Since 1980, Dr. Linda Hayden has been able to bring innovation to Elizabeth City State University by seeking out and partnering with entities like the U.S. Navy and NASA. For years, these partnerships allowed faculty, students and administrators in the computer science department and other departments to gain early exposure to cutting-edge hardware and software tools. With NASA funding, ECSU also served as the lead historically Black campus in assisting several HBCUs in North Carolina and Virginia in establishing campus networks during the 1990s. 

As a result, the accumulated experience among ECSU faculty members and staff as well as the integration of cutting-edge tools into the campus IT infrastructure paved the way for the establishment of the Center for Remote Sensing for Education and Research (CERSER), an interdisciplinary research center. Since 2003, CERSER has attracted nearly $10 million in grant support, much of which has gone into establishing high-performance computing resources and advanced information technology laboratories. One outgrowth of CERSER has been its participation in a multi-university research team that conducts remote sensing of ice sheets close to the North and South Poles.

“We’ve sent one student to Antarctica on a research trip, and this summer another student and a faculty member are going to Greenland to conduct (global climate change) research,” says Hayden, who is the CERSER director.

In the 1990s, it was common to read and hear about HBCUs described as Digital Divide have-nots in a society that was experiencing rapid leaps in computing and the use of the Internet. HBCUs, which have had a long history of struggling to gain adequate funding, did see wealthier, majority White institutions moving quickly ahead in the push for sophisticated campus networks, Web-based distance education programs and use of the Internet as a research and education tool.

A decade later, it’s not as common to hear the Digital Divide term applied to HBCUs because of IT struggles. A number of schools are enjoying rich, robust IT infrastructures and can support cutting-edge research and teaching, in part from having advanced IT tools. And for small to mid-size historically Black institutions like Elizabeth City State University, it’s become clear that long-range planning, the cultivation of strategic partners, and careful IT investment have proven to be winning strategies. Observers say there’s been considerable IT progress among HBCUs since the 1990s, but point out that some campuses still struggle to keep up.