2003 Woodruff Distinguished Lecture Transcript

2003 WOODRUFF DISTINGUISHED LECTURE TRANSCRIPT The Search for Excellence and Equity in Higher Education: A Perspective from An Engineer Given by John Brooks Slaughter President and CEO National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) At the Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, Georgia April 10, 2003 The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Distinguished Lecture was established in 1990 to honor an engineer who has made an outstanding contribution to society and to provide a forum for that person to address the Georgia Tech community. Support for the lecture is made possible by the generous endowment made to the School by the late George W. Woodruff: an alumnus, influential Atlanta businessman, civic leader, and philanthropist. It is the mission of the Woodruff School to provide the finest education possible so that our graduates can be leaders in society. Distinguished Lecturers 1990 Donald E. Petersen, Chairman and CEO, Ford Motor Company 1991 Samuel C. Florman, Author and Professional Engineer 1992 Chang-Lin Tien, Chancellor and A. Martin Berlin Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley 1993 Sheila E. Widnall, Associate Provost and Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1994 Roberto C. Goizueta, Chairman of the Board and CEO, The Coca-Cola Company 1995 James J. Duderstadt, President, The University of Michigan 1996 Norman R. Augustine, Chairman and CEO, Lockheed Martin Corporation 1997 Charles M. Vest, President and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1998 Robert A. Lutz, Vice Chairman, Chrysler Corporation 1999 George H. Heilmeier, Chairman Emeritus, Bellcore Technologies 2000 Wm. A. Wulf, President, National Academy of Engineering 2001 Euan Baird, Chairman, President, and CEO, Schlumberger, Ltd. 2002 John H. Sununu, President, JHS Associates, Ltd., Former Governor of New Hampshire, and Former White House Chief of Staff 2003 John B. Slaughter, President and CEO, National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, Inc Dr. John Brooks Slaughter is the fifth president and CEO of NACME - The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, Inc. Founded in 1974, NACME is a nonprofit corporation that conducts research, analyzes and advances public policy, develops and operates precollege, university and workplace programs, and broadly disseminates information through publications, conferences, and electronic media. NACME is also the nation's largest private source of scholarships for minorities in engineering. More than ten percent of all African American, American Indian, and Latino engineering graduates have received NACME support. Dr. Slaughter has a long and illustrious career as a leader in the education, engineering, and scientific communities. He is President Emeritus of Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, and served as assistant director and, later, director of the National Science Foundation and Chancellor at the University of Maryland. Dr. Slaughter is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, where he has served on the Committee on Minorities in Engineering and co-chaired its Action Forum on Engineering Workforce Diversity. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an eminent member of the Tau Beta Pi Honorary Engineering Society. In 1993, he was inducted into the American Society for Engineering Education Hall of Fame. Dr. Slaughter began his professional career as an electronics engineer at General Dynamics and spent fifteen years at the U.S. Navy Electronics Laboratory in San Diego, where he became head of the Information Systems Technology department. He was Director of the Applied Physics Laboratory and Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, Academic Vice President and Provost at Washington State University, and, most recently, The Irving R. Melbo Professor of Leadership in Education at the University of Southern California. Dr. Slaughter serves on the board of directors of IBM, Northrop Grumman, and Solutia, Inc. He earned the Ph.D. in engineering science from the University of California at San Diego, an M.S. in engineering from UCLA, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Kansas State University. He holds honorary degrees from more than twenty institutions. Dr. Slaughter was honored with the first U.S. Black Engineer of the Year award in 1987, the Martin Luther King Jr. National Award in 1997, and the Heritage Award of the Executive Leadership Council in 2001. He has been married for more than forty years to Dr. Ida Bernice Slaughter. They have two children. Introduction [Editor's Note: This transcript is an edited version of Dr. Slaughter's lecture. To view the original lecture, see http://www.me.gatech.edu and click on the George W. Woodruff Medallion to view the webcast.] Thank you very much for the very kind and generous introduction. The only criticism I have of the introduction is that you forgot to tell them that I was the president of my third grade class - two years in a row. It's wonderful to be here with you. Thank you for coming out. I have been looking forward with a tremendous amount of anticipation to being here and to participate in this 2003 Woodruff Distinguished Lecture. I hardly deserve to be in the company of the luminaries who have had this position, had this opportunity in the past. I know and count among my friends many of them and I stand in awe of what they have accomplished. I'm also pleased to be here because of the respect I have for the president of Georgia Tech, Wayne Clough, who among many other things is a member of the board of directors of NACME, my organization, and because of the important role that Georgia Tech has played and continues to play in helping NACME fulfill its mission. Let me tell you a little bit about NACME and its mission. If you're already acquainted with the organization, let me tell you about the new NACME, the one we believe is required by the demands and realities of the early days of the 21st century. NACME was born from the National Academy of Engineering as the National Advisory Committee on Minorities in Engineering, and, as a result of joining forces in 1974 with several other organizations with similar goals, NACME became an independent, nonprofit entity with the same acronym but a new name, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. The primary purpose of the organization was to provide scholarships to promising minority students in engineering, and it was successful in what it did. We estimate that nearly eighteen thousand minority students have received financial help from NACME throughout its soon to be thirty-year existence, approximately fifteen percent of the 120,000 minority engineering graduates over that period. NACME wishes that all we had to do today and in the future would be to give scholarships to promising young engineering students in order to achieve parity in graduation rates, but we know that the pace has to be quickened, and that despite our best efforts, we are reaching far too few young people to achieve our goal. African Americans, Latinos, and American Indians, our target populations, comprise thirty percent of a college age cohort and constitute eleven percent of the engineering graduates. That disparity represents a hill to be climbed. It is an ever-expanding challenge since the proportion of minorities in college is expected to be closer to forty percent by the year 2020. NACME is responding by adopting a new set of middle school to workplace activities, which we refer to collectively as our M through W strategy. We have launched a new web site, www.guidemenacme.org, which is designed to reach students as young as thirteen years of age, their parents, their teachers, and their counselors, and provide them with information about preparing for engineering education and careers. We are formulating a broader scholarship support strategy that will provide funding support for more baccalaureate students, and we are now managing the Sloan Foundation Minority Ph.D. Fellowship Program in engineering and working to increase the numbers of minorities entering doctoral study in engineering. We're also providing diversity training for industry, governmental agencies, and educational institutions to help them adapt to the opportunities extant in the new and dynamic demographics of America. A recent activity has been the forming of formal partnerships with like-minded groups, many of which have a presence on your campus, groups like the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), the Southeastern Consortium for Minorities in Engineering (SECME), the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), the National Association of Minority Engineering Program Administrators, Inc. (NAMEPA), and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), to name a few. In the process, we have created a new entity we call the National Coalition of Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Advocacy Groups in Engineering and Science. NCOURAGES members have as their aim to focus and align their individual efforts and their individual activities for the purpose of dramatically increasing the racial and ethnic diversity of the nation's engineering and science workforce. All of these new efforts are undertaken because we have committed ourselves to the overarching objective of graduating 250,000 new minority engineers over the next decade, more than doubling the output of the past thirty years. One of the means we have chosen to do this is to facilitate the enhancement of the capability and capacity of America's engineering schools to recruit, admit, retain, educate, and graduate minority students. Thus, we have initiated a new block grant scholarship program for universities committed to this same purpose. I am extremely pleased to inform all of you that Georgia Tech is among the first thirteen universities to receive one of the new NACME grants beginning with the class of 2003-2004.

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