>>Freeman Hrabowski: So I was in an algebraic
topology class in grad school at the University
of Illinois.
And the professor who was from Poland got
to the name Hrabowski.
And said Hrabowski and I raised my hand.
I said, this is America.
Yes, yes, yes.
So I am Hrabowski.
This is no mistake.
And I'm president of the University of Maryland
Baltimore County.
Today's "New York Times" has a wonderful op-ed
piece entitled "How I Fell in Love With Math."
And I saw it and I got goose bumps because
I have always loved math.
It turns out that that piece was written by
one of my UMBC professors in math who is a
little younger than I am, but we both grew
up in big cities.
He grew up in Mumbai.
I grew up in Birmingham.
And somehow we ended up liking math.
Every person in here is a product of his or
her childhood experiences.
And so I often talk about my experiences in
Birmingham as I explain why I do what I do.
I remember sitting in the back of a church
when I was 12.
I didn't want to be there.
Right in the middle of the week.
My parents insisted that I listen to this
man talk.
And I'm to -- to placate me, my parents allowed
me to have my math book.
If I could do math, I would be happy.
And I was a fat little kid.
I knew what it meant to be a fat little kid
and a fat little math nerd loving math.
I had M&Ms in one hand and math in the other.
Eating my M&Ms with the nuts.
All of a sudden I heard this man say, "If
the children become involved in this peaceful
protest, all of America will understand that
children want a good education."
And I looked up and he said, "And it may end
up being that our children can go to the better
schools," meaning to the white schools.
I always hated the fact that we knew we were
in schools that were not as good, that did
not have the resources.
I hated the idea of having to use textbooks
that had been discarded by white children
from their schools.
And I always wondered why the world was like
that.
So I said, Who was that guy?
And, of course, it was Dr. King.
I was so excited that I went home to my parents
and said to my parents, I want to go.
I want to participate.
And they said, Absolutely not.
And I said, You must be hypocrites.
Now, at that time you did not say those kinds
of things to your parents.
They told me to go to my room, and they thought
over it all night and came back and finally
allowed me to go.
And I did spend a terrible week in jail because
of this peaceful protest.
Well, the message was this, toward the end
of the week, Dr. King came to the outside
of the jail with our parents.
And he said this to the children, "What you
do this day will have an impact on children
who have not been born."
And there were a lot of tears and kids wanted
to get out of jail.
I did not fully understand the significance
of the statement, but I knew it was profound.
Now, fast forward.
That was all in 1963.
I was determined to major in math in college.
I did.
I went through school, always loving math.
But I always noticed that most kids did not
like math.
And I was always trying to figure out what
could we do to help more children like math.
I went to grad school.
Never saw anybody -- rarely ever saw any grad
student who looked like me.
Of course, saw no professors who were black.
And I was always thinking: What could we do
to have more people from different backgrounds
making it in math and science?
In fact, there was only one woman on the faculty
at that time out of about 100 faculty members.
So there were no women, and there was just
literally -- I was there.
And every now and then I would see someone.
So I decided literally beginning in the late
'60s and 1970 that I wanted to focus my attention,
my life, on increasing the number of people
of color and, therefore, people in general
who would succeed in math and science.
Let me ask a question.
How many of you in this room love to read?
Let me see your hands if you love to read.
It is a typical American value.
Now, how many of you love mathematics?
This is a pretty nerdy group.
I'm very impressed.
I'm very impressed.
By the way, I'm called the mega nerd on my
campus.
Mine is a campus of nerds.
We got a lot.
Half of the students are in math and science,
and others are in the arts and humanities.
But we talk a lot about what it takes to make
it in math and science.
My dream has been to create a cadre of brilliant
young people of all races who are not only
excited about science and technology but who
can go to the best universities in the world
and become leaders in science and tech, from
Stanford to Harvard to M.I.T. and to make
sure that we have women and people of color
in those groups.
