The Council of Engineering Deans of Historically Black Colleges and Universities convened its annual discussion with business and industry leaders at the 2006 Black Engineer of the Year Awards conference in February. The session was moderated by Bill Brown, who serves as executive vice president of PageSoutherlandPage, a global architecture, engineering, and planning firm. The event was sponsored by Aerotek Inc., a leading supplier of engineering personnel that matches 250,000 people annually to STEM careers; and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, the ninth largest pharmaceutical company in the world and the fourth largest biotech company. The following are excerpts from the HBCU Deans Roundtable discussion, which focused on educating and developing future executive leaders. You can listen to the full session online at www.beya.org.
Bill Brown: I think it’s clear we need to understand the distinction between executives and management. Executives provide strategic focus, vision ... as opposed to managers that are more or less involved in operational aspects. I know in … my federal career, I struggled with transformation from management into executive. I always wanted to be able to hold and feel and say "this was mine." …
I also had to come to grips with a concept you’ve heard quite a bit about---"life-long learner." … I got my undergraduate degree, and then off I went to Harvard. Then I got another degree, and then I went a few other places and got other degrees, and I kept saying: "my goodness, I’m going to be a student forever!" But then I began to realize the value I was getting out of those various programs, and my value to my organization. … So we’re going to toss a few things around here. … My first question to kick this off is, what does your institution have to offer in terms of executive leadership?
Dr. James Johnson: Some years ago, I recognized that when we look at the landscape, we really didn’t see any leaders from the technical field moving into areas we wanted them to go. So I had a conversation with one of our alums---General Lyles---and we started five years ago a leadership institute. We had a guest speaker come in and give a campus-wide talk, followed with a series of lectures. Some of the speakers we’ve had include Les Lyles, Fred Gregory, Delon Hampton, and Max Bond, and last year we were fortunate enough to have that lecture series kicked off by Bill Gates.
Dr. Legand Burge: At Tuskegee, we’ve started an engineering ethics course dealing with leadership principles, codes of ethics of engineering, contemporary issues, and how to work in teams and groups. We brought in CEOs from corporations such as Raytheon. Recently, we’ve had Hewlett-Packard’s vice president and A.G. Lafley from Procter & Gamble, to provide some specific nurturing. One of the things that Bill Swanson did, from Raytheon, he actually gave us a book of his 25 principles specifically written to the students---his “Unwritten Rules.” …
Dr. Robert Whalin: Our flagship program in Jackson State University is a relatively new executive leadership Ph.D. program. We also have our engineering ethics class, and I ask all of our professors in engineering to say something about leadership: awareness in the world, awareness in the U.S., what you read, what you need to think about, being a global person, and having a global perspective on things. …
Dr. Joseph Monroe: At North Carolina A&T State University at the College of Engineering, we have a student development center, and we staff it with our corporate partners who come to the campus and speak to the students in a colloquium format. These are leaders from the corporate world who help support our university. And there’s an opportunity for any of the corporations here to join our colloquium series and come and make a presentation there to our students.
Brown: Dean DeLoatch, I’m going to throw a curve ball at you, here for a minute, if you would. How do you prepare a person with a science and technology background to [acquire a] level of people skills, understanding of culture, language, and differences? How do you prepare them for that?
Dr. Eugene DeLoatch: I think it’s a challenge for those of us in leadership roles in schools of engineering today. There’s a paradigm shift that has to be made in what has traditionally been engineering education, and to a large extent, still is. … I’m not sure that we are, as an engineering school, meeting this challenge of developing future executive leadership. There is a shift, there is a major shift going on, and we have got to have a role to play in that in the engineering schools.
Brown: I think you did a good job framing that out, Dean, and I thank you for your acknowledgement that engineering goes beyond, if you would, the technical tools.
Burge: One of the concerns I have is the whole idea of globalization and making sure students understand the difference between that and internationalism. We must ensure that folks can deal with people of another persuasion and who have a whole different culture. As Dean DeLoatch says, we’re falling short in putting that out as a leadership area, and I think that’s an opportunity for us to get assistance from folks like you to come to campus and share how we might do an entrepreneurship program.
