As the College of Technology prepared to welcome its first students 25 years ago, a company called Microsoft was meeting with IBM Corp. to discuss an operating system for a new personal computer. Meanwhile, American car manufacturers were losing ground to Japanese rivals on quality, and were looking for managers with statistical and process expertise to regain lost market momentum.

It was in this technological and management setting - the burgeoning microprocessor and software industries, and the growing importance of technology management for business success - that EMU's newest college was conceived and launched. Today, its students still study how technology, people and business systems interact, but the range of industries covered is much larger. Students can study everything from how to manage restaurants and airports to construction sites and textile factories.

"The College of Technology has played a unique and important role at Eastern Michigan University by allowing the University to be responsive and agile in developing programs to meet the rapidly changing needs on a regional, state, national and even international basis," said John C. Dugger, the dean of the college.

The college originally had only two departments: industrial technology and industrial education. Today, it offers dozens of majors and minors through two recently reorganized schools: the School of Technology Studies and the School of Engineering Technology. The college offers programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Its doctoral program in technology launched in 2004. It also runs four research centers and institutes (see related story, page 17) that allow students to get hands-on research experience while also benefiting businesses and other funding sponsors looking for solutions to problems. More than 1,600 students are enrolled in its programs, and more than 4,000 EMU graduates have come from the college since 1995.

"The college's biggest accomplishment in the first 25 years has been its ability to achieve such a high level of success in designing special and technical programs in response to the changing world," Dugger said. "For example, EMU didn't have an aviation management program in 1980 and we created one in response to the emerging air-travel industry and the need for people who manage different aspects of the aviation business. We're proud of our contribution to EMU and our ability to assist the University in being so responsive to marketplace needs."

Among the college's degree programs are those in communication technology, computer-aided design, construction management, engineering management, interior design, legal assistant studies, polymers and coatings and pre-architecture. The college also houses the Department of Military Science and Leadership, better known as the ROTC program.

Alumni and employers in southeast Michigan are playing an increasingly larger role in shaping the focus and content of those degree programs. That input is collected through advisory committees at the program level, and through an executive advisory committee that directly advises the dean's office. Its chairman is an EMU alumnus, John Bodary.

"The college's greatest strength is its reputation for turning out hands-on, technically trained people," said Bodary, a 1984 construction management graduate. "The program continues to serve the industry with practical answers to challenges that are taking place in the industry."

Like the rest of the University, the college is designed to serve traditional and nontraditional students equally well. It accomplishes that by offering classes at convenient hours and locations, and in making the credit-transfer process easy through agreements with area community colleges. That flexibility allows students who need to work or raise families to continue taking classes while pursuing a degree.

That flexibility benefited Bodary. He worked year-round while attending classes and eventually joined Sterling Heights, Mich.-based Woods Construction after graduation. Five years later, he bought the company, which specializes in retail and commercial construction nationwide.

"It's a very available program to both the traditional and nontraditional student, and now that is more important than ever," Bodary said. "And the program continues to serve the industry with practical answers to the dynamic needs of the marketplace."

That philosophy - meeting industry needs - was inherent in the proposal presented to the EMU Board of Regents in March 1980, when it voted to create the college. Whether to create one had been studied for several years, and grew out of the need to prepare graduates to succeed in markets that were just appearing in the U.S. economy.

Several months later, the college's first dean, Alvin E. Rudisill, arrived on campus. He led the college for 10 years, and remains active in the industrial technology field and still lives in Ypsilanti.

"We were challenged to meet the needs of industry in southeast Michigan," Rudisill said. "The biggest challenge to achieving that goal was in meeting the non-credit needs of managers and workers. We needed highly qualified people to come in and teach topics such as teaming and statistical-process control. I think the big push there was simply that we had to begin competing quality-wise with the Japanese."

In its first 10 years, the college added 18 degree programs at the bachelor's and master's level. "As we did, we realized there was a parallel need for the development of non-degree programs in the quality area," Rudisill said. The result was a growing corporate services program, and a large role in shaping the facility that would later become known as the Eagle Crest Conference Center. At one point in the 1980s, College of Technology faculty and outside consultants were providing the quality-systems training to all suppliers of Ford Motor Co.

Those market-focused, entrepreneurial roots are still drawn upon by today's college leadership, such as when the college reorganized into two schools last year. "We used this as an opportunity to reflect upon our own structures and to investigate whether there might be better ways for the college to operate. We conducted surveys and analyzed the degree of relatedness among the COT programs with general education requirements," Dugger said.

"One of my visions is to take either or both of these new schools and, with the critical mass of related programs, develop special honors programs and then create additional synergies between those programs," he added. "Although change is always difficult, the COT faculty and staff have a long history of success in being agile and responsive."

Increasingly, the college is measuring its progress by using benchmarks and through a reliance on data in order to know whether it's going in the right direction. That focus on standards and statistics-driven results is encouraged by the dean's executive advisory committee.

"I think it's imperative to use this approach in order to plan for the future and, to use a sailing term, to tack the right course," Bodary said. "And for that you need ways to measure how the programs are doing. 'Where are the numbers up, where are they down? Are we seeing more traditional or non-traditional students and why, and where are they coming from? Who are the end users? Who needs and is going to hire these students?' Those are the issues we need to track."

The focus on objectives and results has allowed the college to grow tremendously over the past four years. In addition to the successful reorganization, it has developed three institutes and centers. "We have changed from a focus on programs and curricula to a focus on the linkages between the classroom and centers and institutes. Linking the classroom with these centers and institutes serves as a portal to connect our students and faculty with the world."

Now, the challenge is where to focus in the coming years, Dugger said.

"We need to identify which new directions to pursue and which new areas of expertise to develop," he said. "This will serve as the basis for developing another new center or institute and for continuing to deliver the quality, state-of-the-art experiences that empower our students to go out and make an impact by improving the competitiveness of the organizations in which they'll work."