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. Your selection was based upon your institutional commitment to increasing the numbers of minorities and women in engineering, a commitment that is evident throughout the institution, and also for your demonstrated record in this regard. NACME is proud to be your partner in this effort.

In Pursuit of Excellence and Equity in Science and Engineering

I have had an opportunity to tour some of the mechanical engineering facilities this afternoon, and I can't help but say that I am extremely impressed. It is far different from the educational environment for engineering when I was an undergraduate student many years ago. I applaud this university and I applaud your faculty for all of the exciting things you're doing.

I had an opportunity after retiring from Occidental College to spend a year on the faculty at the University of Southern California. It was the first time that I ever had a full-time faculty appointment and I found it very enjoyable. I was somewhat apprehensive about it because I had spent most of my academic career as an administrator rather than as a faculty member, and so I was waiting with some trepidation the evaluations from the students.

I received my first set of evaluations and I remember sequestering myself in my office to sit down and read them. One of the first that I picked up was from a young man who started out by saying, "If I was told by my doctor that I had only six months to live I would want to spend those six months in Professor Slaughter's class." I thought that that was such a wonderfully warm tribute. I was very pleased until I looked at the bottom of the page and I noticed that it said, "Turn Over." I turned it over and his note continued "Because every minute in Professor Slaughter's classroom is like an eternity." So I concluded that perhaps being a faculty member was not necessarily the right thing for me to do.

In the year 2000 the Congressional Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology Development called for the creation of an organization to develop and execute a national action plan to increase the participation of underrepresented women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in technical fields. The organization that was created, an organization called Building Engineering and Science Talent, or BEST as it is referred to, is a public/ private partnership dedicated to building a strong, more diverse science, engineering, and technology workforce. One of its publications refers to the quiet crisis that is building in the United States, a crisis that could, in BEST's opinion, jeopardize our nation's preeminence and well-being. It can be attributed to the disparity that exists between America's mounting need for scientists, engineers, and other technically trained workers and our ability to produce more of them.

The Quiet Crisis

I want to speak with you about three issues that pertain to the quiet crisis, issues concerning excellence and equity in higher education. They are all interrelated and they are all ones that I believe are germane to the subject of engineering education for the foreseeable future.

The first of these is a matter of diversity, or more accurately, the lack of diversity in the field of engineering. The second concerns the issue of encouraging more young people to consider engineering as a career, and the third has to do with the content of the curriculum that we require students to study. Each of these, in my opinion, is an important topic for any discussion of engineering education.

The Case for Diversity in Engineering

Last year I had the honor of delivering the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday address at my alma mater, Kansas State University. I graduated from there in 1956 as the only black engineering student. I was astonished but very pleased to learn that there are now seventy-five black engineering students at Kansas State, many of whom I had an opportunity to meet and talk with on my visit to the campus. Many of them, perhaps a majority, were women. This is in stark contrast to the sole woman studying engineering when I was a student there. The students I spoke with were excited about their studies, the opportunities they had for internships and summer employment, and the support structures that the University had put into place to ensure their success to graduation. Regrettably, many of them also shared tales of discouragement and disparagement from teachers and counselors throughout their middle school and high school years. The fact that such behavior was common fifty years ago is a sad commentary on the history of our public schools in our nation. The fact that it is still occurring today is criminal.

Clearly progress has been made. Enrollments, graduation rates, internships, employment opportunities, and career choices are significantly greater today than they were decades ago, but much more needs to be done if America is to benefit from the immense potential resident in the large numbers of underrepresented persons in science and engineering. Thousands of minority and economically disadvantaged young persons suffer from poor public school preparation, limited opportunities, and the imposition of low expectations for their future. This unfortunately is particularly true in our field of engineering. Parity remains a distant and elusive target.

I contend that the engineering profession as a whole has not given a great deal of thought to the issue of diversity. For many years now the National Academy of Engineering and many of the engineering societies have had programs in place that focus on issues of diversity, but their joint efforts have been like those achieved by trying to push a boulder with a wet noodle. While I argue for the need to increase the number of minority engineering students, I feel equally strongly about increasing the number of minority engineering faculty in our nation's colleges and universities. The two goals are inextricably intertwined. Minority students suffer from the absence of minority role models in the classroom, but too few minority students are encouraged and guided into graduate education so that they can ultimately become faculty members who can inspire and educate even more minority students. Again, I have been impressed with what I have learned is occurring here at Georgia Tech and the efforts that you are making to do precisely that. I wish more institutions would use you as a model.

