TRANSCRIPT
Sheila Jaswal:
Thank you for being here. I'm Sheila Jaswal, Professor of Chemistry and Interim Chief Equity Inclusion Officer at the College. Amherst is tremendously honored to welcome Freeman Hrabowski III to campus this weekend to receive an honorary degree. And it is a special honor for me to introduce him today. I know he likes brief introductions, so I'm going to try to do my best. So Dr. Hrabowski is an educator, advocate and mathematician and a longtime friend and inspiration to us at Amherst. Over nearly three decades as president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, also known as UMBC, a post he took up in May, 1992, which is when I was in your shoes, seniors. Dr. Hrabowski worked with tremendous insight, ingenuity, and focus to conceive and implement programming that would transform UMBC into an institution nationally recognized for research, innovation and excellence in STEM achievement, particularly among Black students.
Under his leadership, UMBC was ranked the number one up and coming university in the US for six consecutive years and was recognized as a national leader in academic innovation and undergraduate teaching by US News and World Report. Today, UMBC is recognized for graduating more Black students who go on to earn PhDs in the natural sciences and engineering than any other US college or university. Dr. Hrabowski's highly influential vision regarding inclusive excellence in undergraduate teaching have been transformational for STEM programs worldwide. His TED Talk on the four pillars of college success has been viewed millions of times. In his most recent book, The Empowered University, which I forgot to bring, I have a signed copy, but it's at home, The Empowered University, he generously shares the powerful wisdom he has developed regarding the pivotal role that institutional culture plays in supporting academic success.
Suffice it to say if there's an award or recognition, Dr. Hrabowski has won it. Here is just a sampling. He's been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine and also Marylander of the World, is that how you pronounce it? Maryland, Marylander. He has been a recipient of the US Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York's Academic Leadership Award, among the highest honors given to an educator. In 2022 alone, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and named the inaugural ACE Centennial Fellow and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute launched the Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program to help build a scientific workforce that more fully reflects our increasingly diverse country. In April, just this past April, the National Academy of Sciences awarded him the Public Welfare Medal and inducted him as a member of the Academy for his extraordinary use of science for the public good.
I'll end with a personal note that I first met Dr. Hrabowski when he was Amherst's Martin Luther King, Jr. speaker. His itinerary included lunch with my Being Human in STEM class, conversations on the connections between STEM and the humanities, STEM curricular initiatives and our HHMI Inclusive Excellence Grant application and of course his keynote on The Empowered University. It was a memorable, inspiring, and engaging day and I witnessed firsthand his visionary leadership in the arena of public health that day as the first person of my acquaintance to offer an elbow bump instead of a handshake. That was March 5th, 2020. He was the last visitor to campus before we shut down for the pandemic. So three years later in time, but a lifetime later in our collective human experience, please join me in welcoming the one and only Freeman Hrabowski III for his talk.
Freeman Hrabowski III:
Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good morning. I am delighted to be here. I want to recognize just a couple of people. First of all, one alumna of Amherst and one professor at Amherst. The alumni is Gabrielle Foreman. Are you still here? Gabriel is. She is one of the honorees and I am so honored. Her work inspires me. It inspires me for sure. And then one of my colleagues, Professor Bradley, who is a historian of education, Professor Bradley and his daughter and his daughter, yes.
And then I am so inspired today because who would ever think that when one of my mother's first cousins was journeying from rural Alabama to Chicago for a better way for her children, that one day both of her grandsons would one day graduate from Amherst. And so Cyrus, who is the outgoing president of the student government is my little cousin. Brilliant Cyrus, stand up, let them see you, Cyrus. Stand up. And his mother. And his mother. Yeah. And I had a chance to talk to Cyrus and Sarah and I saw Sam come in and Alexa and Diego the other day about their experiences here at Amherst and it's such an honor to be here.
When I came before, as you said, it was amazing. First of all, I don't know anybody who's more committed to issues of under-representation in science than you are. Give her a round of applause. Years ago, literally 60 years ago this month, I was sitting in jail. As a child, I had had the privilege of listening to Dr. King speak and he had suggested that the children of Birmingham should march peacefully to say we wanted a better education. And I asked my parents. They were not thrilled, but they allowed me to go. And we spent a week, a horrific week in jail being treated like animals, like slaves.
But the experience empowered us to first understand that we could not allow others to treat us as a victim, that we had to define who we were. And secondly, to believe that the world could be better. And that was Dr. King's message that tomorrow can be better than today, but it will take us to make it happen. And that is my theme here, that the way we think about ourselves as individuals, as graduates, as families, as a society, as a college, the language that we use, the way we interact with each other will be so powerful. We become like whatever it is we truly love.
In the same year, President Kennedy was on this campus a month before he was killed and he was celebrating the arts and in particular he was talking about Robert Frost and the establishment of the library that year. But more important than that, he said something that's really, powerful that this college had been and had the opportunity to have an impact on this planet. And it does it through its graduates, through its professors, through others. It's a powerful statement.
