Percy A. Pierre is a systems engineer who has utilized his knowledge of engineering design and systems engineering to make a significant impact on the educational experiences of minority students in engineering.  Dr. Pierre was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Throughout his career, he has participated in many engineering research and education efforts as an engineering educator, a Dean of Engineering, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, a Program Officer for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research, Development and Acquisition from 1977-81, to name a few. It was at the Pentagon that he used systems engineering to manage the development and manufactures of the Army’s major weapons systems, the first African American to do so. This systems engineering approach was also utilized when he orchestrated the development in the early 1970s of many successful organizations that focus on supporting minorities in engineering. Currently, he directs the Sloan Engineering Program, a program he created that recruits, helps fund, and mentors engineering doctoral students from underrepresented groups.

The profile below was authored by Alexandra Coso, Georgia Institute of Technology, based on an interview with Dr. Pierre in 2014.

Dr. Percy A. Pierre

Vice President Emeritus, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Michigan State University
Director, Sloan Engineering Program

Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, 1967
M.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame, 1963
B.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame, 1961

Bridging engineering research and engineering education

A good part of my career was not in engineering education. I grew up in New Orleans in a segregated society and was determined to make a difference in that society. The difference I wanted to make was, first of all, to become an excellent engineer myself, and secondly, to help others succeed in engineering, specifically other African Americans. From my perspective, first I needed to succeed myself and become the role model that would let me be a more effective example.

My initial involvement with engineering education was in 1963 at Southern University, a historically black university. I briefly taught classes at Southern University before starting my Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins. Teaching at Southern was a very meaningful and satisfying experience, and when I left, I was determined to return to teaching later in my career. While at Southern, I taught small classes, and in one class in particular, I taught two young men with whom I have been associated ever since. My experience with those young men and others was very influential in my desire to do engineering education.

Later, when I was at Johns Hopkins as a doctoral student, I got a part-time job teaching physics at Morgan State University, another historically black university. I didn’t return to engineering education specifically until I became Dean of Engineering at Howard University. Still, it is important to note that I don’t separate my research career from my education career. It was my research career at places such as the RAND Corporation and the Pentagon that gave me the option of influencing education.

Supporting minorities in engineering

Throughout my career, I have worked with hundreds of minority graduate and undergraduate students. In supporting these students, there are many challenges that arise throughout their collegiate careers. Initially, many of these students do not receive the high school preparation required to be successful in engineering. In addition, many of them are unaware of the opportunities available in the field of engineering. This is true even for those students who graduate high school with the math and science background necessary to pursue an engineering degree. Once the students are enrolled in an undergraduate engineering program, there still exists the possibility of attrition. Finally, there is a need to support minority students as they identify and pursue career opportunities in engineering. Currently, at Michigan State, my focus is recruiting minority graduate students, providing them with financial support and mentoring, and helping them attain employment.

The most critical problem in helping minority students succeed in engineering is the inadequate education of these students at the high school level. While we have tried to have some impact from outside the public school system, including the development of programs that work with high schools, additional work is required to improve the K–12 system so that students graduate with knowledge about engineering and the skills to succeed in engineering courses.

We need opportunities in every high school for the brightest students to further their knowledge and achievements. The challenge is, how do you do that? I visited a high school in Baton Rouge in the 1980s that had more than its share of students taking advanced math, calculus, and physics. The school was not known as an academic school. It was not a magnet program. It was not anything special. Yet, why was this particular school producing more students who were well prepared for engineering? Well, the answer was simple: the principal. Many of the advanced math and science courses in this school were electives. As a result, many students would shy away from these courses after satisfying the basic math and science requirements. The principal decided that he would identify students who he thought could succeed in math and science. He would tell them, “You will take this course,” and they listened. As an individual who had a relationship with the students, he was able to challenge and encourage them to take these high-level courses.

