Building Bright Futures

Which comes first? Does a community strive to recruit business, or do community leaders develop a workforce educated to fill the jobs that those businesses will demand?

It’s a chicken and egg question. If the right companies aren’t in a given region, potential employees have no reason to develop the skills to work for such companies. But if the right workforce isn’t available, those companies won’t come to an area for fear of a limited pool of workers from which to hire.

When Charles Hathaway, former chancellor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, pondered this situation, he took a student-centered focus, and consequently, took a gamble on the potential future students he felt sure his vision would attract.

Within a month of moving into the chancellor’s role at UALR in 1993, Hathaway was contacted by the late Harold Engstrom, a Little Rock engineer. Engstrom contended that central Arkansas was desperately in need of an engineering program, and that such an addition would  benefit the school and support the local engineering industry.

Hathaway’s reputation preceded him. He had come to UALR from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, where he was vice president for academic affairs. There, he converted what was a school of engineering to a full-fledged College of Engineering and Computer Science. Before that, he was dean of the College of Science and Mathematics at the University of Texas in San Antonio; under his leadership, UTSA also established a College of Engineering. Hathaway had always focused, in his words, on “involving the university enterprise with economic development,” and he intended to do the same at UALR.

“Universities are about serving the needs of the state,” says B. Alan Sugg, University of Arkansas System President since 1990. “Chuck Hathaway had the experience to be sure this would be a successful venture and that he could put together the rationale and the logic for establishing the program. You don’t offer any academic program unless it’s quality, particularly with engineering because it’s a very costly program, so you have to make sure the need is there, and Dr. Hathaway made a strong and compelling argument.”

As people continued to encourage Hathaway to do what he’d done elsewhere and strengthen UALR through engineering, he initially promised only to research the subject. He refused to invest money anywhere it wouldn’t serve the greater community.

“Its reason for being is economic development,” Hathaway says of the Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology, which is turning 10 years old this fall. “If there weren’t a need, I would not have established it. I don’t believe in this day and age there should be programs where there isn’t a need.”

In 1997, Hathaway appointed a committee comprised of representatives from local industry to discuss whether or not central Arkansas needed an engineering program. The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville long had had a College of Engineering, so the committee was tasked with reviewing the merits of creating a second engineering school within the UA System. He invited both proponents and opponents to participate, to make certain the findings wouldn’t be biased. In a prescient, perhaps history-altering decision, the committee requested that scientist Mary Good be added to the group.

A major player on the local and national scene, Good grew up in Willisville, Arkansas, native and had recently returned to the state from Washington, D.C., with the intention to retire. She had a long, acclaimed career in science and research and had served as President Bill Clinton’s undersecretary of technology in the U.S. Department of Commerce, as well as acting Secretary of Commerce after the untimely death of Ron Brown. Her experience included being a decorated professor in the Louisiana state university system, and serving in a high-level research role at Allied Signal, Inc. Through her time in Washington, as well as serving on the National Science Board and President George H.W. Bush’s President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, she also knew plenty about national policymaking.

The committee engaged a consultant whose job was researching potential sites for companies to build new facilities.

“What he told the committee was that of the last 10 jobs he had been asked to do, for eight of the 10, one thing that you had to be able to check off was the existence of an engineering program within 50 miles,” Good remembers. “So, he told this group of central Arkansas business people, that of the 10 potential locating businesses, Little Rock had no chance of being on the list to be considered by eight of the 10.

“This was really interesting because all of a sudden, people in the past who had been opposed and thought that the one program in Fayetteville was all we needed, changed their minds.”

The committee voted unanimously to petition the UA System’s board of trustees and the state legislature in favor of an engineering program at UALR.

An independent team simultaneously studying Arkansas’s need for knowledge-based industry came up with the same findings.

“Economic assessments being done in central Arkansas showed that the lack of an engineering program was a clear deficit for central Arkansas,” says Jerry Adams, a team member who was at the time in charge of external and university relations at Acxiom. “From an economic development corporate recruiting area, it was a clear liability for central Arkansas not to have that competency.”

Hathaway didn’t want this deficiency to deter companies from coming to central Arkansas, or to cause bright students who sought engineering or related degrees to feel compelled to pursue their studies elsewhere. Given the fact that the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s program already covered biological, chemical, civil, computer, electrical, industrial and mechanical engineering, he thought it best to go in a slightly different direction.

“I thought we needed an engineering college looking forward, something different,” he says. “At first, we were looking at developing a program in engineering, and then we realized this was a whole college with a whole new thrust.”

The next step was recruiting local support. Hathaway was persistent as he met with the long list of people whose endorsements were critical – Arkansas state legislators, the state Department of Higher Education, the University of Arkansas System Board of Trustees, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and perhaps most importantly, local businesses.

Hathaway knew the process of starting something from the ground up, and he knew he couldn’t do it on his own. So he brought in Good.

“She probably knows everybody who can have an influence on UALR,” Adams says. “It’s a team effort, but it couldn’t have been done without Chancellor Hathaway’s vision and his ability to recruit Mary, and Mary’s vision of living up to what this could be.”

Hathaway toted around a PowerPoint presentation on his laptop showing Good as the dean of the new college even before he asked her if she was interested in the job. That presentation was consistently well-received.

“She had the complete history necessary – industry, academia, everything,” Hathaway says of Good. “So I asked her to be the founding dean, and I got the Donaghey Foundation to give her an appropriate title and supplement her salary.”

