Gift benefits scholarships for aerospace engineering students
Marva Smalls is not in the aerospace engineering business, but South Carolina is.
That’s why Smalls, a USC alumna and executive at Viacom and Nickelodeon, donated $1 million to the McNair Center for Aerospace Innovation and Research.
The donation — the third seven-figure sum given to the center by a South Carolina businesswoman — will be earmarked for scholarships for aerospace engineering students from the Pee Dee region, which contains Smalls’ native Florence as well as Lake City, the hometown of the center’s namesake.
Ronald McNair, the first African-American civilian astronaut and a USC alumnus, was killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
The McNair Center was founded in 2011 with a $5 million gift from Lake City businesswoman Darla Moore. Another $5 million was donated by Charleston businesswoman Anita Zucker in October 2012. They, along with Smalls, were honored at Monday’s investiture ceremony of Zafer Gurdal, the McNair Center’s chairman and technical director.
Three of the center’s five programs are up and running with a small group of students enrolled, including at least 10 undergraduate students pursuing a minor in aerospace engineering. With Smalls’ $1 million gift, that enrollment is expected to grow.
The scholarships Smalls’ donations will furnish for undergraduate and graduate students reflect a changing tide in South Carolina’s major industries, she said.
“With Boeing in the Lowcountry, Honda in Florence … while it’s a field that’s not my natural affinity, it was an opportunity to merge an under-served population and marry it with a university with education and employment opportunities,” Smalls said.
As South Carolina’s aerospace manufacturing and engineering industry grows rapidly, the McNair Center will train students to enter that industry and stay in the state. Boeing’s North Charleston plant first opened in November 2011 and is set to expand. It will add 2,000 new jobs and $1 billion in investments to the Lowcountry by 2020.
“We have every intention of producing innovative thinkers capable of taking over top leadership positions at Boeing,” said Tony Ambler, dean of the College of Engineering and Computing.
While many of the obstacles Smalls faced as a black high school student in the 1970s may be gone, she said economic barriers to higher education still persist, especially in the largely agricultural Pee Dee.
“We’re clearly creating more pathways for students to go to school. But because of unemployment and underemployment that’s disproportionate in people of color, you still have those first generations of students going to college with parents who may not have all the resources to support that,” Smalls said.
The university will also reach out to support science programs in the Pee Dee, preparing the potential scholarship winners for careers in science, technology, mathematics and engineering.
“We will work with K-12 schools in the Pee Dee to create career paths for all South Carolinians,” university President Harris Pastides said.
At Gurdal’s investiture Monday night, Pastides praised Smalls, along with Moore, Zucker and Cheryl McNair, Ronald McNair’s widow, as “a veritable Mount Rushmore of female community leaders,” and cited Smalls and Ronald McNair as inspirations for Pee Dee youth.
“Marva wants to see a Pee Dee and a South Carolina where thousands of boys and girls can be just like Ron McNair,” Pastides said. “I would add I want them to be just like Marva Smalls.”