L. A. Science", right? Or "Baltimore Science"? I mean, real science. There are TV shows about medicine but the fact is none on science or engineering.
As I’ve talked to my colleagues on campus and as we’ve looked at what we’ve done around campus, there are several things that stand out as really important.
I don’t think there is anything more important in this area regarding increasing the numbers of women and under-represented minorities in science, mathematics, and engineering substantially than leadership. You know what an institution stands for within a short period of time based on what the leader or leaders actually do to make a difference in whatever the area. Let me give you an example. This country believes deeply in the value of athletics, and athletics certainly can be said to have a major role in much of what we do. And of its precedents or others with the N.C.A.A. when there are problems and challenges, we focus the time and effort and money necessary to make things happen. And every institution does that in research, teaching whatever. We all end up talking about those things. And I often say, “if we could just spend some of that effort or at least be inspired by what we do in that area, to focus on the issues of minorities and women in science and engineering, we would have thousands and thousands of students coming out.” As John Slaughter said this morning, and as others know clearly, we know the kinds of things that need to be done.
One of the things that I can say to you that might be a bit different is the following. Number one, the issue of accountability. We do spend quite a bit of money in this country through national agencies on building this network of science and engineering students and having them graduate. One of the problems is, and now that I am fifty I have decided to tell the truth and just say it.
The fact is, we give a lot of money to a lot of places that don’t produce any science and engineering students. You know, it is just the same old thing because of politics.
And the fear I have is that when the public looks at the amount of money we spend at N.S.F., N.I.H., N.A.S., and some of the places they spend that money. When they look at that they are going to be appalled and say it makes no sense at all. So one of challenges is to question every institution, Black or White, and say, “Well, if you are getting these grants, if you are supposed to do these things are you producing, and if you’ve had grants to a period of five years, or ten years, or twenty years, what is the proof?”
In the AT&T and Lucent programs you can look and see the numbers of people who have actually come through them. You can talk about having produced ten percent of the E.E. persons. It makes a difference. The fact is that for so many (other) people (and programs), that is not the case. I look out in the audience here and see our Associate Dean of the Graduate School, Janet Rutledge, a graduate of these programs.
Mine is a campus that is still working to get a presence of some color in most of the departments. It is a research campus. We have in many ways been at the forefront of producing minorities in some areas and not other areas, just over the last ten or twelve years because of some culture change. But there is no difference more clear than that bringing in people of color, bringing in women, changes the attitude, the image, the perceptions, the values, and the conversation in institutions.
When I am in corporate boardrooms, people can’t say the same things that they might have said before. This is true. Even good people can’t say things. When there is a woman in the room, men change. They just do. I don’t care how good the men are, there are some times you say things that you don’t even think about that have an impact. Let’s put in another way. If you don’t have people in the room who look like certain groups, you don’t even think about them (those groups).
Now, we at UM-BC had done really well in producing more minorities at the graduate level. We are the largest producer of Blacks going on to science PhDs. We produced one-third of all the Biochemistry Bachelor's in the country in the most recent data. I’m very proud of that. The sad news is there are only sixty-five in the country. We did produce twenty-two of them, but that is the point. We need to multiply it by ten for Biochemistry. But Janet Rutlege, who was the first Black woman to get a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech. and comes out of the AT&T/Lucent programs is my Associate Dean of the Graduate School (UM-BC). And in the short period she has been on that campus, under two years, we have increased substantially the number of minorities and women in certain disciplines in science and technology applying to programs.
What is my point? It is about leadership. Now I didn’t bring Janet in. I was delighted she came. She talked to me about it but it was the Dean of the Graduate School who identified her and I was delighted to see that. But what happens is, when certain people at the top, presidents and vice-presidents, set a tone and they say to other people this is important, people begin to get it.
Now how do you change the culture? One of the things about universities is you don’t make people do anything. As President, let me tell you this. This is my tenth year as President. When my corporate friends say “Freeman, just tell them to do it.” Right, you are going to tell some faculty to do something, right? It’s not about making people do things, because people can use that passive-aggressive approach and look at you like this and do exactly what they want to do. It’s about persuasion. It’s about consensus building. It’s about finding success and making people feel good about it. It’s about finding the good people, the people from the congregation.
I’ll never forget on our campus that before we started this Meyer-Huff program, we had never had data on an African-American earning an “A” in any upper-level science or engineering course ever in the history of the university. So part of it was finding the data. I said “Find me the name of an African-American who has come through U.M.B.C. who has earned an “A” in any upper-level science or engineering course, because,” I said, “of course, we have had them.”
Well, big distinction, I had already done my homework. I knew what I was talking about. Every Black they found was from another country. And those wonderful Blacks from other countries that had a British education or a French education they came here with a broader background with that focus. One of the reasons we produce so many science and engineering students on our campus, sixty percent, is that so many are first generation Americans. There is a difference--the values, the old fashioned approach, the hunger for the knowledge and so that we have worked to do. I mean whether the students are from Jamaica, or from Russia, or from one of the Asian countries, what we’ve worked to do in that predominately right setting is to say, “Let’s look at some of those characteristics of people from other countries. What is it they bring in that we can learn from and let’s sit and talk about that in a very comfortable way.”
So part of the issue is to be honest. Part of change in culture is to be honest with people about what the situation is. What can we learn from other groups? Who are the faculty who are making a difference right now? How do we highlight their achievements and help them to feel really good about it? In terms of recruiting faculty, it turned out that the Chair of the Modern Language and Linguistics Department had done a really good job and had gotten two Blacks into that department. That was a big deal on my campus. It was the only department ten years ago with two Blacks.
