Above: Three ACM members including Macalester College (pictured) received Humanities for All Times grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Three members of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest—Colorado College, Knox College, and Macalester College—are among 12 liberal arts colleges to receive grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of its Humanities for All Times initiative.
According to the announcement, Humanities for All Times supports newly developed curricula that both instruct students in methods of humanities practice and demonstrate those methods’ relevance to broader social justice pursuits.
Fifty liberal arts colleges were invited to submit proposals to receive a grant of up to $1.5 million. In total, Mellon awarded over $16 million to support the envisioned curricular projects and help students to see and experience the applicability of humanities in their real-world social justice objectives.
The winning ACM projects, which will receive a combined total of over $3.75 million, are as follows:
- Colorado College (Colorado Springs, CO): $1,024,000 for “Humanities for Our Times: From Epistemologies and Methodologies to Liberatory Creative Practices and Social Justice,” which supports professional development for humanities faculty engaged with Colorado College’s new General Education curriculum and ongoing work toward becoming an antiracist institution.
- Knox College (Galesburg, IL): $1,234,000 for “Abolition for All Time: A Proposal for Civic Engagement and the Humanities,” a Humanities Lab to promote curricular innovation focusing on “abolition” as both a legacy of the College and a lens to understand its future.
- Macalester College (Saint Paul, MN): $1,497,000 for “Mississippi River Watershed: An Immersive Humanities Curriculum,” a project to develop innovative humanities-based educational activities that critically examine issues at the confluence of race, environment and extraction.
These projects join related initiatives from the ACM, including a series of Anti-Racism Workshops open to all ACM faculty and staff, as well as the Equitable Civic Engagement Institute, which will bring faculty, staff, and community partners together to explore how civic, business, and other dimensions of the communities in which our colleges reside affect students’ sense of belonging and well-being, their persistence toward graduation, and other issues contributing to academic success.
“The ACM congratulates Colorado, Knox, and Macalester Colleges on receiving these Humanities for All Times grants and for working to expand their humanities curricula in pursuit of social justice,” said Sonya Malunda, President of ACM. “To create a more equitable and just society requires empathy, dialogue, intercultural understanding, and other tools the humanities confer. We commend the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for investing in humanistic inquiry as a means to social justice and for recognizing the unique role liberal arts colleges can play in this pursuit.”
Read the full announcement from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation here.
