BLACK ENGINEER OF THE YEAR AWARD WINNERS
Catto returned to the Institute for Colored Youth, rising to become professor and principal of the male department at the co- ed institution. Fannie Mae Coppin, later to become the founder of Coppin State College in Baltimore, was the overall school head. In Philadelphia, Catto became an athlete as well as a fiery abolitionist speaker and writer, and challenged white profession- al baseball teams to integrated matches. Catto joined Frederick Douglass and the Union League in recruiting 11 regiments of Black soldiers to fight the Civil War, and himself put on a Union major’s uniform to support troop training activities. But like Dr. Hrabowski, Catto’s passion was education― education for the youth, and education for a new generation of black teachers to end the enforced ignorance of the people so recently freed from enslavement. Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equal-
ity in Civil War America by Daniel Biddle and Murray Dubin makes the point that under Catto’s leadership, the Institute for Colored Youth trained more teachers who went south after the Civil War than any other American institution.
Training teachers to lead others
Here we find still another
parallel: Dr. Hrabowski, who first rose to prominence as an educator and as the treasurer who brought stability and sol- vency to Coppin State during a time of financial crisis, has in a 20-year career at UMBC produced more Black science
selective institution. The Meyerhoff program supports students all the way through to graduation from Ph.D. and M.D. studies, and Dr. Hrabowski is such an aggressive salesman and lobbyist for his students that he proudly says UMBC places more Black students at Harvard Medical School than any other institution.
Strong in IT Of particular interest to a magazine such as USBE&IT, Dr.
Dr. Hrabowski, who first rose to prominence as an educator and as the treasurer who brought stability and solvency to Coppin State, has in a 20-year career at UMBC produced more Black science Ph.D.s than any other institution with a white-majority student body.
Ph.D.s than any other institution with a white-majority student body. According to a recent article in Diversity Issues in Higher Education, half of UMBC’s students are white, 20 percent are Black or Hispanic, and 20 percent are Asian. “Among the university’s African-American student population,” the magazine reported, “half are male, a statistic that is unprecedented at most institutions, per- haps with the exception of Morehouse College, an all-male HBCU in Atlanta.”
Diversity Issues also said that, “UMBC is one of the few predominantly white institutions in the nation that can say that the graduation rates of African Americans are always as high as any other group and sometimes even higher.”
High STEM graduation rates In technology, the magazine noted that 45 percent of
UMBC’s students earn degrees in STEM, and that 50 percent of those graduates are African American. And it is well-known that under Dr. Hrabowski, UMBC leads all of the country’s tradition- ally white universities in sending Black students to top-tier insti- tutions to complete Ph.D.s in science. The Meyerehoff Scholars program, begun in 1988 with a grant from philanthropist Robert Meyerhoff, has not only dramatically shifted the perception and expectations of African-American students on UMBC’s cam- pus, but Dr. Hrabowski’s continual drive to recruit the “best and brightest” students to his campus and promote excellence in sci- ence learning has transformed the standing of UMBC as a highly
18 USBE&IT I WINTER 2013
Hrabowski’s UMBC produces more than 30 percent of Mary- land’s IT graduates, and he is proud to say that about 20 percent of those IT grads are African American. Interestingly, while he admits UMBC is not the institution for students who are less well-prepared than those “best and brightest” stars, Dr. Hrabowski has pushed programs to educate a new corps of K-12 school- teachers, equipped to promote a stronger grasp of challenging subjects like science and math, so that more minority youth will be able to pursue STEM careers in the future. In that, he again parallels the crusader Catto, faced with the need to prepare an entire generation of freed men and women for productive lives in a post- Emancipation society.
Recognition comes fast and furious
Such achievements have earned UMBC the No. 1 spot as U.S. News & World Report’s top up-and-coming school in the United States.
It thus is no accident that Dr. Hrabowski’s name appears on a major National Academies of Science and Engineering study, “Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads,” leading a committee effort that included John Brooks Slaughter, the first African American to head the National Science Foundation and, not so coincidentally, the first Black Engineer of the Year. Dr. Hrabowski is the recipient of many awards, includ- ing being named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World;” receiving the Theodore Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence in 2011 from TIAA-CREF; the Carn- egie Corporation of New York’s Academic Leadership Award in 2011; being named one of Time’s “Top 10 College Presidents” in 2009, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; winning the Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education; being named “Marylander of the Year” by the Baltimore Sun; winning a U.S. Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring; and a host of other awards and honors that continues for pages. Octavius Catto, the activist and educator who tragically died at the hands of a bigot outraged at his push for Black progress at the end of the Reconstruction years, can look proudly down the decades at the way his legacy is being upheld today, 150 years after Emancipation.
—by Garland L Thompson,
gthompson@ccgmag.com www.blackengineer.com
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