Now I want you to think about this, graduates and families, that was 60 years ago. I was 12. Within about six years, I'd gone through school early and I was graduating from my beloved Hampton and I'm sitting in the college graduation and I had just asked my girlfriend to marry me. And all of a sudden I'm realizing, oh my God, I'm barely 19. What kind of husband could I make at this point? She's mature, but I'm not, I know I'm not. 50 plus years later, we're still together. So give my wife a round of applause. And if there's one message I always give graduating classes and their parents, and their parents, it is that every young person wonders, will I be okay? Cyrus, when we are talking, Sam, about what you're going to do in science excellence and all of that, will I be okay? I don't care where they're going to school or whether they decide will I be okay, and the message is, you will be okay. You've made it to this point and you'll make it to the next point.
And the other message is, I want anybody who's a high school, who is literally graduating today to think about when you first went to the first grade. And parents, I want you to think about when your child first went to the first grade, pre-K or whatever, and that feeling that somehow you're giving them over to somebody else. And there's that anxiety that we all feel, whether it's the child or the student or the parents. Well, when people graduate from college, whether they're going to work in Boston at a place on Mackenzie, whatever, parents are wondering, okay, will they be okay? They will be okay. You've done the things you need to do to make a difference. And so this is what I want you to really think about. 60 years from now or 55 years from now, students, who will you be and what will be your story?
I have thought so much as I've left UMBC, a campus that has students from 100 countries, known in science and engineering, but very proud Professor Foreman of our strength in humanities. And we often use the language from Jim Collins, the genius of the and versus the tyranny of the or, that it doesn't have to be humanities or science, that it must be the combination in different ways that we solve problems through looking at these different areas. And for me, my love of mathematics, even when I was listening to Dr. King and solving my little algebra problems, always involved thinking not only about the beauty of math and its relationship to nature, but also about how to solve problems.
Because when I listened to him talk, when I listened to my parents talk, it was all about this notion that how do we help the country become the civilization we aspire to become? How do we become a society that is fair to every child, to every person. And most important, how do we help people develop the sensitivity to know that these widening gaps in income or the suppression of rights of people are concerns that we should all have? And that that's not just about studying the social sciences. That's true from science to the social sciences.
Interestingly enough, when I went back from here and Biddy and I were talking about just how bad would this be? And nobody knew for sure, I was also talking to my student who was working at NIH and she was working on the technology for a vaccine and collaborating with Moderna and she was leading the team and she was for me, one of my dreams fulfilled. And shortly after that, she called me saying, "I need you to be in a pilot." Part of what she says, "My team," she and Barney Graham, "We have developed this vaccine." And at that point I thought back to sitting in jail as a 12-year-old and I thought about my questioning myself, will I be okay? And I thought about dreaming about one day helping other people and my leading to having this passion for having more kids doing well in education, but especially in math and science where you just don't see a lot of kids doing well.
And my girls, people from low income backgrounds, African Americans, Latinos, and a lot of Americans in general. And here she is telling me that they've created a vaccine and she's Black. She becomes, she became first Black woman in the world to create a vaccine. Please give her, Dr. Corbett, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a round of applause. And if you haven't looked her up, her name is Kizzmekia Corbett. People said, "Is she from another country?" I said, "No, it's Kizzmekia. She's from rural North Carolina. She's from the country, not from another country," as we say in the south. Wait a minute, she loves that. But she's on the faculty of Harvard now. And I know we've got a wonderful alum today, president of the Moderna on that other side.
But here's the point I'm making. For me at commencement and since it has been a matter of trying to not only know my story, but to write my story. And that's my challenge to all of us, whether we are at commencement, whether we are here for, as a parent or as a student, you have a story right now. Know it. Know your history. Know things your grandmother said. Know if you came from another country or from another part of the world, know if your dad was a poet, know the struggles that people have had, know the history because that history is our story. And history informs us. It puts it in perspective.
When my students say to me, "Oh, it's never been this bad before, Doc. Oh, it's never been this bad." One of them said, "You have no idea."
I said, "Go back to the '60s. The 1960s or the 1860s." If you think about Hamilton, the production, we had fore bearers beating each other with canes in Congress and then killing each other, Hamilton and Burr, right? We just have to put things in perspective, but this is the message. Things get better and then they get worse. I had a cousin who actually was the first Black to get a PhD in a literature from University of Iowa, Nick Aaron Ford. And his father, and he was born in 1904, but his father had been a senator from South Carolina during reconstruction. If you can imagine how things had moved and improved. Imagine in the 19th century, a Black from South Carolina, and then what happened?
The backlash. What is my point? We saw women get certain rights in the early '20s, the 2020s, the 1920s. And who would've thought? And then we saw Blacks get more rights in the '60s. Who would've thought then voter registration in the 21st century? And so students, we have been here before. There is this cycle. We go, we make progress and we come back. It is a challenge. And whether we are talking about performance in science, my own research and we're talking about our society in democracy and the fragility of our democracy, it seems to me that the education you've received at Amherst to think critically, this broad liberal arts education, to decide what you believe, to have evidence to back up what you want to say, as Fred Lawrence from Phi Beta Kappa would say, to be able to discern what somebody says that can be backed up with the truth and what is simply opinion, and then a willingness to find the common ground that for all of us, we are challenged in our country right now to work towards that common ground.
