ECE 20^th Anniversary Celebration (1984-2004)

Early History (1975-1985)

By W. Murray Black

How did engineering and our ECE department get started at George Mason? Some new departments struggle to come into existence, but for us in engineering, that actually was not the case. Our struggle, and it was a prolonged struggle, was to get our initial degree program approved by the State Council of Higher Education (SCHEV). The process was much more arduous years ago than today, particularly when the degree was the first of its kind at the university.

Part of our struggle in Richmond was the Council and particularly its staff being told repeatedly by the powerful coalition of the Engineering School Deans in the state that another engineering school was not needed. The Deans kept talking about a school whereas our objective was to offer a four-year degree.

The process itself really evolved over a period of about nearly 6 years to our having the first degree approved and 9 years before we actually became a department. In the duration, we had 3 different Presidents, 3 Provosts (or Vice Presidents for Academic Affairs), 3 Deans of the College of Arts and Sciences, and 3 Chairmen of the Physics Department.

But still, you might be thinking why did it take six years for the approval? To answer that, we need a little bit of history. Our university began as the Northern Virginia Extension Center of the University of Virginia. It only offered two-year programs. Then in 1966 the new George Mason College (GMC) of UVa began offering 4-year undergraduate degrees and in 1970 some masters degrees.

But the early development of George Mason was by the College of Arts and Sciences from the UVa - certainly not by the Engineering School at UVa. As a result, the faculty members were developing programs in the humanities, arts, and sciences. Nevertheless, even in the early days the students wanted engineering. So the Physics department seeing an opportunity to support such students became the administering unit for the two-year program even in the very earliest days of engineering at George Mason. So, as a person with a background in plasma physics, in 1971, I was tolerated by the Physics Department to become the first full-time engineering faculty member hired at GMC.

Soon we hired another engineer, Lou Welanetz, to take care of the ME and CE while I covered the EE and computer courses. Since we were covering just the first two years, the two of us could handle the course load with an occasional adjunct. But what no one expected was our incredible growth - our two-year program went from some 34 students in 1971 to 166 students in 1978 the date of our fist proposal.

From my perspective, the initial interest in engineering at GMU did not come from industry, or the community, and certainly not from the university faculty or administration. But the initial driving force for us was the desire of our students in our rapidly expanding two-year program to complete their degree at George Mason. The students liked Mason and the area. Consequently, they wanted to stay with us. A few had no choice due to their financial or family situations. But we faced many challenges, one was how could two or three faculty members propose a full degree program that obviously required many more faculty? But we could not justify the additional faculty without the program being approved at the state level!

As you might expect, our first obstacle was the university itself. Remember our roots, the faculty outside of the Physics Department just did not understand engineering at all. They were concerned about the potential expense of engineering. Nevertheless, our very large numbers impressed them since we had become one of the largest majors on campus and we had only a two-year program! On the other hand, the Physics Department was very supportive. In fact, Bob Ehrlich, the Chairman of the Department at that time was perhaps our strongest supporter. So in about 1975 or 6, we began to seriously think about a degree program.

The Dean of CAS, Leon Boothe soon became a supporter, and by the end of 1977, both the Physics Department and CAS gave us their approval to proceed with our request. BUT, Bob Krug, the Vice President for Academic Affairs (same as Provost), came from VPI (Virginia Tech, now VT). Unfortunately for us, he had been the Chairman of the Chemistry Department, and had to constantly fight the large, expensive engineering program at tech and he told me "I never want to see an Engineering Degree Proposal come across my desk". Well, for many years, his close Associate was Ralph Baxter of the English department. At the outset Ralph was very supportive of our efforts and so with Ralph and large enrollment numbers on our side Bob reluctantly let us proceed. This was important because in 1977-78, he suddenly and unexpectedly became acting President! In fact, our first proposal not only was on his desk but it went to SCHEV with his signature!

Up until 1977, we had reasonably good relationships with UVa and VPI. BUT as soon as we told them of our intention to seek degree programs, there was a complete change. George Keramidas (who had replaced Lew Welanetz who retired for the third time) and I sent an advance copy of our SCHEV proposal to Paul Torgersen, Dean of Engineering at VPI and soon thereafter paid him a courtesy visit at tech. With virtually no introduction or elaboration, he told us straight to our faces that he would oppose our programs at every level. And he did.

