All the right moves

ASEE Prism, Oct 2002 by Lapinski, Susan

FREEMAN HRABOWSKI, WHO STANDS OUT AMONG COLLEGE PRESIDENTS FOR SHOWING MINORITY YOUTH HOW TO BE STELLAR ENGINEERS MATHEMATICIANS, AND SCIENTISTS USES CHESS TO GET STUDENTS EXCITED ABOUT THE INTELLECTUAL PROCESS. When Freeman Hrabowski was growing up in Birmingham, Ala., he saw and felt things that children never should. He was spat on and called a racial epithet by the city's police chief, Bull Connor. He saw the police turn fire hoses and snarling dogs on his fellow African-Americans. He also had the "very scary" experience of going to jail with a group of other children demonstrating against segregation on behalf of their parents, who couldn't afford to take the time off from work to be arrested themselves.

Worst of all, he lost a school friend, 14-year-old Cynthia Wesley, a sweetnatured girl who had always made him laugh. Cynthia was one of four girls killed in the racially motivated bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. "At her funeral, I remember the Rev. Martin Luther King saying that life was hard, hard as steel," recalls Hrabowski, now president of the University of Maryland at Baltimore Campus (UMBC).

As hard as those times were, it's typical of Freeman A. Hrabowski, Ill, to draw strength from them now. "I became the person I am today because of those days in Birmingham," he says. "I learned that the world is not fair, but that you should never underestimate the power of the human spirit to transcend all kinds of tragedy. There's a sense of empowerment when you know you can make a difference."

The difference he's making for minority students in the fields of engineering, math, and science has already won Hrabowski much acclaim. He and his university, which enrolls 11,200 students, won the U.S. Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring in 1996. He was named Marylander of the Year by the Baltimore Sun in 1999, the same year he was awarded the Reginald H. Jones Distinguished Service Award from the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. Last year, he was the recipient of the prestigious Harold W. McGraw, Jr., Prize in Education. And this year, Fast Company magazine named him one of their Fast 50 Champions of Innovation.

What's made Hrabowski such a standout among college presidents is UMBC's Meyerhoff Scholars Program for gifted African-American undergraduates in science and engineering. "To be competitive as a nation, we must educate large numbers of people from all our racial and ethnic groups to be our research scientists and engineers," he explains. He launched the program in 1988 with half a million dollars in seed money from Robert Meyerhoff, a Baltimore philanthropist and MIT engineering graduate. Millions more have since poured into the program from such institutions as the National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and National Institutes of Health. This August, the program gained national attention as the focus of a "Today Show" episode on NBC.

Hrabowski has put UMBC on the map for building a pipeline that reliably produces minority scientists at a time when minorities are vastly underrepresented in the sciences. But of the 65,113 bachelor's degrees awarded in engineering last year, African-Americans earned just 5.3% of them, due to poor high school preparation, a lack of role models, and other factors. And while the test scores of African-American students enrolling at UMBC have improved dramatically, Hrabowski's success at graduating engineers has been only slightly higher than the average. Last year, for example, just 14 out of 206 engineering graduates were African-American.

"I've been very inspired bv his charisma, his ideas," says Shlomo Carmi, dean of UMBC's College of Engineering and a professor of mechanical engineering. Carmi is building his own pipeline for young engineers by working in conjunction with some of Baltimore's middle and high schools to add introductory engineering courses to their curricula.

Nurturing young talent has certainly paid off for UMBC so far. Ninety percent of the program's scholars complete their bachelor's degrees, and 80 percent of the engineering graduates go on to graduate school. The program has already produced dozens of engineers and scientists and about 50 African-American physicians. Hrabowski speaks of one alum who was in the very first group of Meyerhoff students and just completed his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Northwestern. Another is about to earn a Ph.D. in bioengineering at Stanford. "These are the faculty members and administrators of tomorrow," he points out proudly.

How does the Meyerhoff program work its magic? Hrabowski ticks off about a dozen ways the program supports and sustains its scholars, who typically come in the door with promising high school records and combined SAT scores in the 1300s (and increasingly, in the 1400s). Before their college classes ever begin, the scholars participate in a six-week preparatory program called Summer Bridge. Besides taking classes in science and math, the scholars learn how to work in groups, ask for tutoring when they need it, and recognize that they have abilities and ideas that are worth sharing with their classmates.