And the challenge I faced was that many people
said to me, "it's not time for people of color
to do that well," that it will take more generations
for that to occur.
And so the daring part of my message has to
do with, first of all, this notion all the
way back to when I was a child, when somebody
could dare to say "The world does not have
to be the world -- the way the world was."
It does not have to be the case that people
of each race will have to be separate and
that we will have people of color at the bottom,
that the world can be much better than that,
that America is better than that.
And so for the first time as a child in that
experience in the civil rights movement, I
began to understand just how great America
is, that it was possible for people to question
what was going on and to say we would like
to see opportunities for everyone.
And that experience as a child motivated me,
inspired me, to do what we do today on my
campus.
UMBC was founded in 1963, the same year that
I went to jail.
And it was a different kind of place in that
it was the first university in my state that
could allow people of all races to come there.
Before that, every university was either for
blacks or whites at that time.
Today, we have students from 150 countries.
Now, what has made the difference?
The big question people always ask is: How
is it that you have been able to figure out
what we can do?
And how do you know you have succeeded?
Well, we have become the leading predominantly
white university in the country in producing
African-Americans who get science and engineering
Ph.D.s.
Give my colleagues a hand for that, would
you please?
It is a big deal.
It is a big deal.
[ Applause ]
>>Freeman Hrabowski: And the big question,
the real question is: What does it take to
help students of any race succeed and from
all kinds of economic backgrounds?
And there are several major points.
Number one, the notion of high expectations.
What does it mean to be prepared for college
in math and science and engineering?
You may not know this.
And you heard, I know, a speaker today talk
about what's happening in America.
I have the privilege of chairing the National
Academy's Committee on Underrepresentation
in Science.
It turns out that only 6% of America's 24-year-olds
of all races, only 6%, have degrees in STEM.
Now, for people of color, particularly blacks
and Hispanics, Native Americans, it is only
about 2%.
And the key here is that what happens is not
that people aren't interested in math and
science, large numbers come to college with
an interest in engineering or in medicine.
The fact is the majority of students who begin
with majors in those disciplines do not make
it, do not graduate with bachelor's in those
areas.
For example -- I mean, it doesn't surprise
people that only 20% of blacks and Hispanics
who start with a major in science and engineering
will graduate.
It shocks people, though, that only 32% of
whites who begin with a major in science and
engineering will make it and only 41% of Asian-Americans.
You put it all together, 2/3 of all college
students who start off saying I want to be
an engineer, I want to major in computer science,
I want to major in chemistry, 2/3 will leave
it.
And the number one reason is they did not
do well in the first-year courses.
And the fact is when people say, it is a K-12
problem.
No, we know we have to continue to improve
K-12.
But the fact is large numbers of students
with 5 on AP exams with perfect math scores
that go to the most prestigious places within
the first year change their majors because
they did not do well in the coursework.
What we work to do in understanding the challenges
of minorities has actually helped us with
all students.
And it is this: When you talk about high expectations,
the question is: What's the background a student
needs?
What kind of math background does a student
need?
How are you going to go about making sure
that you got faculty ready to work with that
student?
And most important, how will you measure success
as you look at what happens with students?
So high expectations.
The notion of building community among the
students.
If you majored in science and engineering
in this country in the last 25 years, you
know that much of the work is based on a competitive
basis, that often we're talking about curving
the grades and that rarely have people been
taught to work in groups.
In fact, usually we call it cut-throat.
And everybody knows that you have to be very
careful because, quite frankly, if somebody
else gets a higher grade, it means you may
get a lower grade.
So the mind-set, the culture in science teaching
and learning has to do with a cut-throat approach
too often.
And, secondly, the assumption is most people
won't make it.
I can prove it to you very easily.
If you look at the number of seats in the
second-year's work in engineering or in science,
you will see it is about 1/3 the number of
seats as in the first-year's work because
the assumption is most won't make it.
