Earlier in his career, Dr. Luther S. Williams spent nearly ten years as the only faculty member of color out of seventy in his department at Purdue University. The African American microbiologist is now assistant director of education and human resources at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

As an assistant director at NSF, he has set his sights on the ambitious goal of helping colleges and universities expand the pool of under-represented science and engineering undergraduates from its current level of 24,000 to 50,000 students by the year 2001. In doing so, he also intends to expand their ranks among graduate students.

There is little doubt that Williams's experiences in the academy and in industry are what have made him so adamant about the need for systemic transformation among science and engineering disciplines within higher education.

"You cannot sit in a research institution in isolation and succeed," he says. "You may be successful one time...but if you really want to succeed, you need to create a national network .... Too many people act like, `if the solution will present itself without effort, I'm not opposed to it.'

"But anyone who takes time to understand science and engineering knows that it is a downstream event. How can you imagine an enterprise that is so excruciatingly competitive and so hierarchical is going to accommodate itself to a sort of laissez faire approach to successful participation by people who, heretofore, really were not a part of it?

"You've got to be pragmatic. You've got to have a highly specific strategy, and it has to be sufficiently incentivized so that it is not seen as a destructive transaction.... A variety of schools have done this and have done this well -- and they have been able to sustain it.

"To use an overworked colloquial expression, it is not rocket science."

Succeeding at Stanford

When Dr. Noe Lozano took charge of Stanford University's effort to increase the number of under-represented minority graduate students being produced by its engineering school, he knew the challenge was great. He also felt up to tackling it.