CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF ENGINEERING DIVERSITY & WOMEN’S PROGRAMS VIRTUAL AND IN-PERSON EVENTS AND A SCHOLARSHIP FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN ARE AMONG THE HIGHLIGHTS COMMEMORATING THE ANNIVERSARY. by Joel Mathis
2021
in the U.S. Navy, said in a 2012 interview. “We didn’t know how to do it, but we knew we needed to actively recruit. We had tremendous support from the School of Engineering, so we set about raising funds to start the program.” At the time there were few such organizations on American college campuses. In 1977, SCoRMEBE was named one of the four best minority engineering programs in the country by the National Research Council’s committee on Minorities in Engineering. “KU certainly had the first one in the country conceived and initiated by students,” Floyd Preston, professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, said in 2012. File Photo
is a landmark year for a groundbreaking program at the KU School of Engineering. Engineering Diversity and Women’s programs celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. To commemorate the anniversary, the School hosted virtual and in-person events, and launched a scholarship fundraising campaign throughout the year. The anniversary means “there’s been a lot of positive change, we’ve seen our numbers grow,” said Elaina Sutley, the School of Engineering’s newly appointed Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging. “We’ve been able to retain more women, more diverse students, but importantly, there’s more work to be done in this space.” That sentiment was echoed earlier in 2021 by Sutley’s predecessor, Andrew Williams, who served as Engineering Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion from 2017 until his appointment as the Dean of Engineering at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, in June. “We want to celebrate the fact that we’ve been doing this since 1971, and it’s been an award-winning program ever since,” said Williams. The organization began in 1971 as SCoRMEBE, the Student Council for Recruiting, Motivating and Educating Black Engineers, started by African American engineering students at KU: William Nunnery, Gene Kendall and Ralph Temple. Soon after, William Hogan was appointed as the school’s first assistant dean of minority affairs. “We figured we’d try to establish a program to get more young engineers on campus,” Kendall, a retired rear admiral
Ronald Moore, who received his degree in electrical engineering in the late 1980s, works at a computer at the School of Engineering in this file photo.
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