And I had that Chair conduct a seminar for all of the other department chairs. And one of the points she made was that it’s not enough to look at the paper, at the resume, that to understand who can make a contribution on that campus, you might have one person who has five books, and the other person may have one book, or one person with ten articles and one with two articles. Just look at the quality of what they have done, understanding that a lot of times women and minorities haven’t had the same connections to have the right advisor who can pump up the resume and all of that. And secondly, that one’s ability to contribute to a situation in science and engineering or in any area is not just what’s on paper, but it’s about those personal qualities. So opening the minds of people to get beyond excluding people from the pool just because what the resume says, if there is a certain level of competence there.
The other part that is really significant is to get into the specificity of what works. We often talk broadly about you need academic advising, and you need group work, and you need this and that. The Meyer-Huff Program has a wonderful array of aspects. But what we work to do is to become much more specific about what is it about academic advising in this program that works.
Let me give you an example. We make it very clear to students that even if they come in with A.P. credits, five on the A.P. Calculus, A.P. Chemistry, they should not go to Calculus II and Chemistry II. Because most students, regardless of color, who go to the next level will get a “B” or a “C,” in the next level course because they are not accustomed to college level work. As a math person I can tell you that I give you a test with five problems, three of the problems you have seen before, two you have not seen before. In high school it is cookbook. In college you are expected to go to the next level.
And unless you have had a chance to learn how to prepare, how to work with a group, who to look at, the different “what if?” scenarios, suppose the problem is changed this way; you are not ready for it. And the problem is once even that smart student gets the “C” in Calculus II; he is not going to get an “A” in Calculus III.
You get my point, and so it’s looking at the first year’s experience differently. One other example, just about specificity. The idea that students can come in and take three courses for an engineering major: math, Calculus, Physics and engineering, is one that needs to be questioned when talking about curriculum. Because I said, “Let's look at what happens if we give them only two courses in science and technology in the first semester,” to give them a chance to adjust to college life, to do extraordinarily well in those courses, to build confidence, to build our study habits, to learn how to work in groups and to get adjusted, and then they can make it up later on. And let’s not just think about a four-year program. Because for a lot of people it’s much better to go slow at first and to pick it up later on, because a lot of students get pushed out in that first period.
Next point beyond specificity is evaluation--what works? When you try something then how do you go about showing whether or not it makes a difference? And if it does work, how do you replicate it? And so a lot of the practices that we have developed we’ve actually moved on to people beyond the minority groups. And similarly as we’ve worked to develop programs for women, we have a new “Center for Women in Information Technology,” that is a few years old. We’ve looked at those things, and we have a new graduate program at the master's level, looking at what worked at the undergraduate level and transferring that to a group for women in the information technology and to a graduate program focused on American-born students, women and minorities.
And one of the most important aspects about changing culture had to do with creating communities of scholars. I spoke for a Diversity Conference for all of the heads of the University of Colorado campuses and the head of that system, a woman in Economics, said that she had been mentoring about thirteen women in the Economics faculty around the country and she said if that group of women had not worked together, most of them probably would never have gotten tenure. Because those women helped each other understand all of the nuances, the subtleties of things that people don’t just talk about. And when you are one of the few in your department, you sometimes don’t understand or don’t get all of what needs to be gotten if you are going to have the security for tenure. And she said, “But through the networking, over the years, they had helped each other, giving each other support, giving them ideas, working with them on journals, all kinds of things.” And she said, her point was, “You need a community of scholars to make a difference, it makes all the difference in the world.”
And then the other point. Everybody can’t make it in science and engineering. We don’t want to admit that. Oh, just give the money to everybody. I’m convinced that the best programs involving cultural change have to do with not starting at the freshman level. We are working on programs with elementary kids, and middle school kids, and high school kids and I’m saying, “Let’s identify kids in middle school who have the interest, and some ability that we can determine, and a willingness to work with us.”
What are the characteristics beyond just test scores? Willingness to take advice is a big deal to me. Hunger, fire in the belly I call it. Find these kids. Let’s make them feel prestigious; let’s make them compete for whatever it is. We just give kids things and they say “Oh yeah, I got that.” Make it a big deal and then give them all kinds of honor.
It’s interesting that the first couple of years of the Meyer-Huff Program, people, I will never forget, some of the Black students came and said, “We don’t like the fact that you do so much to make the Meyer-Huff scholars feel special.” And I said, “Well, because we take them to New York to cultural events, they would really get involved in research early. These are the students we were working to help to get good grades. They had good grades in high school, but my experience has been, even when you have good grades in high school, if you are not from a really rigorous science and technology school, you've got a challenge when you get there, competing with the kids from Russia.”
And so I looked at these African-American students and said, “Why is it that you never came and asked me about what we do for the Basketball players?” Because on every campus we make athletes feel very special. We give them all kinds of honors when they pass by. You almost bow. They are little gods. By the way, my campus has, for three of the past five years, been the National Chess Champions. I’m very proud of that. And when Chess players pass, you give them their respect.
But the point is how do you change the culture to help people to understand that the people who should get real recognition are the ones who are the best minds, those who are producing, those who are really working to do the best thing? The biggest challenge we face in this country, as we work to increase the number of minorities and women scientists and engineers, is to have faculty and colleagues believing that they can do it in large numbers, that they are not just the exception and number two to have our students wanting to be smart. To make it in science and engineering, you got to want to be smart.