And I'm going to give one example of what I see as most important. But on the other side, the broad side, I have the example, and it's going to be about voting, about that we as liberal arts graduates have such a responsibility. In the '60s, we did have, after my protest, the protest I was in, and then the bombing of the church and the little girls and my God and President Kennedy was killed. All of that happened. And it was after all of that that we had the legislation, the Voting Rights Act, the Higher Education Act, the Civil Rights Act, right? What percent of Americans do you all think had gotten a college degree in the mid '60s? What percent overall of Americans had gotten a college degree? Anybody? 45%? 20? 10? 15? First of all, I love the fact that you're more willing to take risk. When I'm talking to the engineers, they don't take risks. They just focus, focus, focus, right?
But actually it was only 10%. And then at that time, everything was broken down into Black and white. How many of you remember Black and white TV? Anybody old enough? Oh, you look good, you look good. But the fact is that what percent of whites had a college degree? If overall 10%, what percent of whites had a college degree? 33? Now if overall it's 10%, we know whites have always been more privileged, so it's got to be more than 10%, right? So if overall it's 10%, what percent of whites? 95? Ooh, you think a lot of white people, that's what? That's a joke, folk. That's a joke. 14? 30? It was only 11%. And for Blacks, it was between 3% and 4%, almost all way at the HBCUs, except for one exception here, one exception there, just a very few. What is my point? 90% of Americans in the '60s had never seen anyone in their families graduate from college. That's what people don't realize. It wasn't an expectation.
And then secondly, I want you to think about it. Today, what percent have a four year degree? 30? Somebody else. 24? 44? 50? See the ones of you who are not answering this because you're used to getting As, you want to wait and see what the answer is. I know, I know, I know. But the fact is only, only about 37% of Americans today, about a third. And if you break it down, it's about 41% of whites. It's about 30, 29% of Blacks. The fastest growing group in our country is what? Latino, Latinx, right? And they're at about 20%, little over 20%. And the Asian population overall is the best educated, and they're going to be over 50%. But that's not all Asian groups. It's certain Asian groups. We know that, right? But it's 52, 53%.
So you put it all together, we can clearly say slightly more than a third. Now why am I telling you that? When you look at how people vote and what they think, you will see that while it's not perfect in terms of the connecting, you will see that people who are well-educated tend to think more critically about the issues in parts of the country. And one of the challenges clearly is that people on the East coast and the West coast tend to be a little condescending towards the South and the Midwest. That's a part of what I say all the time to people, that we have to think about that as we think about how we pull people into these conversations.
Now why do I tell you that? If we see, and then finally, literally, believe it or not, well over half the students who start college never graduate, never graduate. You are in a wonderful setting here where people graduate. We know that. And the ineluctable question is, what should be expected of graduates from one of the most privileged colleges in the most privileged country in the world? There is the question. And what I would say is with all the challenges every person faces, with the fact that we as higher education still have a long way to go in figuring out how to pull in more people of color, more people from first generation to college, and to make them feel a part of the environment, any institution still has work to do. All of us do. My book is on The Empowered University, how to be empowered to look at yourself and say, "We're good in these areas, but we have improvement to make. We still have things to do. We are not helping those students to be immersed into the environment. And so there is work to do."
But the key, the key is this. What can you do as a graduate? At my graduation, we had two luminaries. Your parents may know their names. It was Congressman Adam Clayton Powell for commencement and for baccalaureate it was my hero, shero, Shirley Chisholm for baccalaureate. And I still remember that message. Even though I'm still worried about whether I'd be a good husband or not, right? And I'm getting ready to go off to the big grad school Illinois from my small college. But their message was the same in different ways. It was the world is changing. This is 1970. You've not spent much time with whites. Your world is going to be so much bigger and you will do things you never thought possible. The world will be so different.
And the question is, what can you hold on to as you work to be not just affected by the change, but to be the change, to be the change. And what did they tell us to do? And I went back and thought about it, and this was 50 some years ago. They said, "Believe in yourselves." They said, "Don't let anybody else define who you are." They said, "Build relationships, healthy relationships. Appreciate what you have, your parents." For us the Hampton education, for you the Amherst education. And they said, "Dream big. Don't limit yourselves. You have no idea how far you may go. And just reach." Oh, that a man's reach should exceed his grasp of what's a heaven for. Never settle, never give up." Thank you all very much.
So I did that because if I can go ahead, because I wanted to have a lot of questions, but I have a story first, and it's about what we can do, because my students are always saying, "Who would imagine people would be taking rights away from women or the kinds of things people can do in some states about healthcare," all kinds of challenges. We do. And I've often said to a lot of people, "Commencement addresses tend to focus on all those things. But you've heard all those things, whether it's about the economy or about rights. You've heard all those things. And the question always becomes, so what do we do? What do we do?" I'm telling you, first of all, we've been here before.