Finding key people

One of the first things I learned as I tried to support minorities in engineering was that I could not do it all myself. That’s why I sought administrative positions that would allow me to have an impact on multiple students, rather than opportunities to work with students only in the classroom. Most of my impact on engineering education has not been in the classroom; it’s been mentoring students to succeed. I realized very early that as an instructor, the number of minority students that I could significantly impact would be limited, and ultimately, I wanted to impact the whole trajectory of the students and not just their experience in the classroom. I found that I could impact more students and address their issues more directly through administrative activities.

In the early 1970s, I played a central role in orchestrating the minorities in engineering effort that resulted in the creation of many organizations dedicated to helping minorities in engineering, including the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME), the National GEM Consortium, the Mathematics, Engineering and Science Achievement (MESA) program, and the Southeastern Consortium for Minorities in Engineering (SECME). This all started when I was Dean of Engineering at Howard in 1973, and I was asked to organize a symposium at the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) on minorities in engineering. I chaired the planning committee of that symposium and worked in close collaboration with General Electric (GE). Many recommendations were made during the symposium, but the question was, what happens after the symposium? To address this, GE and NAE created NACME, a committee of industrial people, government people, and college presidents, and we asked them to work on what came next after the symposium.

Shortly thereafter, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, who had representatives at the symposium, asked me to run their minority engineering program. This opportunity put me in a very strategic position. I decided I would not focus on helping individual students; instead, I would see how I could leverage the money the Sloan Foundation had committed to this program to create lasting organizations capable of helping many minority students. Very often foundations give grants and when the grant is gone, the program is gone. So that meant I had to find the people I thought would want to keep this going after the money we gave them ran out.

For example, when creating NACME, we were able to coordinate with NAE. Through collaborations with industry, the federal government, and several state governments, the other organizations I mentioned—GEM, SECME, and MESA—are still supporting minority students today. These organizations were created in the 1970s. If you ask me, the most significant impact I had was in helping to create these organizations by providing the funding to get them started and structuring them in such a way that they would continue to be funded after the Sloan money ran out.

We could have spent the Sloan Foundation’s money very quickly and when the money ran out, there would be not too much to show for it, except maybe a few more minority engineering graduates. However, the idea was to put together the key ingredients to achieve long-term objectives. The key ingredients were people who really wanted to work with and support these programs, people who could contribute the necessary financial support, and a focus on the key variables that had to be addressed.

Through the entire experience developing NACME and these other organizations, I learned that you have to find people who want to support and participate in these organizations. You have to identify people who are committed to doing this kind of thing and then give them the resources to do it. I also found that there are many people, both minority and non-minority, who, if given the opportunity, want to help minority students succeed in the engineering field. For example, while the Sloan Foundation had the money, the chairman of GE was a driver. He was chair of NACME, and he corralled all of his colleagues to support this effort. The president of NAE was also very important, as he allowed the National Academy to be the place where all of this happened. These were two people that were critical to the initial development and sustainability of these organizations.

These activities are chronicled more extensively in my article, “A Brief History of the Collaborative Minority Engineering Effort: A Personal Account,” in the book:

Slaughter, J., Tao, Y., & Pearson, Jr., W. (2015). Changing the face of engineering: The African American experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

In the same book, Darryl N. Williams and Angelicque Tucker-Blackmon highlight three K-12 programs that came out of the Sloan effort as successful model: i.e. MESA, SECME, and DAPCEP.)

A systems perspective

I am a systems engineer, and I have been called that at different points throughout my career. As such, a critical lesson I have learned is that, whether it is a weapons system like what I worked on at the Pentagon or an organization focused around supporting minorities in engineering, it is a system. As a result, you have to make the system and all of its components work together in order to have significant impact. You can have impact as an individual, but if you want to make a significant difference, you have to make the system work. So as a systems engineer, I designed programs and organizations, but more importantly, I designed these programs by finding the resources and the people who would be committed to make them successful and sustainable.

Photo provided by Dr. Pierre.