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.”