And when Dr. King talked about that arc of justice, the idea that it bends, that it bends in a certain way, it bends that way towards us as if we make it do that, that we have to be empowered to say we make the difference. All right? And I want to give the story of the relative of Cyrus and me, their great-grandmother, his mother's grandmother, Cora and Gracie, because it was literally her aunt, Gracie who did this. There was something called the Alabama Literacy Test in the early '60s, and it meant that that Blacks had to pass this test based on the Constitution before they could vote. Now whites could go and just mark an X because many could not read. Still people don't realize it, even though women had the vote, many men kept their wives from voting. White women still couldn't vote, even though legally they could, they did not vote. All right, intimidated. All right.
My grandmother, his great great-aunt, was determined to vote in a place called Wetumpka, Alabama outside of Montgomery. And she took two of her women friends with her and they had tried to study. And grandmother had only gone, was the daughter of a slave, but had learned to read. And her daughter, the English teacher had really all the time we were working on reading and she was determined to be literate, and she was very literate. And she went and they failed the test. It was a difficult test. Now I found that Alabama Literacy Test, and when I gave a keynote at the Department of Justice, I gave the lawyers the questions and most failed. I told them they could no longer vote. All right? They were shocked. They just hadn't looked. There's some fascinating, go look at the Alabama Literacy Test. They with such specificity.
My grandmother was so amazingly brilliant that she was not to be defeated. She said to them, to the other women, "This test is the same test." She said, "We've been hearing about these questions all these years." She gave them assignments and she broke it into three parts and each person was to memorize the questions from her part. And then they came together to the test and wrote them down. And then she brought them to my mother so we could look up the answers in the Constitution. And then she began to study and to work with her other friends. And so when she came in after that third test, she looked me in my eyes, and she had been having me drill on these things. She sounded like a lawyer. And she said, "I am now a voting citizen of the United States of America." She was 70 years old. I tell people, "How dare we not vote? How dare we not vote, that it took all that?"
And that inspires me every day, that we find a way, whatever the issue, if we are committed, whether it's about kids of color in science or it's about helping people in higher education, or it's about all the academic achievement challenges that children have, there are ways that all of us can make a difference. That's the message that I want the graduates to think about. Now questions please, challenge me. Anybody please challenge me. Who goes first? Hi. Somebody? They're going to ask you who you are.
Noga:
My name, I'm Noga. I'm a alum and a friend of Professor Foreman. I'm interested in hearing what kind of global experience, how your work, especially in Maryland, has had impact in other countries and other societies.
Freeman Hrabowski III:
Excellent, excellent. First of all, my students come from 100 countries and 60% of my undergrads have at least one parent from another country because many are in that Baltimore-Washington corridor from New York down. Many are the children of diplomacy, of military, of intelligence and whatever. And they go back and forth. So ACE has an internationalization accreditation group. So for years we've been a part of that group that involves students going to other countries to study and then in engineering to solve problems like Engineering Without Boundaries. So a number of my students work on clean water issues in different parts of Africa. Others are in Latin American countries. We have a lot of presentations, a lot of grants working on that because you're right, it is important for students, whether they're in STEM or humanities, to understand how connected we should be across societies at these problems.
I'm privileged to work with presidents of universities. Now that I'm President Emeritus, I tell people, "I did not retire from UMBC. I graduated from UMBC after 35 years." And Michael Elliot was in my class this summer at Harvard with the president of Spelman and president of a number of other places, it was wonderful. And what I would tell you is that some of the presidents were from University of Ghana, first woman President, University of Ghana. And what I will tell you is that whether a president is from Amherst, Massachusetts, or from Ghana, many of the challenges are the same as we talk about educating those who are not the most privileged, for example. Or as we talk about changing attitudes. I often say, and I say it in my latest book that we have to think about, we talk about the power of the liberal arts, and yet many people who in elected offices went to the most prestigious places and they studied the liberal arts. And T.S. Eliot one said about somebody, "They had the experience and missed the point."
Somehow, no, it's more than just being literate. It's very interesting if you think about that, what is it we are not getting and how must we think? And for us, it's about crossing religions. Vartan Gregorian, former president of Brown once said, somebody said, "If every student had to take a course, a course, what would it be?" He said, "Comparative religion." Comparative religion for the impact it has in so many positive and negative ways on people. And so we do a lot. We also do a lot with grants involving arts and humanities and the sciences, not just across this country, but in other countries, bringing people from other places. It's an excellent question, really is.
I. Rabi by the way, a Nobel Laureate from New York in the '40s, a physicist said that when he was growing up, all of his friends' mothers would ask them at the end of a school day, "What'd you learn in school today?" And he said, my Jewish mother would say, instead of that, she would say, "Izzy, did you ask a good question today?" And the practice of encouraging his curiosity made him the thinker. He began... And that is a theme on my campus when I talk about my TED Talk and high expectations. But the idea is how do we encourage people to ask good questions?
And often good questions can be very uncomfortable. Everybody knows I'm studying French right now. When I started several years ago, my students had this strange look on their face and I said, "What's wrong?"