Good agreed her background and connections would help get the college off on the right foot, so she agreed to take the role for two years and to help Hathaway sell the idea to the essential backers. She was named dean and Donaghey University Professor. The Donaghey Foundation’s contribution led to the new college being named the Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology.

The College was designed to add to UALR’s offerings in technology-related fields. Computer science, engineering technology and construction management already existed, but upgrading and wrapping them together with new departments would create a more complete menu of degree programs for students. With the establishment of the College also came the founding of two new undergraduate programs, information science and systems engineering, which would offer specialties in electrical engineering, computer engineering, mechanical engineering and telecommunications engineering.

Timing was everything.

“1999 to 2000 was when the bubble burst on IT things, and technology went downhill,” Good says, of the early years of the college. “So, there were extraordinarily good new young faculty prospects available. You can imagine trying to hire technical people into a college with no history is not something simple to do, yet we were able to hire some excellent people.” She takes pride in the diversity of today’s faculty, which is heavily international.

At a time when it might have been difficult to assure the quality across all of the desired and necessary specialties in systems engineering, a $6 million endowment from the Trinity Foundation for specialties in electrical engineering and mechanical engineering ended all doubts.

Jay Chesshir, president and chief executive officer of the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce, calls the Trinity Foundation’s gift “the biggest economic development announcement that central Arkansas has seen in the last 10 years.”

“In today’s marketplace, if you don’t have an engineering school within your region, you simply get taken out of the process and have no chance of attracting the companies and the quality jobs we’re after,” Chesshir explains. “If it weren’t for EIT being created, we wouldn’t even be in the game. EIT not only has been a catalyst in bringing new investment and jobs to the area from outside our state, it’s also been a catalyst for companies here in growing because of the educated workforce that it has produced.”

Ten years after becoming EIT dean, Good is still at the helm. Under her leadership, the College has flourished and garnered around $45 million in external funding. She is almost ready to hand over the next era of the college, however. She anticipates the board engaging in a national search to replace her within the next couple of years, once the College is settled in its new building. After all, she is a decade past due in her long-awaited retirement.

She eagerly awakes the building’s opening, set for May 2010. The new facility will relieve overcrowding and include state-of-the-art classrooms and adequate research space for faculty and graduate students to work and study.

“What it’s going to do is allow us to move to the next level,” Good says. “A new building like that makes faculty and students feel good.”

In the 10 years since the College was established, it has become clear that most graduates remain in central Arkansas – fulfilling every hope and goal the early visionaries had in mind.

“I see it as a great asset to economic development and just as importantly, to being certain that the business and the industry that we have in central Arkansas is supported by an engineering discipline,” Sugg says. “The great majority of the graduates of the engineering program at UALR stay right here in Arkansas to work. So, there has been a need for it, and it’s been highly successful. It has just helped make UALR a complete university.”

Hathaway’s early conversations with local industry led to the five advisory councils that EIT now relies on to ensure its curriculum is relevant and properly preparing its graduates for their careers. Each advisory group matches up to an undergraduate major at EIT. The cooperation between university and industry provides visibility for the college and its students.

James Hendren, an early and outspoken advocate for the college, and former chief executive officer at Arkansas Systems, an advisory council member.

“The advantage is that the school is getting feedback from businesses in the community as far as what they need and what their students are studying,” Hendren says. “The value is in companies meeting students and knowing better what their background is. From a public relations point of view, it helps them know more than the school exists, that it’s doing good things. So it goes both ways.”

John Burgess is a 1988 alumnus of UALR’s computer science program and for the past five years, has served on EIT’s computer science advisory council. His company, Mainstream Technologies, employs UALR students.

“It benefits us because we get cheap resources, and it obviously benefits the kids because above and beyond the direct work experience they’re getting, they also get interview experience – they have to put together a resume and have a job interview,” Burgess says of the hiring process. “It gives them that real-world rounding that students are usually lacking.”

Looking back, Adams concludes:

“EIT has given the state an additional breadth and depth in engineering competency. All boats rise when you get an asset like UALR’s EIT program working at a higher level. The overall benefit to the state from a competitive purpose is: Everybody wins.”

Looking forward, EIT continues to make history. In addition to its ongoing collaboration with local industry, the college is working to strengthen partnerships with UAMS. Along with faculty from the College of Science and Mathematics, EIT faculty are involved with research at UALR’s Nanotechnology Center. The facility was established in 2006 with $5.9 million from the state. The mission was to “perform outstanding research in nanotechnology, to develop educational programs for students at all levels from high school to Ph.D. and to generate the technological advancements that can be commercialized through licensing and/or spinoff companies,” explains Alexandru Biris of UALR’s Applied Science Department and the Nanotechnology Center.

The Nanotechnology Center provides a strong research nexus between UALR and UAMS, particularly in light of nanomaterials’ potential for cancer targeting, killing and visualization, as well as tissue regeneration, according to Biris.

“The work of the nanotechnology groups at UALR has reached a maturity that is now driving very exciting research in collaboration with UAMS, which is leading to new and important intellectual property,” echoes Michael Douglas, Director of UAMS BioVentures. “These collaborations offer exciting new opportunities for the delivery of better health care and advances in nanomedicine that have the potential to push the central Arkansas region to the forefront of nanomaterials and nanomedicine applications.”