In 2001, approximately one thousand women and two hundred minorities received Ph.D.s in engineering in the United States. While the numbers are admittedly small, they are large enough to begin to make a difference in the composition of our faculties. We know that our colleges and universities have the capacity to begin to diversify their faculties; we hope they have the will.

What is diversity and why is it important to higher education? Answering these questions is not simple. Part of the reason is that the word diversity has become overworked and misused in higher education. It is most often used to denote the extent of the presence of various racial and ethnic groups within a population of students on college and university campuses, but that's not all that it should mean. It is my thesis that diversity should mean much more than numbers and percentages and that, further, the presence of diversity should not be seen as synonymous with the presence of equity. By constraining the definition of diversity to apply only to the mix of students in an institution overlooks many important constituencies as well as a range of ideas and intellectual concepts that are subject to study and inquiry.

In the field of mathematics, as all of you in this room no doubt know, one encounters the concepts of necessity and sufficiency. Mathematicians deal with propositions that are required or necessary in order for a truth to be upheld but that are in and of themselves not sufficient for a theory or postulate to be declared true. Some other proposition or fact must be present in order to declare the existence of truth or proof. Such is the case, I argue, with diversity.

If we accept as our goal the creation and sustenance of culturally pluralistic and inclusive institutions that affirm the presence of difference throughout and that value excellence at all levels of the institution in their students, faculty, staff, administration, governing board, curriculum, student services, social organizations, and mission, then we need to do more than achieve to celebrate diversity.

To be certain, an institution cannot achieve what I have just mentioned without the presence of diversity. Diversity is necessary, but it is not sufficient. It is not sufficient by itself to produce the desired result. In other words, the presence of diversity does not guarantee the presence of equality of opportunity. Something else has to be present besides mere diversity in order to reach that goal. Something within the institution has to be in place.

That something in my opinion is really two things. One, the institution must have the will and the capacity to change in order to address fully the educational and socialization needs of its increasingly more diverse population. Second, there must be an unwavering commitment to excellence. Not the ersatz narrow view of excellence found in most of those publications that have anointed themselves to be the judges of American's best colleges and universities, but the kind of excellence that can be measured in the quality of outcomes. The favorite argument of those who fear diversity is that it represents a diminution of an emphasis of quality and pursuit of excellence as a consequence of its focus on equality and the presence of equity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Excellence cannot be narrowly defined, measured, and compared by the use of SATs and GREs no matter how hard we try.

One of the principal impediments that we must overcome is the mind set on most college and university campuses that diversity refers only to the composition and characteristics of the student body. If you ask an administrator or a faculty member at most institutions to comment on the diversity at his or her institution, you will most likely receive a reply with percentages that pertain to the latest incoming class of students. And if you respond to this answer with another question, the question about faculty diversity, you're likely to receive a response that is significantly different, one that demonstrates that little attention has been given to the matter.

A true commitment to diversity requires more than concern for the diversity of the students who come to be educated; it requires a similar commitment to the diversity of those responsible for providing the education, faculty, administrators, staff, and trustees and to the diversity of academic and support services provided to those students. Only then can a meaningful assessment of the institution's commitment to a pluralistic, inclusive, and multicultural learning environment be made. Only then does a commitment to diversity make itself evident.

Today, higher education is confronted with the reality that the presence of African American, Latino, and American Indian students, faculty, and administrators falls well below the proportion of those groups in our society. Given the extraordinary demographic changes that are occurring throughout most of our country, this is a situation that, if unheeded, portends serious and even dire consequences for the nation.

To rectify this situation there is a crying need for transformation in education in this country. This transformation must begin in preschool where successful interventions have already been shown to be possible. It must continue through all levels of education, up to, and including, graduate school. Our colleges and universities must embark on a new era of teaching and learning in which excellence is not so narrowly defined as it is today. It will require that we eliminate, to a large extent, privilege from our definition of merit.

