Minority College Presidents Share Their Stories: Dr. Bob Suzuki was a content assistant professor of engineering at the University of Southern California in the late 1960s who wanted nothing more than tenure. But then all hell broke loose.Suzuki found himself enveloped in the civil rights struggles of the era, organizing with local community groups and becoming a social activist himself.
It was then that Suzuki understood that the traditional professorial track would not satisfy his ambitions and the thirst for social activism he developed.
“I wasn’t doing research so I reached a point after four years that I needed to make a decision,” Suzuki said during a roundtable discussion of university presidents at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE). “I decided I couldn’t drop the social activism and it changed the course of my career.”