Nevertheless in November 1977after receiving approval from the Board of Visitors, we sent to SCHEV in early 1978 a single EE proposal (letter of intent) for its review. In April 1978, SCHEV deferred our program, because it was questioned as to whether or not we could have just one stand-alone engineering degree program housed in a Physics department.

In the summer of 1978, the next important person entered the picture - George Johnson as the third president in the three years that we had been working on the degree proposal. Unlike the previous Presidents, George saw the program as being important to the community and enthusiastically embraced it. In fact, after initial setbacks inside and outside the University, he lit a fire under us. In the fall of 1978, we not only revised the EE proposal but also created one for ME and one for CE. As we submitted our second round of the three proposals in late 1978, President Johnson gave a powerful address to the council on behalf of many new programs including ours. But the Virginia engineering establishment also heard him and increased its opposition by turning to VSPE and their alumni for support in opposing us. The result was that despite the staff of the council recommending denial of the package, the council again in April 1979 deferred action this time citing the high costs as being the major problem.

We were down, but far from out. In fact, we were more determined than ever! For the rest of 1979 and 1980 we commenced a much bigger push with industry and increased involvement with our three advisory boards and held open public hearings that were very supportive. At this point, the council staff could see that we were not going away. Consequently, SHEV launched a statewide investigation for the need of engineering in the entire state. Deans from Purdue (John Hancock) and Florida (Grintner) were brought in as consultants. But with its 3 engineering faculty members, a powerful administration, community and now industrial support, GMU definitely was beginning to shake the Virginia engineering establishment.

A compromise of types was needed, since the council did not want to further alienate Northern Virginia, but they did not want to give in to the powerful Virginia engineering establishment. Rather than making it appear that GMU was creating yet another engineering school like the others, the thrust was to concentrate on the disciplines like EE and computers that were important to the region. Hence, for the first time we began using terms like information technology. To avoid the appearance of duplication, we called EE program Computer and Electronics Engineering for both the BS and MS along with comparable programs in Computer Science. In fact, I think that prospective students who really knew little about engineering from high school, related to the words computer and electronics more than electrical! On the other hand, industry people erroneously thought that the title might suggest more of a technology degree than academic degree. Finally, to the delight of the council, we would also withdraw the ME and CE degree proposals.

In other words, rather than requesting three different undergraduate disciplines, we decided to concentrate on one, electrical, and propose both the bachelors and masters at the outset. That actually made sense to us, so we eagerly prepared another proposal. The entire package consisted of some nine programs and was entitled Providing Science and Advanced Technology Education in Northern Virginia. The programs were formally submitted in January 1981 and on March 15, 1981 the programs were all approved with little opposition. The BS program commenced in the fall of 1981 and MS in the fall of 1982.

In January 1982, I received a very short personal note from Dean Torgersen that said “Good luck with your electrical engineering program” - he knew the type of program we had! Also a few years later, perhaps with this experience in mind, Paul actually partnered with VCU to establish a new engineering program in Richmond! Amazing!

Once we had our BS and MS programs in place, the creation of the department followed naturally. Actually, we enjoyed our relationship with the Physics Department - they gave us complete autonomy to run the engineering program. Although we were looking forward to our own program we left Physics with much appreciation for them since they had been so helpful to us, particularly its chairman, Bob Ehrlich. However, we knew that we would not miss the bureaucracy of CAS that had to represent such a broad range of interests.

So after conferring the first degrees in May of 1983 we proceeded to plan for both a new department that became a reality in 1984 and a new school that became the School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE) in 1985. We note, that at the outset we called the department Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Creating its name was an internal matter, SCHEV only reviewed programs not department names!

We were exceptionally fortunate to have a very distinguished founding dean, Andy Sage, who was well recognized as a leader in engineering education and systems engineering. With much valuable assistance from Dean Sage, we were very fortunate in attracting excellent faculty members at all ranks.

The strength of any department lies with the strength of it faculty. As early as 1985 Jerry Cook became the first person of national prominence to join our faculty. Jerry was an IEEE Fellow and recent Chairman of EE at Vanderbilt. The hiring continued on at a brisk pace to develop a strong faculty to serve the increasing demand for EE and computer related degrees.