It is true, I'm afraid, as Barry Switzer, the former coach of the Oklahoma Sooners and the Dallas Cowboys, once said that some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they just hit a triple. True measures of equality must be adopted that are based upon a much deeper engagement with students, all students, than is occurring on the campuses of many colleges and universities of our nation. It will require that we show a greater commitment to the formulation and implementation of policies that will make higher education more affordable, accessible, and equitable for all. We have to have the courage to make higher education an inclusive rather than an exclusive industry where quality is no longer measured by the percentage of students who are declined admittance. We need to focus more of our attention on outcomes rather than primarily on input measures such as standardized admission test scores, whose importance in predicting success in college is vastly overrated.

The poor record of success in producing diverse faculties in our nation's colleges and universities is due to many factors. Many of those with undergraduate degrees who go on to pursue graduate and professional studies often encounter stereotypes and obstacles that serve to discourage them in their quest for full membership in the community of academic scholars. Subtle discrimination ranging from the difficulty in finding dissertation advisers and mentors to the devaluing of their research areas prevents many minority graduate students from completing their doctoral studies, the entry to the academic profession. Those who do obtain their doctorates are still faced with the high probability of encountering discrimination in employment due to long-held attitudes and practices in colleges in universities.

The failure of accreditation bodies and those who presume the ranking of colleges and universities to value the relevance of faculty and staff diversity to educational quality is one reason that so little has happened in this area. Institutions focused on the goals of increased prestige and greater recognition in the meritocracy of American higher education feel no incentive and receive no reward for diversifying their faculties. In fact, institutions that do commit to increasing faculty and staff diversity risk being criticized for pursuing equity at the expense of excellence. This fact alone accounts for much of the apathy shown by most colleges and universities toward improving faculty diversity despite their awareness of the benefits to educational quality that would accrue.

The University of Michigan case now before the Supreme Court is, in my opinion, a precursor of the potentially significant events that will occur in this country with respect to the use of affirmative action measures in increasing the presence of minority students in undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs.

It is interesting to note that American industry has expressed a strong belief that it would be a mistake for this country to fail to utilize some race-sensitive measures to ensure that a reasonable number, a significant number, of minority students are afforded an opportunity to have the best possible education in the best universities in this country. American industry, the military, and a number of educational institutions have joined together in presenting amicus briefs to the Supreme Court. I was particularly impressed by the one filed on behalf of sixty-five corporations. In that brief, they said that the rich variety of ideas, perspectives, and experiences to which both nonminority and minority students are exposed in a diverse university setting and the crosscultural interactions they experience are essential to the student's ability to function and contribute to this increasingly diverse community.

NACME joined with the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, MIT - the Georgia Tech of the north -, Stanford, IBM, and DuPont in an amicus brief. In our brief we said that a diverse academic community stimulates critical, reflective, and complex thinking that enhances students' problem solving ability. Moreover, racial and ethnic diversity in higher education significantly contributes to students' ability to live and work together and to communicate across racial boundaries, skills of great importance in our increasingly heterogeneous world.

The National Academy of Engineering, an organization that plays an important role in advancing engineering and engineering education in America, made a statement recently that I think is equally important. It said there is an absolute necessity for diversity. Not just racial and ethnic and gender diversity, but also socioeconomic, experiential, and individual thinking/behavioral style diversity. Bill Wulf, the president of the National Academy of Engineering, in a recent Woodruff Distinguished Lecture said it best. He said, "as a consequence of a lack of diversity we pay an opportunity cost, a cost in designs not thought of, in solutions not produced." I think that statement is an important one for us to remember.

I had an opportunity to pick up a story that I think clearly represents that. I'll just read it to you very briefly: "One day Joe, Bob, and Dave were hiking in a wilderness area when they came upon a large, raging, violent river. They needed to get to the other side but had no idea of how to do so. Joe prayed to God saying, 'Please God, give me the strength to cross this river.' Poof! God gave him big arms and strong legs and he was able to swim across the river in about two hours, although he almost drowned a couple of times. Seeing this, Dave prayed to God saying, 'Please God, give me the strength and the tools to cross this river.' Poof! God gave him a row boat and he was able to row across the river in about an hour after almost capsizing the boat a couple of times. Bob saw how this worked out for the other two, so he also prayed to God. 'Please God, give me the strength and the tools and the intelligence to cross this river.' Poof! God turned him into a woman. She looked at the map, hiked upstream a couple hundred yards, and walked across the bridge."