They said, "Don't you think you're kind of old?" And that was all I needed. [foreign language 00:30:46]. I said, [foreign language 00:30:55]. The joy comes after the struggle. My point is that we need the difficult conversations on our campus, not shouting matches, but deep thinking and challenging all of us to examine our views on all sorts of things. Yeah, please. So my point about I. Rabi is ask me some more questions. Go on please. Anybody? Anybody? Professor Bradley, Professor Bradley, I had a chance to be with him on a major panel with somebody from I think UCLA. And he was just superb. He was just superb. He really was.
Professor Bradley:
You're being very kind and I hope my boss who gives raises is here to hear that. No, no, no. Thank you so much for being here. So inspirational. As I look around the room, I see as many mentors and parents as I do students. I'm interested in what did your parents give you or sacrifice for you for you to make it this far?
Freeman Hrabowski III:
I appreciate that. I really do. When I got that last award from the National Academy of Sciences, it's something I could never have imagined. The first thing I said, I was looking at my wife and I said, "Usually as we get older and things happen to us that are really positive, the first thought we have is I wish my parents were here." It's the human experience. We all do that. I've gotten to an age now and I'm very blessed about it, that my thought is my parents are with me, that I sense them just with me, take it for what it's worth. And so my parents loved to read. Of all the things I can say as a math teacher, if I could wish for one thing for every little girl, every little boy, it would be that they learn to read well. I can tell Cyrus reads well, it's very clear. His mama did the right thing. Give her a round of applause again for doing the right, she may.
And if there's something to be said about that, because with the reading will go thinking and talking and communication skills. So many children don't have books in their homes, but we constantly, books all the time. In fact, my mother really wanted me to be an English major rather than the math major. She really did. She said, "You can get the math, but let's do this literature." So I did go back and take grad courses under Richard Barksdale and others at Illinois. Yeah, I really did go back and do some in African-American literature, but also went back and studied British and Russian literature, Dostoevsky and the Bronte sisters. And it made me broader and it helps me as a college president.
So when I'm talking first of all to college presidents and they say, "What happened?" I said, "Novels, reading novels, beyond your own culture even, your own culture and others, because it's human behavior." What my parents did was to teach me to think about ideas and to talk about ideas. And it was always the civil rights movement, but also how do we get more people educated? So they both worked several jobs. My mom not only taught in the day, she also taught GED at night because my dad had left teaching to work in a steel mill because he could make more money. And he did the reading and writing for his white supervisor who couldn't read, you get that. But he took the lunchtime and right after work to work with Black men on preparing for the GED. So he'd work with them in reading and math, then send them to my mother, who was the official GED teacher. And I saw that all the time. And then they would work with their kids to get them the college applications to go to college and stuff. So it was that kind of environment.
And the reason my mother allowed me and father to go to jail was that my mother was very proud that she had been fired from her job in 1948 because she led the protest for the equalization of teacher salaries. Black teachers were making 60% of what white teachers were making. And she led the protests, but she was such a big mouth that they fired only one person, my mother. Everybody else went back to work. But within a few days, she was hired by another system, but she was known as a rebel. And her best friend was the mother of Angela Davis. And so I grew up in a Birmingham where my mother and Angela's mother taught together, and Angela's little sister, little brother and I were in class together. So it was at Birmingham and with people from Angela Davis to Alma Vivian Powell to Condi Rice, it was too. So the range of thinking and everything, that's that middle class Birmingham that made the difference. Hi.
Speaker 5:
Hi. That was great. And the teacher of the year in Maryland this year is a preschool teacher. And her speech is the last one I heard that was almost as good as yours about how to make it work, how to just keep trying and like that. So I was just wondering how does here, we're in a college setting, but how does preschool relate to what you're talking about?
Freeman Hrabowski III:
Oh, it's such an important part. My wife actually did her doctoral work in child psychology and was a professor for a number of years before going to work at a financial institution. She always said that her work in child psychology taught her how to work really effectively with men, because every man reminded her of some little boy in her class, that their behavior was still the same. She could use the same... And she didn't say it disparagingly. She said that man was still that same little boy. She's very effective. She went right on the vice president and became very rich. She really did from that child. But what she taught me was the importance of pre-K, zero through pre-K. And so when I chaired the Obama Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans, people were shocked that as a college president, I would emphasize having this big pre-K part, early childhood of the work.
And so Jim Comer from Yale was a part of that work and others, Valerie Jarrett's mother in Chicago was a part of that work. And we looked at that continuum because it's in those years that that child learns the ability to think, develops a sense of self, you see, sees the models. It's very important. And what we did on my campus and this 35 years was a period to experiment. How can a predominantly white campus learn how to embrace people from all kinds of backgrounds, Black kids, Latino kids, people from other countries, people who were different religions? How can we pull them in and not have them as on the side, but rather a part of the core of the institution? And a part of it had to do with connecting research and teaching and having students in labs.