Dr. Decatur Rogers: One of my concerns is that technology is moving so fast, I begin to wonder if we really do have time to prepare engineers to be a little bit of everything else under the sun. We need to be preparing engineers to be engineers. When I started in engineering, back in the 1950s, you studied general courses for two years and then you studied your specialty for two years. Many people are even arguing now that a four-year degree in engineering is no longer good enough. We need to have students in them for at least five years to get to what we call “the professional level.” Then, at that point, through natural selection, some people---if they have the personality, the bent to become a leader on the outside---they can channel themselves off and become the entrepreneurs, become the management.
Audience member: My name is Karl Johnson. I’m with Freescale. I’m a senior technical fellow and vice president in research. I contend that a lot of the techniques, a lot of the principles that you teach in engineering, are exactly those same skills that you need in executive leadership. In particular, in engineering, you have to know what the market wants. You have to understand what drives the customer. You have to understand that in some cases, you can build a better mousetrap, but if it doesn’t satisfy the expectations and the needs of the customer, then it’s not going to be something that’s going to be sold. Leadership is the same thing. You have to understand the expectations of the people that you wish to lead or want to follow you. Now what we need to do is figure out how to exercise those skills in programs so that they can become proficient in them.
Audience member: My name is Ace Vangelou. I'm with Morgan State University’s School of Engineering, and I would ask the panel, are you distinguishing between leadership and executive leadership? Also, is there an element of courage and spirit and fortitude, and can that be developed or nurtured, and how do you address that? …
Dr. Eric Sheppard: I was waiting for a question like that. … We have to create a foundation at our schools so our students who want to become executive leaders can do so. So I think that the attitude, the courage, the confidence is something that we have to give all our students if they’re ever going to be successful engineers, much less leaders.
Burge: I think it’s very important that the principles that Booker T. Washington espoused---related to head, heart, and mind---drives this. A student that graduates from our institutions can hold his head up high. We all have done the criteria related to the accreditation, and so we have all of the skill sets. …
Audience member: The first part of my question is this: Leadership is derived basically from your position; whether you got pulled up to [your position], whether you climbed up the ladder, it doesn’t matter. You’re there. You guys are leaders. How do you make yourself available to those underneath you, your professional staff, and your students? How do you make yourself available so that you can take the opportunity to either pull them up or lead by example … ?
Dr. Arthur Bond: … If you take note of the actual figures, there’s about six hundred, seven hundred Black Americans in the history of this country who’ve been awarded Ph.D.s in engineering. So when you look up here and see those of us who have Ph.D.s in engineering, you’re seeing a large percent of Black Americans with Ph.D.s. Now, engineering programs have evolved to the point where they want Ph.D.s to lead them, but when you get Black people with Ph.D.s, the money waved at them by corporate America is so great, they’re not going to come back to the universities to teach. It’s not always necessarily true, but I think it is true in large part.
Audience member: I’m Daphne Mobley, vice president of Corporate Diversity for Wyeth. I took another opportunity, decided to go into business, help the company and go move us further along. But as I sat here thinking, I was wondering if there was a way that companies---besides providing financial sponsorship or mentors---if there’s some other opportunity that we could provide to assist in the development, or is there some unmet need to maximize development of engineering students as they come up.
Joe McAvoy: … Aerotek has recently joined with AMIE, Advancing Minorities’ Interest in Engineering. In that place, we are able to work collectively on the issues, some of which were running through this group here today. I think for us to claim that we are going to take on the strong challenge of educating and developing future executive leaders in the roles that we play as deans of engineering at these particular institutions, without the rest of the world, if you would, we’re not going to succeed. So this is a tough topic, but we have to have awareness. Situational awareness is very important in this situation.
Dr. Milton R. Bryant: Some of us have programs where we have done some work over in Uganda or Ghana. I want to see the day when some of their students can come to our campuses and get experiences, but [I'd also like to] send our students over there for an experience during the summer. Why do I say that? Because then our kids will have a better experience outside Houston, Texas and Third Ward, or Chicago, or Detroit. They need to have a different type of experience. And with companies with presence, as we all know, in Africa, it will certainly behoove our students to have it on their résumé that they’ve had an experience over in Africa, so to speak.
Rogers: … I really would like to see the folks here all join AMIE and become our political arm. If the corporations, the top 200, were to go to Congress and do what’s being done for other entities, then you can really help our institutions. About two weeks ago, you saw the list of the top institutions in the country with endowments. If you match that list up with the top federal-receiving research institutions, they almost match one to one. And they had a number of things in common. One was they had huge endowments. The other was that they had political clout. … When you look at those top ten schools, with the largest research, you’ll see that they have political clout on all the major appropriation committees.
