Dr. Arthur J. Bond: Electrical Engineer & Founding Advisor of NSBE

Posted on 21. Dec, 2009 by Leshell Hatley in Electrical Engineering, Faculty, I'm a Full Professor!, Scholarly Celebrations

Arthur J. Bond (born 1917) was the dean of the School of Engineering and Technology at Alabama A&M University in Alabama, and an activist in the cause of increasing black enrollment and retention in engineering and technology. He was a founding member of the National Society of Black Engineers and part of the team that fought for state funding of engineering at Alabama A&M University.

Education

Arthur J. Bond came to Purdue University in 1957 to study electrical engineering on National Merit Scholarship and Purdue’s Special Merit Scholarship. After two years, however, he had to drop out due to a softball injury. After he recovered, he joined the army, “because Vietnam was looming on the horizon,” he would later recount.

Bond returned to Purdue in 1966, was graduated with a BSEE in 1966, MSEE in 1968, and Ph.D. in 1974.

Upon receiving his doctorate, Bond became an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Purdue for five years, and then an associate professor at Purdue Calumet. He then went to work in industry for RCA, AlliedSignal, and Bendix.

In 1989, Bond joined Tuskegee University as head of its department of electrical engineering, where he helped the university get reaccredited.

In 1992, Bond joined Alabama A&M as Dean of Engineering and Technology. At the time, the land-grant university was involved in the notorious Knight v. Alabama lawsuit, in which the plaintiff class, joined by the U.S. Justice Department argued that the State of Alabama’s system of public university funding is a violation of equal rights. The case resulted in a 1995 decree that ordered Alabama to fund engineering at Alabama A&M. The ruling further ordered that whatever level of the engineering program that would be built up in nine years would constitute the required level of funding by the state.

As dean, Bond played a pivotal role in meeting the nine-year challenge. A&M’s efforts bore fruit in 1997, when it was able to offer the first engineering courses. In 2000 mechanical and electrical engineering at A&M was accredited with the effective date made retroactive to 1998.

Honors

1994: Minorities in Engineering Award (formerly Vincent Bendix Award), American Society for Engineering Education
2000: Golden Torch Award for Academic Visionary, National Society of Black Engineers
2000: Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer, Purdue University
2005: Distinguished Engineering Alumni, Purdue University

Student Organizing

Bond was a student leader at Purdue during the time when the civil rights movement was in full swing. He would become a founding member of Purdue’s Black Cultural Center and a founder of the National Society of Black Engineers.

At Purdue, Bond led students to demand that Purdue open up its engineering schools to more blacks and women. Frederick L. Hovde, Purdue’s president at the time, was sympathetic to the cause. He appointed Bond to a steering committee, which organized the first national effort to increase minority participation in engineering.

Responding to students’ need for a place where minority students could bond and study, Purdue provided black students with a house, which Bond and his friends would “move in and decorate it and call it a Black Cultural Center,” Bond later said.

More information about Dr. Bond can be found on Purdue’s News website.

National Society of Black Engineers

When two undergraduate black engineering students, Edward Barnette and Fred Cooper, approached the dean of engineering to create a Black Society of Engineers in 1971, the dean agreed and assigned Bond, then a graduate student, to be the group’s advisor. This group would grow into a national organization that is now the National Society of Black Engineers, the one of the LARGEST STUDENT-RUN ORGANIZATION.

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Information obtained from Wikipedia.

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