Welcome to the Teagle Foundation. We are a medium-sized foundation based in New York City with a distinctive approach to philanthropy. We believe that philanthropy today is knowledge-based rather than dollar-based, that is, our grantmaking is shaped by careful research about where our financial support can be most effective. Our grants, moreover, are made with the intent of generating new ideas, know how, and approaches, that is, knowledge likely to be useful far beyond the confines of any individual grant recipient.

Since its establishment more than sixty years ago, the Foundation's programs have changed in various ways but it has always given high priority to helping students enjoy the benefits of an intellectually stimulating college education. At this time we are especially excited about the prospects for increasing student engagement and learning in the liberal arts and sciences. As you will see from the Resources section of the site, much more is known now than just a few years ago about how students learn and what really works in higher education. We want to help that knowledge be extended, applied, and its results systematically assessed. Systematic, ground-up, faculty-led assessment, we believe, is one of the most powerful ways to improve student learning in the liberal arts. That's why it is at the center of our grantmaking.

As new grant programs are developed, we announce them on the Request for Proposals section of the site. Once grants are made, we list them promptly on our Grantees page. Since we attach such importance to increasing knowledge about student engagement and learning, White Papers and other reports from grant recipients are added to this site on a regular basis. In a more informal mode, I comment in very personal ways about liberal education on my web log on liberal education ("the liblog"). I hope visitors to the site will react to the entries on the liblog and post their responses as part of an ongoing dialogue about how we can strengthen liberal education.