Dr. Freeman Hrabowski III ’93 Featured on 60 Minutes
for Educational Leadership at UMBC
By Alan Dessoff
When Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski
III ’93, President of the University of
Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC), was
featured November 13 on the CBS
broadcast 60 Minutes, it was only the
latest in a long series of national
recognitions he has gained as one of the
country’s outstanding educational leaders,
and has brought to UMBC as well. Three
days earlier, the prestigious Carnegie
Corporation honored him with its 2011
Academic Leadership Award, recognizing
his development of a culture of
excellence and success in preparing
students of all backgrounds to become
Ph.D. scientists and engineers.
Hrabowski claims that the
achievements attributed to him have
happened “because of the work of the
campus” he has led since 1992. A
member of Leadership Maryland’s
inaugural class, he also credits his
Leadership Maryland experience with
broadening his perspective of the state
and helping him “bring a statewide
perspective to some of our thinking.”
Under his leadership of UMBC, that
broader perspective now has become
global. He reports that the university not
only attracts students from across
Maryland but also from every other state
and 150 countries. “We are very proud of
Dr. Hrabowski and what he has
accomplished at UMBC through his
leadership and vision of higher
education,” says LMD President Nancy
Minieri.
The Carnegie Corporation honors its
Academic Leadership awardees with
grants of $500,000, to be used at their
discretion. According to UMBC,
Hrabowski plans to use his grant to start
the Freeman A. Hrabowski Fund for
Academic Innovation, which will support
investments by the President’s Office in
faculty, staff and student initiatives that
promote “a culture of innovation,
entrepreneurship, and student success.”
Hrabowski has been promoting that
since he became UMBC’s President. One
result, as CBS correspondent Byron Pitts
reported in his 60 Minutes interview of
Hrabowski, is that the mid-sized state
university once known primarily as a
commuter school “has earned a
reputation as one of the most innovative
schools in the country, especially when it
comes to getting students into math and
science and keeping them there.”
“We have to teach Americans of all
races, from all backgrounds, what it takes
to be the best. And at the heart of it is
the same thing we saw when we were
kids. Hard work. Nothing, I don’t care
how smart you are, takes the place of
hard work,” Hrabowski said on the
broadcast.
When he was a kid, he saw it from a
perspective far different from the one he
has today. How he got to UMBC in the
first place was “a journey through
American history,” Pitts said, and
Hrabowski hasn’t forgotten it. Born in
1950 in Birmingham, Ala., he explained
that his last name came from his
grandfather’s grandfather, who was the
“Polish slave master in rural Alabama.”
His first name came from his grandfather,
“the first one born a free man.”
From his childhood, Hrabowski
excelled in school. At 12, he was in ninth
grade and at 15, went to college,
graduating four years later from Hampton
Institute with highest honors in
mathematics. After earning an M.A. in
mathematics, he received his doctorate in
higher education administration at age 24
from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.
He was a child leader in the civil
rights movement as well. As Pitts
reported, he was in the “Children’s
March” in May 1963 in Birmingham,
organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. The
march became “infamous,” Pitts said,
when Sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor
unleashed dogs and fire hoses on the
demonstrators, including 12-year-old
Hrabowski, who had his own encounter
with Connor. The sheriff spit on him and
he spent five days in jail. Hrabowski was
featured prominently in Spike Lee’s 1997
documentary, “Four Little Girls,” on the
racially motivated bombing of
Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church in 1963.
Hard work has become a lifetime
commitment for Hrabowski. Building on
his training as a mathematician, much of
the hard work he has instituted at UMBC
has been in science, engineering and
math, which accounted for 41 percent of
the bachelor’s degrees earned there last
year—well above the national average of
25 percent, as Pitts reported.
One way Hrabowski has helped
UMBC achieve that has been through the
Meyerhoff Scholars Program, which he
co-founded with philanthropist Robert
Meyerhoff in 1988. The program is open
to all high-achieving minority students
committed to pursuing advanced degrees
in research careers in science and
engineering, and advancing minorities in
those
fields.
The
program
has
become a
national
model and represents the themes that
continue to frame Hrabowski’s
professional career, including research
and publications that focus on science
and math education, with special
emphasis on minority participation and
performance.
Those themes also continue to bring
significant recognition to Hrabowski
and UMBC. In 2008, he was named one
of “America’s Best Leaders” by U.S.
News & World Report, which also has
ranked UMBC as the #1 “Up and
Coming” university in the nation for the
last three years. It ranked the school 4th
this year for “Best Undergraduate
Teaching,” tied with Yale and
immediately before Brown and
Stanford.
Other honors Hrabowski has
received are too numerous to mention,
except for one of significance in his
home state: he is the recipient of the
Tech Council of Maryland’s “Lifetime
Achievement Award.” By its title alone,
that one seems to fit Hrabowski in
every respect.
Alan Dessoff is an independent journalist
in Bethesda ([email protected]).
For more information on how you can become
involved in Leadership Maryland, contact
Nancy Minieri, president, at
410-841-2101, or visit www.leadershipmd.org