The Critical Need to Inspire Our Youth Let's now consider the second point, the need to encourage more young people, and especially minority youth, to aspire to become scientists and engineers. I am reminded of the words of the late Benjamin Mays, who for many years was president of your neighboring school, Morehouse College. Mays said "it must be borne in mind that the tragedy in life does not lie in not reaching your goal; the tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn't a calamity to die with a dream unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It is not a disaster not to be able to capture your ideals, but it is a disaster to have no ideals to capture. It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for." Not failure but low aim is a sin. How do we instill this in the minds of our young people?

I have often asked myself these questions. What if all students, not just those fortunate enough to go to the best public schools or the prestigious private and prep schools, were challenged to achieve at the highest levels by teachers who believed in the students' abilities to succeed? What if the best teachers in America were in classrooms that need them most instead of the present reality in which teachers without the appropriate college preparation are teaching a quarter of all mathematics students and more than half of all physics and chemistry students in grades seven through twelve, with most of them teaching in schools with the largest numbers of poor and minority students? What if our nation's colleges and universities were as dedicated to the notions of both excellence and equity as they are to being ranked among the top ten in U.S. News & World Report's listings of America's best or making it to the NCAA Final Four? Would the picture be different today?

We find ourselves at this point in history with the number of engineering graduates at one of the lowest levels in the past twenty years. This is occurring at a time when the demand for persons prepared to provide the skills needed by America's high technology industries has never been higher. The engineering profession itself must share much of the blame by not conveying to young people the excitement, satisfaction, and rewards to be found in engineering and by not providing in some comprehensive manner the outreach that will encourage and inspire more youth to prepare themselves for the opportunity to become engineers.

We have failed in many ways to tell the story about engineering, and as a result engineering is not seen as a prestigious occupation in the eyes of the public. It is a sad reality that over the past few years too few young people, both minority and nonminority, are choosing to get on the pathway of engineering as a career pursuit. Sadder still is the fact that many of them are robbed of the option to even consider entering the field before they have left middle school.

More than a half million minority students graduate from high school each year, but only thirty-two thousand of them have completed the necessary science and math courses to even be considered for entry into engineering school. About twenty-one thousand are fully qualified for admission and about fifteen thousand of them actually enroll. Now, while the picture for nonminority students is somewhat brighter, their numbers are also well below the level necessary to meet current and future demands. Only fifteen percent of white students complete four years of math and science, the ticket to admission for engineering study. It is estimated that the demand for engineers will grow over the next decade to replace those who retire and to fill the new positions that will develop over that period. Unfortunately, we find ourselves importing talent and exporting jobs simply because we do not produce enough native born, well- qualified scientists and engineers in our nation's universities. We must ask ourselves why.

Why can't we produce adequate numbers of people with the analytical and quantitative skills that are needed for the jobs that are going unfilled in this country? Part of the reason, of course, is the poor preparation and lack of encouragement that many of them encounter in our public schools. Even many well meaning teachers and counselors are woefully ignorant about what it takes to be an engineer and, therefore, unable to guide students in any meaningful way toward engineering.

The Engineering Curriculum

But our engineering education programs in our colleges and universities must share some of the responsibility. It has become well-known that more than a few engineering students have left the study of engineering or have threatened to leave because they felt they were not receiving a sense of meaningfulness in their education or were not being led to an understanding of how engineering will help them make a contribution to society.

The drudgery of the early courses in math and science masks the potential of enjoyment and satisfaction that they hope to receive from their career choice. The extent to which this is a widespread problem could be a major contributor to the high level of attrition in our engineering programs.

What To Teach and What To Learn

This leads to my last point. When the African American chemist Percy Lavon Julian, the discoverer of synthetic hormones such as physostigmine, received an honor scroll from the American Institute of Chemists he chose to quote in his acceptance speech from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem begins, "Where should the scholar live, in solitude or in society?" As both the scientist and humanist, Dr. Julian's answer was, "In society. My prime concern," he said, "is that the scientist recognizes the magnitude of the responsibility resting on his shoulders when the nation entrusts so much of its wealth in its hands."