We don’t have that; and we would hope that AMIE would step up and become that political arm that---as a corporate entity or corporate body of a number of major Fortune 200 companies---would go and be our political advocates. And that would not only help the College of Engineering, Technology and Computer Science at Tennessee State, but it would also help our education program at Tennessee State University, because that’s the most important program at TSU … So I would ask that you would join AMIE right away, get everyone in here to join AMIE, and then go to the first AMIE meeting and say "Listen, how do we get our companies to be political advocates for these institutions?" And then go to your foundation and say, "We want to give Tennessee State $100 million."
Dr. Habib Mohamadian: One of the greatest challenges we have is recruitment … but the greatest challenge that we’re facing is retention of those students … although they come to engineering programs, since they don’t really have the basic [foundations of] math and science, we see that they leave after the first or second year of college. So the involvement of industry, universities, and high school is very important to make sure the pipeline is flowing.
Sheppard: I have two examples … At Hampton … We had a woman who had a company that hired folks who needed security clearances. She came and was very frank with the students. You have to change your lifestyle. You can’t assume that things that you do when you’re a freshman are going to be swept under the seat and you’re going to become a leader in that kind of company. The second one was to have someone representing the Society of Professional Engineers come to talk to students about ethics and talk about how sometimes, you can lose a job because of your ethics. ... So I think the companies really need to be role models … we really need you to be honest with us and frank with our students to let them know what’s ahead of them and tell them how to be successful in their careers---on the technical side as well as the non-technical side.
Audience member: My name is J.R. Taylor. I was a non-traditional student, and what you all addressed a few minutes ago was non-traditional students moving into the engineering discipline. In Michigan, we do something that’s called "forecasting for emerging sectors." We’ve identified ten emerging sectors that you need to look at and I think that’s my basic question here today. The traditional skills as far as engineering is concerned are well and good. What are you forecasting for the future relative to emerging sectors?
DeLoatch: I think the other thing that’s going to happen, as it relates to engineering education, is that we’re going to go from the traditional sciences of physics and chemistry being the foundation that our students build from, to these other sciences---nanosciences, biotechnologies, and things like that. So I think that what we’re seeing is a more complex world, one that brings in multiple components from various disciplines, and that’s where the problems are for the future.
Brown: I would just like to make a comment on this … if you look at the Japanese economy, most of the corporations are headed by engineers, and so I try not to think of where they will go. I try to think of what skills they bring to the marketplace, and how engineers bring disciplined thought processes to the marketplace. I think anywhere that that is required, an engineer can move into that area. Now, I want to thank Aerotek and Wyeth, once again. We certainly appreciate you hosting this. I think it’s been a tremendously lively and very, very beneficial discussion. I want to thank the deans. I’m just in awe of these individuals and the tremendous job that they’re doing not only for our communities, but also for the global world itself. I think we heard a lot of things here, today. We heard traditional approaches. We heard someone talk about the courage that it takes to do certain things. We talked about making young people aware of the different paths that engineers can go. We talked about partnerships. We talked about how industry and the schools can work together. While this was not designed to come to any definitive answers, this seminar was designed to enhance the awareness and in true engineering fashion, we go out and we explore, and we look at the possibilities, and we grab hold and make use of those which fit the situation. Thank you very much.
HBCU Engineering Deans
Dr. Robert Whalin, associate dean of engineering at Jackson State University
Dr. Eric Sheppard, dean of the School of Engineering at Hampton University
Dr. Decatur Rogers, dean of the College of Engineering, Technology and Computer Science at Tennessee State University
Dr. Joseph Monroe, dean of the College of Engineering at North Carolina A&T University
Dr. Habib Mohamadian, interim dean in the College of Engineering at Southern University
Dr. Arthur Bond, dean of the School of Engineering at Alabama A&M University
Dr. Legand Burge Jr., Dean of the College of Engineering, Architecture and Physical Sciences at Tuskegee University
Dr. Milton R. Bryant, dean of the College of Engineering and Architecture at Prairie View A&M University.
Dr. Ching-Jen Chen, dean of the School of Engineering at Florida A&M University
Dr. Eugene DeLoatch, dean of the School of Engineering at Morgan State University
Dr. James Johnson Jr., Dean of the School of Engineering, Architecture and Computer Science at Howard University