One of the things I did that you'll appreciate was to take some of my colleagues around in the sciences and I said, "Let's see what we see. We can observe anything about human behavior." Well, students in every lab tended to be from the same country as the professor and men with men. The few women we had at the time were with women. But the few. There are no Black professors at that time, and very few now. So Black students would say, "Where are we supposed to go?" All Latino professors, you get my point? So having those conversations to say it takes a really enlightened professor to pull people into the lab who are different from him or her, was very important.
Now saying that, we also decided we're going to work much more closely with pre-K through 12. So if you look at our Choice program, we work with first of all, first-time offenders between ages of eight and 17, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for extended periods of time. And then we have another program, the Sherman Scholars that really first rate math and science and English humanities majors who want to either work in the middle school or in early childhood. And the Sherman family has given us a lot of money to build the reputation of them the way we have of the Meyerhoff scholars. And to think about excellent teachers for four and five year olds who know not only literature, but also some science and a lot about child psychology. So they're Sherman Scholars. And it goes with my TED Talk to the idea of building community. I want people to talk about the issues. That's what we've done. Yeah, good question. Another question, please. Yes.
Mark:
Mark [inaudible 00:39:20], I'm a professor at Amherst. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about-
Freeman Hrabowski III:
He says it like it's no big deal. Give him a round of applause. Being a professor at Amherst. I'm a professor. In 1963, they would've looked at you like you were crazy. So they said...
Mark:
I had the privilege of when I was a postdoc at Hopkins mentoring Meyerhoff Scholars.
Freeman Hrabowski III:
Oh, good, yeah.
Mark:
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the co-evolution of the institution and the program in the early years of the program.
Freeman Hrabowski III:
Yes, yes. People, we are given a lot of credit now for showing the country how to develop programs that will produce large numbers of underrepresented groups, Black, Latino, people with disabilities, first generation college, in science and engineering who would become leaders. But in the early years, people didn't want to disaggregate the data. They thought it was un-American to talk about a program that had an emphasis also, for example, on Black males. They were very uncomfortable with that. And I got two page, at a time this is when we still had typewriters. Students, do you remember typewriters? Do you know what a typewriter is? And these were from very nice liberal guys who just felt everybody was a man and white man. And they said, "No, it's not fair."
And I said, "Well, show me a Black student from this country who was born in this country who was graduating with at least a B average in any science program." And they couldn't.
And their response was, "Well, it will take another generation."
And my response was, "I thought you were scientists."
And they said, "Explain."
I said, "Well, you're basing your conclusion on your limited anecdotal information. You've not seen it, so you're suggesting it'll probably happen the next generation. Allow me to experiment. Let us bring in some students and work with them and let us see what we can do and what we learn from this group will help us with students of all races, men and women." All right. And finally convinced them to let us do that. And that's when we started. We started particularly with African Americans because in our part of the country that is the largest minority group.
I often say Baltimore is the upper south. I am originally from Birmingham, the Deep South. Cyrus' great-grandmom is from the country, rural Alabama. I'm from the big city, Birmingham. But the fact is that, believe it or not, after 10 years of working with that program, we found that from the American Association of Microbiologists, there were only 67 Black Bachelor recipients in biochemistry in the country, 67 in the country, 22 came from my campus. People knew we were onto something and almost all went to grad school, OEMDs, OMD, PhDs. And that's when we knew we were onto something.
And the best news is if you look at the Hrabowski scholars today, we now have students, Black students, and not just at all the Ivys, but on the faculties of Harvard and Stanford and Hopkins and Duke, on the faculty at all these places. But this new program, if you look at the Hrabowski Scholars Program, anybody who's going on for the PhD, the beauty of that program is that every one of those scholars gets almost a million dollars a year for 10 years. If you can imagine. They're now at Columbia and Harvard and wherever, Stanford, and every other year we'll be getting 30 more. And about half of them are of color, Black and Latino. The other half are whites who want to focus on these issues. I wanted it to be broad, women or LGBTQ, every kind of diversity. And I wanted them to focus on these different issues. And it's working really, this is for [inaudible 00:43:18]. It's very encouraging, really is. Uh-huh?
Speaker 7:
Dr. Hrabowski, thank you for the inspiration of your collaboration, of your critical thinking, of your legacy making, of your institutional challenging. I wanted to ask you, because we're in a moment in a month where we'll be in a post Affirmative Action moment, as you spoke and answered that fine question about the genesis and the development of the programs, where are the places of persuasive strategic crags? What is the argument that gets the most traction in response to a country which is now the two-page letter or worse that you've been receiving for so many years? And then you can tell us we going to be okay because we need to hear that in this post Affirmative Action moment too.
Freeman Hrabowski III:
No, I do hear you. I do hear you. I do hear you. First of all, I didn't say this. Professor Foreman received the MacArthur last year, give a round applause for that. And I do that because we always know the bad... When we hear the good news, we need to celebrate it. It gives us strength to know we can do it. All right. There's several things I would say. I often say this at institutions around the country, the medical schools and the public health schools are more enlightened when it comes to inclusive excellence than the traditional arts and sciences schools. And I base that on, and that's a broad statement, I realize and there are exceptions. But there's a sense of urgency that people in medicine and public health have, because we know such a large proportion of the population will come from the underrepresented groups. And all the research says that you need people from those groups to help understand the challenges that are not just medical, but sociocultural and everything else that goes with it.