Julian's words have tremendous consequences for engineering education. They require us to do more than simply provide students with the best math, science, and engineering curriculum, the best laboratories and instrumentation. It means re-examining what we teach as well as rethinking our expectations for them and for ourselves as their mentors.

There are indeed many potential conflicts between science and technology and society, and consequently, there is a profound need for an in-depth appreciation for social responsibility in scientific and technological endeavors. I contend that this appreciation is not to be found in traditional courses in science and engineering. Those courses must be offered in concert with material that exposes students to the study of ethical principles and human values. Without this grounding the engineer is much like a machine that dispassionately and methodically crunches numbers and produces answers to complex and perplexing problems, but a socially responsible engineer can interpret as well as investigate, evaluate as well as analyze, reflect as well as create. The engineer who cannot make value judgments and who cannot see beyond the facts is a potential danger to society.

As a professional engineer who spent eleven years as a liberal arts college president, I fully believe that engineering students must be broadly educated in mathematics, the natural, behavioral and social sciences, literature, and the arts so that they can make the connections between these fields of learning. In my opinion they need to study both Bach and botany, both Carlyle and chemistry, both Dickinson and differential equations, both Giovanni and geometry, both Isaiah and isotopes, both Michelangelo and microchips, both Milton and molecules, both Picasso and picofarads. They need to understand well the insight of Perey Lavon Julian who said of the sciences and the humanities, "The goal of both is to enrich and enoble the good life of man."

Conclusion

It has been my intention to show that an institutional commitment to the synergistic goals of excellence and equity must be the overarching purpose for higher education in the 21st century, in particular for those colleges and universities that are responsible for preparing our scientists and engineers. Success requires that the institution's commitment be genuine, that it not only talks the talk, but also consistently walks the walk. This commitment must be evident in the institution's mission statement, its catalog of course offerings, its admissions and hiring policies, its student life programs, and its community and public relations efforts.

It must be seen and sensed at all levels of the institution for it to be deemed true and it must be done with a sense of urgency, the same sense of urgency reflected in the message of the no trespassing sign in the Indiana countryside. The sign says, if you want to cross this field, you better do it in 9.9 seconds. The bull can do it in ten flat.

Only if an institution does each of these things will it be seen as a college or university that provides all of its students with a total educational experience of the highest quality, one that prepares them for life in a world that has become increasingly complex, pluralistic, and interdependent.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q: I believe that the IBM Journal of Research & Development did a special issue where they featured some of the fruits of the labor of the NACME scholars. Can you comment on how that came about and what was actually in it.

A: The question has to do with the fact that about three years ago, maybe three and a half years ago, the IBM research and development journal published a series of research articles that had been done by persons who had been NACME scholars. IBM is one of our biggest supporters. The chairman of our board at the time, Nick Donofrio, IBM vice president for technology and manufacturing, and our vice president for communications, Dundee Holt, made arrangements with IBM to feature a number of our students' work, which is how that came about.

I'm not sure I understood the second part of your question, but did it have to do with how can more of that be done?

Q: I'm just wondering if any of the other journals had also featured NACME graduates, because you said you had fifteen thousand graduates.

A: I am not aware that any other journals have focused on the minority graduates, but a number of our graduates have published research. A number of them have gone on to graduate school, a number of them have gone on to faculty positions in colleges and universities and have conducted research that has been published. We're extremely proud of the contributions of our alumni.

Q: I would like to applaud you for a very pointed discussion of the issues and the need to expand the concept of diversity at least amongst academia. It's not a secret that universities play the ratings game. Among those factors there is a clear absence of methodology, so when one scores to get up the ladder sometimes they use various criteria as in U. S. News & World Report. Does NACME see a need to change the modus operandi of schools to challenge groups such as U.S. News & World Report that attempt to push these criteria into academia?

A: A very good question. Does NACME feel a need to attempt to change the methodology used to rate higher educational institutions? The answer to that is a loud yes. I personally - this is long before I came to NACME - spoke out loudly about the methodology that was used. I've written about it, and have even visited U. S. News & World Report to talk about it. As a matter of fact, I think that some of us who felt strongly about the importance of diversity, particularly faculty diversity, at least were able to get U. S. News & World Report to include a small component of recognition of diversity in their rating.