And as a result, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So the question is: How do you build a community
of students and faculty with this notion that
we can do it, that if you don't do well on
the test, it doesn't mean it is over, that
you want to build competencies, that you want
to use the technology to make a difference?
What we ended up doing is building these communities
of scholars but also what we did that was
different was to redesign courses.
We've redesigned all of the STEM courses.
And "U.S. News" calls us the most academically
innovative place around.
We flipped the work.
We've gotten away from the lecture method
as the main method.
We are using group work.
We are using problems out of the company's
own campus.
We got about 90 biotech, I.T. companies, cyber
security companies on campus.
And most important we have looked at how we
use analytics to understand what's working
and what's not working and it continue to
revise what we do.
And the idea is if students fail, we fail.
We always say, Look at the student to your
left.
Look at the student to your right.
When a lot of us were in college the dean
said, "One of you will not make it."
That's a terrible thing to say to kids.
We ought to be saying, "Look at the student
to your left.
Look to the student to your right.
Our goal is to make sure all three of you
graduate and if you don't, we fail and we
don't plan for you to fail."
Give us a hand for that philosophy, please.
It is a big deal.
It is expecting the students to make it.
[ Applause ]
>>Freeman Hrabowski: And the third most important
point is to get the researchers and the experts
connected to the students and get them into
the labs and into the companies.
And so for us we've got large numbers of students
working on questions of intelligence and cyber
security, others working in biotech labs,
because if they can do well in the coursework
and they have a chance to be mentored by people
and to get involved in the actual work and
see how the engineering, the computer science,
the biotech work connects to real life, then
they get excited and passionate about the
work.
And to the extent that the experts say to
the people, "You can do this," it is amazing
how much can be done.
What we need in this country will be large
numbers of experts who are saying, it's not
right that there are so few women in science
or technology.
Not right that half of -- literally half the
population, when you think about minorities
and women, are not there and that we will
get them involved in our companies and our
labs, build their background K-12 and then
make sure they make it.
And then the final piece that's made the difference
for us has been evaluation, to see what works
and what does not work.
You know, it is so amazing to me that often
in universities we make decisions based on
anecdotal information as opposed to using
analytics, as opposed to seeing what's going
well, what's not, as opposed to understanding
concepts that are difficult to grasp, thinking
of other ways of doing it, and then reshaping
the work.
If you come to my campus, whether it is in
the chemistry discovery center or you are
looking at digital humanities, you are going
to see that we have gotten away from the lecture
method because, quite frankly, large numbers
of students in K-12 and in universities are
bored just sitting there all day long.
They need ways of having hands-on experiences.
They need to feel empowered by the work in
the same way that I as a child was empowered
to get involved in a movement to change this
country.
What I want you to remember is this, if we
want our children to be leaders one day, we
have to give them that sense of self.
We have to teach them the importance of curiosity.
You know, amazingly, I.I.
Rabi, a Nobel laureate, said that when he
was growing up all of his friend's mothers
would ask them at the end of the day, What
did you learn in school today?
He said, "Not my Jewish mother.
My mother would say, Izzy, did you ask a good
question today?"
And that's what we have to do.
We have to encourage kids to ask the good
questions and to believe that they can dare
to be the best and to change whatever is going
on.
You know, 50 years ago as a 12-year-old sitting
in that jail, frightened and absolutely not
knowing what the future held, I could never
have imagined that one day I would be president
of a university with students from 150 countries,
that one day I would have a chance to say
to all of my students "You can be excellent
in math or you can be excellent in literature,
but you can be the best that there is."
And that's what makes for passion.
What we need in education, what we need in
STEM is the belief in self.
It's in the empowering of our children.
And it is believing that we should never,
never, never give up.
I leave you with the words I use with my students
all the time.
Watch your thoughts, they become your words.
Watch your words, they become your actions.
Watch your actions, they become your habits.
Watch your habits, they become your character.
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny,
dreams, and values.
Thank you all very much.
[ Applause ]
