Bruce McEver, IE 1966, spent most of his days at Tech focused on 
engineering courses, but an English class he took with professor James Dean Young left a lasting impression 
on the young man.

McEver went on to earn an MBA from Harvard and founded financial services firm Berkshire Capital, but he carried an understanding of the connections between the mechanical arts and the fine arts that led him to endow the McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Tech in 1999 and establish the McEver Program for Engineering and the Liberal Arts in 2001.

That longstanding support 
continued this spring when McEver—who has published three chabpooks of poetry and one collection, Full Horizon—returned to Tech to teach a seminar in the School of History, Technology and Society. “Witness to a Changing Conscience: Writing and Personal Transformation” (HST 3818) focused on “writing that witnesses to fundamental transformations in individual moral consciousness in a world transformed by scientific and technological development,” according to its syllabus. McEver made weekly trips from New York City to teach the course.

The course was co-taught with K. J. Knoespel, currently the McEver Professor of Engineering and the Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech, and included visits from a number of guest speakers, among them noted theologian Harvey Cox and Bill Foege, the 2012 recipient of the Ivan Allen Prize for Social Courage. In February, the McEver Poetry Reading featured poets Theresa Davis (one of the four 2012 McEver Visiting Chairs in Writing at Tech) and Chris Forhan, as well as McEver himself.

This story was written by Rachael Maddux and originally appeared in Vol. 88 of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine.