An $8.1 million grant will be used to build a two-way street between the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest.
The grant, awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will serve as the foundation for a seven-year initiative encouraging students from underrepresented backgrounds to participate in graduate school preparation and to consider careers teaching at liberal arts colleges.
The money will be used for a host of programs meant to increase student opportunity in the CIC-ACM partnership.
The fellows program will offer 280 undergraduate fellowships for ACM students to support mentoring, career development and experiential research, including a paid summer research internship on a CIC campus.
It also will create 30 faculty fellowships in tenure-track positions at ACM colleges for underrepresented CIC students working toward master’s or doctoral degrees, and includes mentoring and other developmental benefits during the first two years of appointment.
The program will include a series of annual ACM-CIC meetings and workshops to improve communication and share best practices for supporting diverse faculty.
Barbara McFadden Allen, the CIC executive director, said the benefits of the Mellon-funded program would flow both ways.
“The fellows program will leverage the strengths of these two consortia, both individually and as partners in collaboration, to address the challenges of diversifying the professorate,” she said. “Together we can connect undergraduate and graduate programs across research universities in liberal arts colleges.”
Amber Cox, the CIC associate director, said the program has the added benefit of targeting liberal arts disciplines.
“These programs usually target underrepresented students in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines,” she said.
Most important, she said it would offer new opportunities and options for students who aren’t necessarily seeking a research-rich career path.
“It’s going to help create more-interested candidates,” she said. “It’s a very strategic way to attract them and has the added benefit of offering the program across sets of schools. It addresses the parts of the puzzle in so many different ways.”
