Engineering Education "Today in History" Blog: Martin Luther King Day
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (333) · January 20th, 2008 · Add a Comment
Today in History – January 20, 1986 – First federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King. Through fifteen years of the persistent efforts of Congress Members John Conyers (Michigan), Shirley Chisholm (New York) and an army of other supports, Martin Luther King Day legislation was passed in 1983. A number of changes were required for it to be acceptable as a federal holiday. The date was changed to the third Monday in January, rather than his birthday of January 15, so as to distance it from Christmas and New Years. Several states resisted celebrating the holiday for various reasons. Several southern states included celebrations for various Confederate generals on that day. Arizona voters didn’t approve the holiday until 1992 after pressure from a tourist boycott. Only recently in 2000 was it first officially observed in all 50 states.
Advocates of Martin Luther King Day promote it as a day to focus on service activities using the motto “make it a Day ON, Not a Day Off!”. In fact, the 1994 King Holiday and Service Act designates the holiday as a national day of volunteer service, asking “Americans of all backgrounds and ages to celebrate Dr. King’s legacy by turning community concerns into citizen action.”
Martin Luther King brought together a diverse cross-section of the American citizenry to break down barriers and join forces in a common cause of justice and equity. Unfortunately, we still have much further to go in achieving diversity and inclusion in engineering. Community service learning projects have been proven to be an effective tool in developing integrative thinking and societal context in engineering education, as well as a means of attracting and motivating underrepresented engineers. One of the most successful efforts is the EPICS (Engineering Projects for Community Service) program originated in the College of Engineering at Purdue and the 2005 winner of the National Academy of Engineering’s prestigious Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on Martin Luther King and community service learning. Or view our Engineering Diversity or our Computing Diversity educational community sites. View Michael Smith’s December 10th Engineering Education blog on the anniversary of his Nobel Peace Prize. The title of his Nobel lecture was “The Quest for Peace and Justice”.
Tags: Broadening Participation · General Engineering, Engineering Science
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