kind of environment became a backdrop for BEYA, the pi- oneer for blacks in technology and engineering, to enhance its goal of motivating corporations to support activities that promote inclusion in all phases. BEYA is viewed by many, whites as well as blacks, as a catalyst to take corporate engineering and technology to another level to help build a more competitive technology-based industrial sector.”


AMIE Enters The Equation Advancing Minorities’ Interest in Engineering (AMIE), the corporate-academic partnership, grew directly out of the industrial corporations’ steady involvement in BEYA programs. One look back shows how it happened. Today’s HBCU Engineering Deans’ Power Breakfast is a major conference event with 1,000 people in at- tendance, but it was not always so. Not only were fewer schools represented on the Council of HBCU Engineering Deans–FAMU, Howard, Morgan State, North Carolina A&T State, Prairie View, Southern, Tennessee State and Tuskegee universities have, since those early days, been joined by Hampton, Alabama A&M, Jackson State, Nor- folk State, and Virginia State universities, with the Univer- sity of the District of Columbia the most recent addition. But in the beginning, only a handful of forward-thinking corporate executives attended. That Deans’ Breakfast and the HBCU Engineering


Deans’ Roundtable discussions exposed corporate officers to the resource the HBCUs represent, and the corporate officers began meeting with the deans to discuss ways to regularize their connections. AMIE, the corporate-academ- ic partnership, was founded as a direct result, bringing fre- quent appearances by senior corporate officers on HBCU campuses, according to Tuskegee’s Dean Burge. “When corporations realized we could help them reach their goals of developing diversity for business experi- ence,” Dr. Burge said, “the benefits began to flow. Scholar- ships, internships, donations of lab equipment, loans of top professionals for faculty positions, all of that came out of that connection.” Thus, when Abbott Laboratories’ Dr. Lance Wyatt invited the interested executives and HBCU deans to his Illinois headquarters for a planning session to explore ways to formalize their relationship with the Council of Deans, he found many eager joiners. The nonprofit AMIE, which meets four times a year to marshal increased sup- port for HBCU technical programs, was the result of that portentous meeting. Through AMIE, the HBCU technical programs are finally beginning to receive the kinds of cor- porate support “mainstream” institutions take for granted. “BEYA became the catalyst,” Dr. Burge said. “It pro- vides a whole big correlation for everybody that comes.” And after 25 years of steady evolution and new demands on the technology workforce because of Baby Boom retire- ments, national infrastructure needs, the rapid advance of new technologies, and the burgeoning competition of China and other countries in the post-Cold War, multi-polar world economy, that correlation is more necessary now than it ever was before. 


80 USBE&IT I WINTER 2011


“BEYA is viewed by many, whites as well as blacks, as a catalyst to take corporate engineering and technol- ogy to another level to help build a more competitive technology-based industrial sector.”


— Bill Granville


www.blackengineer.com


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