I was very pleased that for the last three years of my presidency at Occidental we were identified as the number one liberal arts college in America with respect to diversity because that had become such a high priority for us. It is unfortunate that our educational institutions have become so committed to the idea of prestige in this very competitive world of getting students and getting research grants, and so forth, that we oftentimes lose sight of those important issues in our pursuit of recognition. I think it's unfortunate that even though we know better we allow ourselves to get sucked into this myth - I'm talking about higher educational institutions now - that the number of books in your library, the number of Nobel laureates on your faculty, the number of dollars that you pour into some research program necessarily translates into the quality of the educational experience that undergraduates, in particular, are receiving. I think that this is a thing that is most disturbing. Higher education is the only industry in the world where you end up getting recognition for your rejects.

Q: How would you rank the United States amongst the nations of the world in providing equity for minorities? Have you seen strategies or systems in other countries that we should or could learn from?

A: No. You know, the United States - certainly one could maybe draw some parallels, but only to a certain extent, with some European countries, but there is no other country in the world that has the kind of diversity and, more importantly, the history that exists in the United States.

We tend to ignore the impact of history on where we are today, and we can't afford to do that. I think that's one of the unfortunate things about the discussion taking place in the Supreme Court right now. We're pretending as though somehow the playing field is level and that we are making some policies based upon the fact that everyone is starting from the same point. That is far from true because we have had this invidious history that has created the situation that we're attempting to remedy today by virtue of some affirmative action policy.

So I don't think that - I'm not smart enough to see anything that begins to parallel our experience in any other country. We're certainly familiar with the problems that have occurred in places like South Africa and others, but, again, that is a situation that is very different from the history in this country or at least the demographics of this country.

Q: You spoke about some of the earlier problems encountered by students in middle school or high school where they received discouragement or a poor academic experience. I was wondering if NACME had undertaken any efforts at that level and what they were.

A: The web site that I mentioned, www.guidemenacme.org, is designed to reach students as early as age thirteen. The purpose for that is to provide information as well as inspiration for young people to fill that void. The fact that they may have received some discouragement or disparagement, but more importantly, because they simply are not in environments where they have either had role models or they've had people who understand what it takes to study engineering. So we are very concerned about that and trying to play a role at a very early stage in order that there will be more students who will be on the pathway to engineering by the time they're ready for college.

Q: I guess I take your definition of diversity in the context of race, sex, and nationality. What about diversity of the way students think or the way teachers teach? Because I think that's also important in a university regardless if this world were not interested in race, color, or creed. I think that's also something to pursue regardless of the numbers of different types of people at a university. I wanted your comments on that.

A: Well, I agree with you and I may not have been as clear as I should have been in my early comments, but I think it's a mistake to think of diversity only in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity. I think I said something about what it has to be - we have to think about it in terms of the things we study, the issues that we deal with. We've got to think about geographical diversity. We've got to think about behavioral styles. There are a variety of issues that I think are a part of the landscape of diversity that transcend far beyond race, culture, and ethnicity. Q: I couldn't agree with you more about the inadequate preparation of teachers in middle schools and high schools who are teaching our students mathematics and science, particularly in the poorer school districts. They are not doing an adequate job of preparing those students for coming into a university and pursuing careers in science, mathematics, and engineering, and I hope that NACME will be do something to help rectify that situation in whatever way it can.

The question I have is that twice you have commented on the use of rejection rates as you put it, as a measure of the quality of an institution. Is not an institution's acceptance rate at least indicative of the public's perception of the quality of that institution so is it not a valid measure of some sort?

A: Well, yes, the acceptance rate is important from the point of view of the public perception of the institution. One would have to question whether or not that is the basis upon which one should decide that Institution A is better than Institution B. What I'm arguing for is much harder to measure. I don't think there is a number that can be used to make that judgment. I'm more concerned about the quality of the educational experience for which a student spends four years. What is the value added to that student's life? I am suggesting that just looking at an institution's yield rate or acceptance rate is not going to tell you that and the public is being misled. You're right, it's the public's perception of the quality of the institution, but I think the public is being misled for looking for a simplistic answer to whether an institution is good or is better than some other institution. I don't think the answer that we accept eighteen percent of the students who apply, as compared to the institution down the street that accepts thirty percent, means that we are that much better.