It was interesting with Kizzmekia, she was determined that the wide distribution of the vaccine would not move ahead until they had enough Blacks in the study of the pilot. Fortunately, she had a double major in the life sciences and the social sciences. And she had studied everything from the Tuskegee study and the Henrietta Lacks study. And many of my students in biochemistry will work with AIDS patients. And so they get the biochemistry, but they get the social cultural issues. They see the connections, the lack of trust. And her point was, we are not going to get people to take this vaccine unless they can see more people looking like them who've taken the vaccine. And some people who've worked on the vaccine, because there is no trust, and people who don't understand those things will say, "Oh, people don't trust the doctor." They go no.
And she convinced Jackie and me, and my wife and me to be in it and be on the TV and everything. And we saw it. We saw how much it took. Okay. Now my point is this. I think people involving pandemics saw, they did see that you still have large numbers of people, not just of color, particularly lower income people, particularly from certain parts of the country who still don't believe. And I start with those groups because it's still going to be a matter of convention there. Because everybody knows we're going to continue to have tragedies of things. And those areas now, let me just say, I was speaking at a commencement in the South and I was going to bring up her name about what she had done with the vaccine. And they said, "I don't think you want."
I said, "Because she's Black?"
They said "No, because we have so many anti-vax people here, that the parents. You'll get a protest, you'll get a lot of boos if you start talking about the vaccine."
I said, "In 2023?"
"Oh, yeah, oh yeah." They need to see, and these are not people of color. They need to see people from their communities who are helping with the vaccines so they can trust and see the difference it make. I'm saying, so representation from every group will be important. That's number one. That's why I keep talking about inclusive excellence. I'm getting all these groups in.
Number two, though, I would say that I cannot say enough about the voting. I cannot, I am convinced that the more powerful the voting presence, the more we can show people that women will not allow certain things to happen to them. That people of color will come out in big numbers. The assumption has been they won't come out in big numbers. And we've seen some of that. We really are. We really are. But then I would say we need to be educating people to think about the issues, to think about the issues, and to have the hard conversations about the issues.
And the other part is, believe me, this is maybe my faith, my blind faith or whatever, but I've just seen it bad before. I have. And there's something about the human condition that we do rise to the occasion. But it does take, as John Kennedy said, it takes the artist to speak the truth. If you've not read it, it's a beautiful, beautiful piece that he gave here in October of 1963 about the importance of the artists in giving that difficult message and saying how we are not living up to what we need to be doing right now. But it should take the scientists too, to speak up. This is why we talk about human and the scientists and the other people.
And I'm saying, I think this generation, for my students and others, will have the courage, will have the courage to speak. I was just in my home state of Alabama, and it's a challenging place. And yet there are so many people of different races who want things to be better. I believe that. I really do. But it's going to take a lot of hard work. Don't miss my point. I'm not being sugary about this. It's going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of suffering. It is. You're right. You're right.
Sam. Sam and I had big argument, big argument, big. But he was excellent. He did not back down. They did not back down. Go ahead, Sam.
Sam:
It's actually what you were just saying is a really great segue to what my question is. So I come from deep south Georgia, very, very rural. The place I moved to had 300 people in the village kind of rural. And I know my school district has a lot of emphasis on trying to get through kindergarten and second grade, trying to get students into learning actively. But there's just such a large pushback from the community. Because I'm sure, as you know, oftentimes being seen as smart is not cool. It's most of the time a way to alienate you for the rest of your family. And as you try and go on, it's even middle and high school. It's either do you sit here and stay and essentially reject what you're trying to pick up and learn or do you take what you learn and go, but at the likely the expense of your connection to your family. And I was just wondering if you had any insights or potentially trying to tackle that particular issue, why intellect is so seen down upon and trying to learn more history is so just frowned upon.
Freeman Hrabowski III:
It's such a great question, Sam. I often talk about the evolution of the American middle class. Every family sees the first person go to college, some from the 19th century, many from the 20th century, many from the mid 20th century, many still to go. And that first person goes to college and does well. And people are impressed. And somebody will say, "I want my child to get that." What we say, we have students from all over. But it is wonderful when people who come from those environments go back to pay it forward in different ways. I'm always trying to get people to think about teaching a few years, something noble about teaching pre-K through 12, something very noble about that. Whether you do it forever or not, it's something about it. But the idea is that it's about changing attitudes. If you've never seen anybody in your family go to college and have a better life, why would you believe it? You see what I mean?
And here's the big challenge. Millions and millions of Americans of all races went to these for-profit places and got big bills and never got a degree. And so they're cynical. And that's why the voting and public policy. when I was fighting with the Obama Commission. I was fighting, you'd be surprised, the carcasses that fought me when I was saying, "It's not fair that all these people have all these bills and all these people from for-profits have gotten rich and people owe $100,000. They have no degree to show for it." And they're saying, "Screw college." It's just awful. So I'm saying it's those kinds of issues we have to face, to change attitudes about education, about medicine, and about what can happen for their children, for their children. I start again with the idea if we can help families to teach a child to read and dream and think and get them into that kind of... Project Headstart, so important.
