Late in the summer of l983, following meetings in Madison to discuss the future of the College, the announcement was made that DSC would be given a new mission: preparing people to work with computers in business and education. The school year started with Richard Konkel, the Dean of Academic Affairs, serving as Acting President.

"Soon an announcement was made that an executive with Citibank of Sioux Falls would be on loan to Dakota State to serve as President: Charles Luke. He is a forceful manager who had worked for IBM for twenty-three years. He had joined Citibank after having been a Branch Manager with IBM: a position of considerable responsibility. Citibank continued to pay his salary while he was President of DSC.

"Chuck Luke met with the deans, business manager, and the division chairs; he called special meetings of the faculty of each division, and he spoke at meetings of the general faculty and to the student body. At each of these meetings he presented an overview of the new functions he expected Dakota State to assume, but he did not describe specific programs...

"In the late spring, l984, the South Dakota Board of Regents approved a four-year Bachelor of Business Administration in Information Systems degree and a two-year Associate of Science in Application Programming degree. DSC President Charles Luke organized, guided, stimulated, and supervised the development of both programs.

"The two-year program was based largely on ideas Bruce [White] and I [Eric Johnson] brought back from Dallas. We started with a two-semester sequence which was designed to teach principles and logic of clear programming; almost incidentally, the PL/I programming language is taught. Obviously these courses were based on the IBM Application Programmer Training class we were in. Large amounts of the summer of 1984 were spent in organizing units of these courses and thinking how best to synchronize the several sections.

Source:  Johnson, Eric.  "Dakota State University: A

 Brand New Day, A Selective Account of the Changes at Dakota State During 1983-84" , January 1985