I'm much more concerned with what does student X who comes in as a freshman walk away with at the end of four years. I can tell you there are a lot of institutions that are ranked high in U. S. News & World Report that I would not want my son or daughter to attend as an undergraduate simply because I don't believe that they would receive the quality educational experience that they ought to have.

Q: Returning to the definition of diversity, we had a talk yesterday, a much more technical talk, on design where the advantages of diversity were mentioned. There were tests given, the Briggs and Meyers test I believe, that some people gave to their design groups to separate them into groups, basically to achieve diversity. Is there an objective way or a test to measure diversity and, in particular, when you get back to the problem at hand at the University of Michigan, for example, to increase diversity, a way which could increase diversity without focusing on racial advantages or racial quotas?

A: Well, that's a very good question. I think people are trying to find answers to that. I don't have a good answer to your question other than to say that some of the things that have been proposed are not necessarily good surrogates or good proxies for race in attempting to achieve greater racial diversity in the institution.

I mentioned at lunch that I read an article that said that maybe we need to look again at the use of economic class as a better way to accomplish some of the goals. Particularly if the Supreme Court rules against using race, then we need to explore economic class. The interesting thing that this article said is that if you look at the top economic quartile, seventy-four percent of the students in our colleges and universities are from that top economic quartile. Only three percent are from the lowest quartile. So there is this huge difference in the abilities of students to attend college based upon their economic class.

Certainly in the lower economic strata one is much more likely to find larger numbers of underrepresented minorities. Some people are looking at that as a surrogate for race. There are as many articles opposing that as there are recommending that if you look at the Chronicle of Higher Education. So I don't think there is a simple answer. But a lot of work is going to go into trying to figure out ways in which institutions can achieve the commitment to creating a diverse class, depending upon the answer that comes from the Supreme Court.

Q: I'm also one of the NACME scholars that your organization is funding. I have two questions based on the comments earlier. Justice Scalia said that the University of Michigan's problem was of its own doing insofar as they wanted to create an elite law school and they ought to have been able to predict that they would have lower rates of diversity because minority students in education don't have elite merit degrees.

I also worked for NACME for a while. As a foot soldier, one of the arguments that often comes to you is the attempt to find alternative ways to determine who would be successful in engineering. Despite their merit there are ways to skirt the issue of minority students' low performance Ð their low performance in lower level schools.

So, I wonder how you respond to what the perceptions are of Scalia's comments if, indeed, people feel that the elite institutions are, by nature, not going to have very diverse populations. And the second part is, given George Bush's environment that we're now in, where does diversity stand as a national issue?

A: The fact that the President of the United States entered his own amicus brief meant that this issue is high on the national radar screen. I heard part of Justice Scalia's comment. I frankly was shocked by it, that he raised it as he did. Unfortunately, we have adopted in this country a mind set about what elite means and, unfortunately, elite does not mean in most people's minds having a racially, culturally, and ethnically diverse population. They are not considered necessarily the best and the brightest. One would have to accept his definition of the assertion. It's unfortunate that kind of thinking occurs, if, in fact, that was his opinion and not just a hypothetical question.

As I said, because President Bush presented the amicus brief, it clearly is a matter of the administration bringing forth his point of view. We're going to see if the Supreme Court will agree or not. It is a matter that is going to have tremendous consequences regardless of the answer on what it is that Georgia Tech does in the future and what NACME does in the future. We may have to modify as we go on with future programs.

NOTICE The next George W. Woodruff Distinguished Lecture will be held early in 2005.

Details will be announced soon.

The Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering is the oldest and second largest of ten divisions in the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech. The School offers academic and research programs in mechanical engineering, and nuclear and radiological engineering/medical physics. The enrollment includes almost 1350 undergraduates and about 685 graduate students. Studies are directed by a full- time faculty of 82 professors, 21 research faculty, and four academic professionals, who are supported by 51 staff members. The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering is the only educational institution to be designated a Mechanical Engineering Heritage Site by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

For additional information, contact Dr. Ward O. Winer, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. Chair of the Woodruff School at:

The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0405