And it's important. I say it's important for me as a college president to be concerned about pre-K as it is about a PhD program, that those early years and the attitudes of the community there. So my campus is in suburbs, out by the BW Airport, but we are always in the city of DC or Baltimore, always because that's where we are needed. It's so important. Very important. Great question. Yeah, please. Yes. There's one right here. A parent of a student who majored in neuroscience. And I love to, let me say that math. Yeah. Let me say that math. I love some math.
Chaya:
I heard you say math, so I said, okay.
Freeman Hrabowski III:
I appreciate that.
Chaya:
Needs to know. My name is Chaya, I'm from India, came here 24 years ago.
Freeman Hrabowski III:
Wow.
Chaya:
I think I joined my husband and came here. Everyone has a story. I have a story. If somebody came to you and said, "I want my story to be heard," what would you guide them? How would they go about it?
Freeman Hrabowski III:
I'd say what the students would say. I would record my student. I'd video. I'd record my story first. I'd put it on social media. I really would. I'd put it on social media and see what kind of response you get. You'd be surprised how much, because you'll get... My students from different countries have done just that. We have a certain platform that deals with linguistic diversity and they connect people who are French speakers, from different parts of Africa, all the way up to people from different religions. And it's amazing how people will connect. People love telling those stories, migrating here from other countries. And it's important for people to hear those stories. Very much so. Try it. Yeah. Everybody has a story. You're right. Come on folks. Come on folks.
Sheila Jaswal:
Last question.
Freeman Hrabowski III:
Last question.
Sheila Jaswal:
No pressure.
Freeman Hrabowski III:
Come on.
Speaker 10:
I'll ask a question. Dr. Hrabowski, thanks for your presentation today. And I've heard you speak before, as we mentioned when introduced. I can see as Sam is asking a question, he's really going beyond education and asking you about sociocultural ways to impact. And I think your model, if I can pay you a compliment, is that you speak about issues and you don't align them with political interests. You align them with what's right, what's wrong, what's good for people, all people. And so our country is getting increasingly divisive, split. And people think that going even farther to their extreme is the only way to get people to come to the middle. How would you respond to that notion of effectiveness?
Freeman Hrabowski III:
Sure. Because I speak in places where people cringe when they see that I was very close to the Obama Administration, and they say, they cringe and they close their minds immediately. Then my challenge is how do I use my mama's thought about language being able to open minds? And the human experience, the human experience. I'm going to always speak the truth. But you can speak the truth without using language that moves people to immediately become emotional. You really can. People care about children. They really do. You can help people to be better, to rise to be better is what I would say. Every time. Emily Dickinson, another one of my mother's favorites, said, "Tell the truth, but tell it slant."
If I start off by saying, "You guys really suck," I've lost everybody. I've lost everybody. But if I can ask a question and plant a seed and get people just thinking about it, and that's what we need, we need that. And then the other thing I would say is a book that was recommended to me in the last few weeks. I gave a commencement at NYU Engineering. The book is entitled, Gradual. Gradual. It's worth reading. And it's saying we don't like to think about incrementalism as making a difference. And yet in these times, we always think about revolutionary and transformation. But if anything is too much, you got the backlash. Right? You always have the backlash. I tell college presidents, "True leadership means keeping everybody minimally dissatisfied." What do you think about that? Think about it. If one group gets too excited, the other group is really upset. Right? And it's amazing.
And the other thing I tell presidents is, "Tell the truth though. Tell the truth." If you start lying, people will never trust you. You need that truth. You really do. So I end with something that I want you graduates and families, it's an old rural Southern story, again about Gracie, my grandmother. And it's about savoring the moment. This is the moment of dreams fulfilled for families. You're waiting for your child to grad... It's such a special moment. And we tend sometimes have it and move on. And my friend talked about liking pizza, and he'd be eating one piece of pizza, but he is looking at the next piece of pizza. So he doesn't really enjoy that piece because he's already onto the next one, right? Now how do you just enjoy that piece of pizza? You get that's a human experience, right?
Well, this is about, and I'm telling you, if you don't remember anything else I said, Sam, this is your blueberry moment. Let me tell you what I mean by that. I was a chubby little kid, loving math. Loving math and food. And my mother was trying to get me to eat more healthily. She wanted me to eat the calorie six. I liked the pie. And my grandmother would make two pies. One for the family and one for Freeman. All right? And she'd have on the card there "For Freeman only." And it made me feel so good. And my mother would be so upset with her mother for doing it, right? And my grandmother would sit there at one of the table, and I'm at the other and let me eat my pie. And there'd be blueberry pie everywhere on my face. Wait a minute, it was so good. I can still taste that blueberry pie. Now that's what you call savoring the moment. This is your blueberry pie. Thank you all very much.
