By AFRO Staff
Dr. Freeman Hrabowski (Courtesy Photo)
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(November 15, 2009) - University of Maryland, Baltimore County President Dr. Freeman Hrabowski ranked seventh on a recent Time Magazine top 10 list of the best college presidents. He is the only African-American to make the list.
UMBC was once a small, arts-oriented, sometimes racially-charged commuter campus in the University of Maryland system, but in his 17 years Hrabowski has continually worked to change the school’s image and broaden its focus. Now the school, under his leadership, is described by Time as "a hard-discipline powerhouse."
Hrabowski has implemented programs to increase the number of African-American students in science and engineering, starting years ago with scholarships and the recruiting of not only top students, but top professors, to the campus. Now, Hrabowski told Time, while over half the students are in the sciences, the other half are in the arts.
When he was installed in 1993 as the fifth president of the young university – UMBC was then 27 years old –Hrabowski's plans were already underway; he'd been serving as acting president for nine months.
At that time, he promised to generate grant funding for the science programs and other disciplines at the school, to connect with the surrounding community and to increase the school's participation in public policy through research the college was uniquely positioned to provide.
"We're working to build a university that has first-rate research across all disciplines," Hrabowski said, according to Time.
The result of his years of focus on the university’s goals and its students, according to Time, is that "UMBC is one of the nation's leading sources of African-American Ph.D.s in science and engineering and almost half of its seniors go immediately to grad school."
Also making the top 10 are Eduardo Padrón, president of Miami Dade College, Miami – the largest community college in the nation – at number eight; and Juliet García, president of University of Texas at Brownsville – which sits blocks from the border of Mexico and educates a population, according to Time, that is 91 percent first generation college student – at number nine.