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Grants in Higher Education

TEAGLE FOUNDATION GRANTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

FRESH THINKING
OTHER PROJECTS

May 2011
The Aspen Institute, Business and Society Program
Dissemination Project for "Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession"
Project Leader: Judith Samuelson

$75,000 over 24 months to build upon the work of the Business, Entrepreneurship, and Liberal Learning (BELL) project, which considered the value of integrating liberal education goals into undergraduate business education and studied to most effective ways to do so. This work culminated in a book, Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession (2011), co-authored by Anne Colby, Thomas Ehrlich, William M. Sullivan, and Jonathan Dolle. Through the work of this particular grant, the Aspen Institute will work to disseminate the recommendations from this book by holding meetings for institutions to help them implement the key concepts of the book in their own business and liberal arts programs.

Barnard College
Reacting to the Past: Creating a Sustainable Business Model
Project Leader: Mark Carnes

$25,000 over 12 months to assist with the creation of a sustainable business model for Reacting to the Past, an innovative, award-winning curriculum in which students participate in role-playing games set in historical periods of great importance. Founded in 1997 by Mark Carnes, Professor of History at Barnard College, over 300 institutions of various types - liberal arts colleges, urban commuter schools, community colleges, public universities, and more - are using the program. To help create a sustainable business model for Reacting to the Past, this grant will support the costs of a part-time graduate intern to work with Reacting project staff and also support the development of videos to best showcase the curriculum.

November 2009
Project Pericles
The Periclean Faculty Leadership Program | Project Website
Project Leader: Jan Liss

$100,000 over 28 months to develop a cohort of 30 faculty members at Periclean institutions who will champion civic engagement in the classroom, on the campus, and in the community. Faculty will develop, teach, and evaluate an academic course that incorporates issues of civic engagement, as well as organize campus-wide activities and prepare an academic paper or project. This project builds on the success of the Civic Engagement Courses program, which Teagle previously supported.

November 2008
Union College, Bard College, Colgate University, Hamilton College, Skidmore College, and Vassar College
Investigating the Utility of High-Performance Computing Capabilities at Six Liberal Arts Colleges (planning grant) | White Paper
Project Leader: Valerie Barr

$40,000 over 9 months to investigate how experience with powerful, high-performance computing technology can impact teaching, learning, and research (faculty and undergraduate) across a wide range of departments and programs at liberal arts colleges.

May 2007
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Departmental Template Survey
Project Leader: Leslie Berlowitz

$75,000 over 12 months. The need for reliable, cross-disciplinary data about the humanities is generally acknowledged by those working in these fields, especially when compared to the prodigious amount of information available in science and technology. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has already collected what data exist under the auspices of its "Humanities Indicators" project, and now seeks to gather new data that will fill in important gaps in what is known about the humanities through its new "Template Project" initiative, thereby creating a robust and useful knowledge base. The Academy will collaborate with five learned societies and the American Council of Learned Societies to survey 200-300 departments each in the disciplines of history, modern languages and literatures, art history, linguistics, and religion. Data will be collected through a template that the societies will attach to surveys they already circulate. The template questions will focus on faculty (numbers tenured, untenured, etc.; teaching load and responsibilities; graduate student teaching) and undergraduate curricula (numbers of majors, minors, interdisciplinary concentrations, courses offered, whether the department offers first-year seminars, requires a senior thesis and more). Similar data already collected from political science departments will be included in the survey results. The American Political Science Association will do the analysis. All data will be transferred to a host organization that will manage and maintain it, clean it up, and develop ways to make comparisons using this information.

February 2007
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Business Education and Liberal Learning (BELL) Project
Project Leader: Thomas Ehrlich

$375,000 over 36 months. Roughly 60% of American college students are majoring in professional fields, with roughly a third of those majoring in business or marketing. Graduates in these fields, the Carnegie Foundation argues, need the capacities to understand, even foresee, social trends and needs; to be creative and innovative in their work; to play important leadership roles; to operate effectively in a global environment; to understand their own as well as other cultures; to know how to conduct themselves ethically and with integrity in their professions; and to understand the public purposes of their work. These students, in other words, need a liberal education. Yet after an initial review of more than 30 undergraduate business programs, in addition to ongoing work in other undergraduate professional fields and in the liberal arts, the Carnegie Foundation has found that attention to the core goals of liberal learning (analytical thinking, intellectual depth, ethical understanding, leadership, and creativity), though present in most programs, is limited in scope and not well integrated with other dimensions of students' training. The Business Education and Liberal Learning (BELL) project—an action research project that has as its goal widespread change in practices of teaching and learning—responds to this problem by exploring how the goals of a liberal education can best be integrated into undergraduate business programs. Having identified some promising models for the integration of business and liberal education, the Carnegie Foundation will further the work in four stages:

Preparatory work, including an extensive review of available literature relating to the ways professional education and liberal education can be mutually enriching; consultation with a range of experienced leaders in those fields; background analyses of programs on campuses they plan to visit, as well as protocols for those visits.

Field work, entailing site visits to at least 12 campuses that are effectively integrating business and liberal education. These will be done with an eye towards developing a rich and textured understanding of the strengths and limitations of the programs, and the usefulness of their key features for other settings.

Analysis of data gathered, leading to the production of a book and other resources which will help those in professional education incorporate important dimensions of liberal education into their students' learning, and help those in the liberal arts and sciences think about how liberal learning can contribute to the preparation of professionals.

Collaborative work with key stakeholders to draw attention to the importance of integrating liberal and professional education, to make the project's resources as useful as possible, and to disseminate findings through publication and through presentations at major conferences.

The total cost of this project is $900,000. In addition to Teagle's support, the Carnegie Foundation itself will contribute $375,000, and is seeking support from other funders for the remaining $150,000.