At the age of 80, C. Dianne Briggs Martin ’65 still has an insatiable passion for teaching, which was instilled in her during her time as an Economics and Mathematics major at McDaniel College, formerly Western Maryland College (WMC). “In terms of a great liberal arts education, WMC couldn’t be beat. I ended up with a great education, which certainly helped propel me forward in the things that I ended up doing in my life,” Martin says.
While she never could have predicted a career in computer science back in 1965, it was the foundation in philosophy and critical thinking she got on the Hill that led her to a role at IBM working on the Apollo missions, breaking gender barriers in the industry, and a teaching career that she just can’t seem to give up quite yet.
Currently teaching Computer Ethics at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and Information Policy online for The George Washington University (GW), Martin can trace her love for teaching all the way back to a ninth-grade mathematics classroom in Prince George’s County, Maryland, in 1965.
In her own words, we learn about the former McDaniel trustee’s career journey, the challenges of being a woman in programming in the 1960s, how computer science has changed over the decades, and what her next mission is.
I had two graduate offers in Economics — one from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one from the University of North Carolina — but I ended up accepting neither one because I got married right after graduation to my husband, Dave Martin ’62, who had been serving in Korea. I started my career teaching ninth grade math for a year before I was recruited to become a programmer. I loved teaching and I loved my students, but I sort of realized I was at a crossroads. Either I would end up being a math teacher for the rest of my life or, if I was going to do something different, that was the time to pursue it because I didn’t have children yet. So, I kind of tossed my resume out there and a lot of the computer companies were looking for math majors. I was called in for an interview and got a great offer from IBM, where I learned computer programming.
I was with IBM for three years in its federal systems division. For my first year, I was working on a classified Air Force project. But IBM had also won the contract to do the programming for the Apollo project, so I moved over to that. I worked on Apollo 8, which was the first mission around the moon, and then Apollo 11, which is when they actually landed on the moon. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I have to say that I did not develop the math — that was developed by those wonderful women from “Hidden Figures” — but I did get the opportunity to program some of that math for the mission.
When I first started at IBM, the first several months were me learning programming. I was in classes and trainings all the time, and I immediately thought, “Gosh, I would love to be one of these teachers.” I was learning programming and simultaneously thinking what fun it would be to teach programming. IBM did have educational benefits when I was working for them, so I was able to get my master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, and then I taught there for seven years. After that, GW recruited me to come be an instructor there. I worked up the ranks, joined the administration, and ultimately retired as vice provost for faculty affairs, but I’m still teaching today at both GW and UNC.
On my first assignment with IBM, I believe I was the only woman in that environment on the Air Force project. On the Apollo project, I only remember one other young woman; it was otherwise all men. Interestingly, I had to watch the moon landing on television like everybody else. I was 8½ months pregnant at the time, and they wouldn’t allow women — especially pregnant women — in Mission Control. I wanted to go back and work for IBM after having my first child, but they wouldn’t allow women to work part time at that point. They lost a lot of good talent that way.
I met a dear friend, Shelly Heller, in my master’s degree program. She had also worked for IBM in a different division and went through the same thing as me when she got pregnant and had a child. So, we did our master’s degrees together, we raised our children together, and both of us delayed getting our doctoral degrees because we were raising children. We both ended up at GW in the School of Engineering as assistant professors, but we were like 10 years behind our colleagues in terms of the timing of our degrees. At that time, I think there were two other women, and we were there as these two women in Computer Science, 10 years older than where we “should” have been, with people younger than us outranking us. Something that’s funny and kind of an indicator of the value of women in the field at that time: Shelly has dark hair; I was blonde. We couldn’t have looked more different. But the men never paid enough attention to us to tell us apart. We were just always “Shelly and Dianne.” We had to make our way together and we partnered together on a lot of research, grants, and community initiatives.
In the past, Shelly and I worked to put together cyber camps in the summer for girls and were really invested in bringing computers into the classroom and increasing access for girls. One of the first grants we had together was bringing young women of color to the threshold of science. I also spent two years in Dubai as the dean of a woman’s college at Zayed University. My goal was to impart in those women a sense that they could be computer professionals. By the time I left, they had started a master’s certificate in cybersecurity that many of my students were signing up for. They were going to be part of their nation’s security infrastructure after they finished their studies.
It’s a much more diverse field than when I was sitting as one of the few women in the room. The key is recruiting woman faculty members; if you want to have woman students, they must see themselves in the faculty. It’s about representation. I think girls and women are feeling like they can go into computing these days. That wasn’t always the case.
I’ve been teaching computer ethics for 40 years now, and it’s something I’ve become known for because very few people teach it. It’s where my good ol’ Western Maryland liberal arts education comes in because you just start out with a good philosophical background and ethical frameworks. We look at professional ethics, professional codes, privacy, intellectual property, free speech, bullying, cybercrime, and lately, artificial intelligence. Every Computer Science major must take this course if they’re going to be a professional. They need ethics training so that they will make the right decisions when they are developing systems in the future.
Well, when I was in undergrad, computers were barely on the horizon and were just starting to go commercial. I never could have predicted then where we would be now. But when we crossed over into the 21st century is when the explosion of the World Wide Web and the internet really happened. Connecting the whole world together — the good, the bad, and the ugly — was made possible because of the rapid increase in the capacity of computing both in terms of speed and memory capacity. Back when we were doing the Apollo projects, we had very limited memory and had to keep shuffling programs back in and out of memory. Now, there’s essentially unlimited memory.
The whole artificial intelligence issue is looming so big. Everybody who does any thinking about social implications is very concerned. We tend to get a little bit behind the eight ball when it comes to regulation here in the United States. Europe is already ahead of us in passing laws attempting to regulate AI and its uses, whereas we tend to let things go kind of wild and then try to rein it in. But with something like AI, reining it in after the fact is going to be very, very difficult. Then again, it’s also possible that we figure out AI can’t really be regulated.
The courses I teach are so interesting. I’ve done a lot of work on the ethical implications and social consequences of computing. That goes back to my liberal arts undergraduate education, thinking from that wider perspective. I also teach Information Policy, and a lot of students come into it dreading it because they don’t want to be in a class that is so philosophical and less hands-on. They want to be in their technical classes. But by the end, they think it’s the best course they ever took. It’s the excitement of opening students’ minds to these very interesting and subtle nuances about technology that they would never think about in just being good programmers or systems or software engineers.
Because I have this strong sense of ethics and social impact, I have become very much involved in social justice issues in my community here in Chapel Hill. I’m working with Black activists in my community on some pretty intense social justice issues, particularly in the area of equity and education. That’s kind of what my passion is now in addition to teaching. I am still teaching, and I ask myself every year, “OK, is this going to be the last year I’m going to teach?” And then every year, I sign up again and I do it. So, I have no idea if this is the last year I’m going to teach, because I continue to enjoy it, and the online courses are so easy for me to teach that it’s almost a shame not to do it. But where I see myself with however many years I happen to have left is doing more of that social justice work in my community.