The Teagle Foundation’s Board of Directors has approved nearly $2M in support of ongoing initiatives and special projects to promote teaching and learning of liberal arts education.

Three grants were awarded under the Foundation’s Faculty Planning and Curricular Coherence initiative. Launched in 2014, it supports projects that bring faculty together to create coherent and efficient curricula whose goals, pathways, and outcomes are clear to students and other constituencies with a stake in the future of higher education. Another was made under Liberal Arts and Professions, which aims to integrate liberal arts content and perspectives into professional undergraduate education. Notably, the awards within these two areas will collectively serve three minority-serving baccalaureate institutions and over 40 community colleges across the country. Foundation President Judith Shapiro explains, “This past fall, we convened leaders within the community college sector and asked how Teagle might advance liberal arts instruction within their institutions. Rather than launch a new, sector-specific initiative, they advised that many of our ongoing efforts were applicable across institutional types. We are pleased this has been realized through the newest series of awards.” 

The Foundation has also renewed funding to two promising young organizations that seek to extend the benefits of liberal arts education “beyond the academy” to adults in workplace and community settings, as well as to veteran populations. Grant funds will aid in executing their scale-up and long-term sustainability strategies. 

The Foundation has also provided grant support to the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success based at the University of Southern California to sponsor a national award to be given to one two-year and one four-year institution annually in recognition of innovative reforms as they relate to faculty work to help overcome barriers to student success. 

Finally, the Foundation has extended its resources to College Completion Innovation Fund, a funder collaborative that will support New York City community-based organizations and colleges and universities to address undergraduate transfer student success and increasing overall momentum and persistence to graduation. 

Grants Awarded

Faculty Planning and Curricular Coherence 

Texas Success Center at the Texas Association of Community Colleges
Promoting Faculty-Led Curricular Reform
$500,000 over 60 months to build capacity at 38 Texas community colleges to implement guided transfer pathways at scale to reach their entire student bodies.

Association of American Colleges and Universities
Purposeful Pathways: Faculty Planning for Curricular Coherence
$300,000 over 36 months to convene and support four institutions – University of Houston-Downtown, Winston-Salem State University, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) – with implementing curricular reforms that guide students to higher levels of learning while improving degree efficiency and curbing instructional costs.

LaGuardia Community College 
Learning Matters: Building Curricular Cohesion at LaGuardia Community College
$260,000 over 36 months to align City University of New York system-wide general education requirements with LaGuardia Community College’s own majors and degree programs, identify and remove hidden pre-requisites that create obstacles for completion, and promote intellectual cohesion in its course offerings to develop highly structured guided learning pathways for students.

Liberal Arts and the Professions

Miami Dade College
Contextualizing Liberal Education for Applied Reasoning
$300,000 over 36 months to redesign three business education programs – business entrepreneurship, accounting technology, and transportation and logistics – to yield a new model for contextualizing liberal arts content in workforce programs that can be disseminated college-wide across its eight campuses as well as nationally.

Liberal Arts Beyond the Academy

That Can Be Me, Inc.
Books@Work
$150,000 over 24 months for promotion and refinement of Books@Work, a program that partners colleges and companies to bring faculty-led liberal arts experiences to adults in workplace and community settings.

Warrior-Scholar Project
Warrior-Scholar Project Expansion
$150,000 over 24 month to support the expansion of Warrior-Scholar Project across campuses nationwide. 

Special Projects

Graduate NYC
The College Completion Innovation Fund
$100,000 over 48 months toward the “College Completion Innovation Fund,” which will support projects that seek to address undergraduate transfer student success and increasing overall momentum and persistence to graduation in New York City.

The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty at the University of Southern California
Award for Faculty Models to Support College Student Success
$185,000 over 54 months to create a national award that would encourage campuses to rethink their policies as they relate to faculty and help overcome the barriers to scaling best practices and policies that support both faculty and student success.