People
The Miracle at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC)
By Lango Deen
Nov 19, 2009, 12:38

UMBC President, Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski, has been honored as one of the nation's top 10 best college presidents. Science Spectrum Online's sister publication, USBE&IT magazine, spoke to Dr. Hrabowski in the fall of 2005 about the part diversity has played in UMBC's amazing story. The University is among the nation's leading schools in the number of undergraduate degrees awarded to black students in the sciences.

USBE: Can you talk a bit about UMBC's diversity efforts?

Dr. Hrabowski: We see ourselves as an institution that is very connected to the larger community. When we think about our diversity efforts, we focus not only on students coming to the freshman class, but also students who are recruited through other transfer programs with institutions around the country and through community colleges. We also look at what we are doing to support children of color in K-12 initiatives.  We focus on hundreds of minority boys in our Choice program [an outreach program that works directly with young people and their families to provide job skills and reduce delinquency]…. So, we have programs for K-12 initiatives, we have special initiatives involving young African Americans and other people of color coming from institutions, and then we have the freshman class.

USBE: Some press reports say that diversity on college campuses is a way of giving preference to favored groups. How do you respond?

Dr. Hrabowski: I think diversity on campus has everything to do with teaching future leaders in our society how to work with all types of human beings from this country and from other countries. The world is now more than ever a global setting in which students would have to know how to interact comfortably, and effectively, with people from backgrounds very different from their own. Not just Black and white, but people from different parts of the world, and people with different points of view about many things. And so to educate Americans effectively, universities have to focus on giving students opportunities to get to know people different from themselves.

USBE: In fewer than 40 years, UMBC has become both a major research university and a national model for preparing minorities in science and engineering. How did you make that leap?

Dr. Hrabowski: Much of the success is because of the foundation that was laid before I moved to UMBC…. What was striking to me was the success we had had, as a university, preparing Blacks for law school. We were producing large numbers of African Americans who were becoming lawyers, who had majored in the social sciences and humanities, African-American studies, and political science.

And yet we had not had the same success in producing large numbers of Blacks completing bachelor degrees in sciences and engineering. So my colleagues and I had conversations about building on our strengths in the social sciences, law, and public policy….We focused on listening to the students, looking at the interaction among students in these areas, looking at the kind of background students needed in order to succeed in organic chemistry, for example, and then learning from some of the best practices in the country.

I often said I wanted the UMBC experience to be for my students what Hampton University had been for me. One of the strengths of Hampton, and other HBCUs, historically, has been attention to the needs of students. It’s more than rhetoric, its actual practice, and close faculty-student interaction. Also, it was helpful to look at models of group study, and learning from Asian populations how important group work and collaboration can be in ensuring success. We married some of the work of HBCUs and some liberal arts colleges with what we’ve seen in lots of places with Asian students, and developed a set of components focusing on African-American culture.

USBE: Did you encounter challenges in pushing this campus initiative?

Dr. Hrabowski: It was challenging for all of us, because we first said, "let’s look in the mirror." If campuses look at the performance in this area, most would have to agree that minorities are not doing well in science and engineering. And the challenge is to make sure we don’t point fingers at any one group by simply saying, "Well students or teachers aren’t working as hard as they should."

The question was, how do we build trust among all these groups and identify strategies that can help more students succeed? At the heart of the success of the UMBC story is trust among different groups on campus--faculty, administrators, staff, and students--and an understanding that every group has to take ownership of these issues. These are not minority issues. They are educational and American issues.

We have a paucity of science and engineering professionals in our society, and given the growing number of people of color in America, it is incumbent on all of us in education to see students from all backgrounds in science and engineering as an American priority. What makes our success unique is that faculty--research, tenured faculty--take ownership of this issue, understand the challenges these students face, expect the most from students, engage students in the research labs, and then go around the country talking about these issues.

USBE: How diverse is UMBC’s faculty?
Dr. Hrabowski:  We have worked to bring in Blacks and other people of color to be on the faculty in different areas.  We also have two major initiatives involving women and women of color. The Meyerhoff program was started for Black males, and while we have people of all races involved, it is interesting that the African-American student population in the program is approximately 50 percent….

So we’ve done some things to focus on the issue of minority males, and now we can [focus on] faculty. It was very clear that we needed to look at not only faculty of color but also women faculty.  For several years, we have had a National Science Foundation Advance grant, which has led to our doubling the number of women faculty in tenured positions in faculty and engineering over the past four years.... By examining these policies involving women, we have had the opportunity to think about policies in general involving diversity in faculty.

We [started to] look at contracts, examine the data, understand where we had some success, learn from those departments where they have successful recruitment and retention, and talk about what needs to be done on the part of the university to increase the numbers. And so, for example, we are perhaps the only research university in the country that has half of its faculty in biochemical engineering who are women, including a Black woman. We have made progress in these disciplines, but we’ve also made progress across the board.

USBE: How is the university spreading entrepreneurship education and training across campus?Dr. Hrabowski: We have the Alex Brown Center for Entrepreneurship on campus, which focuses on increasing the number of students and faculty interested in entrepreneurship. In addition, we have focused for some years now on tech commercialization, patents, invention disclosures, and encouraging more faculty in these areas. The center focuses on activity that involves entrepreneurs and our students-–undergrad and grad. And it is interesting that a number of those students are of color.

USBE: What would you say to a 13-year-old who doesn’t enjoy math, doesn’t have a positive role model, and doesn’t see a future in math, science, or engineering?
Dr. Hrabowski: I am a strong believer that college students can play a major role in the lives of children. A 13-year-old would be much more impressed by a cool 19-year-old engineering student than by a 50-year-old college president. This is why the Meyerhoff Scholars and some of the other programs focus on working with children and bringing these children to campus to show them what college students do. They have college students helping them with reading and mathematics, giving them a chance to dream about the possibilities beyond basketball and college football.

I recently spent time with a group of 12--15-year-old boys, all of whom said they either wanted to be an entrepreneurial rapper, a basketball player, or a football player. We had great conversations about other possibilities. Some of my students who are planning to become engineers talked about their work, showed them what they do in labs, and showed them how what they do in mathematics in middle school is related to what they do later on….

Large numbers of Black UMBC students are working in a multimillion dollar program designed to help teachers of minority children use technology in the teaching, and these minority students are giving teachers a level of confidence in technology and also working with middle school children in the seventh and eighth grades.

The interaction among the teachers, the students, and the children leads to stronger math and science teaching, and the children see what is possible when college students are smart and interested in helping them out. So it leads to more of the 13-year-old children saying "I want to be like them," because they see that the students are not geeks or nerds, they are just cool kids who are smart and are excited by technology.

Dr. Hrabowski was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He graduated at 19 from Hampton Institute with highest honors in mathematics. At the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, he received his master's degree in mathematics. Four years later, he received his PhD in higher education administration and statistics at age 24. In May 2005, Dr. Hrabowski was conferred a Doctor of Letters degree by Duke University.