The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) announced Feb. 5 that it will receive $10 million from three major foundations to increase its fellowships and help advance the study of the humanities in the United States and abroad.
"These splendid gifts are a very strong vote of confidence in our council's historical record and our priorities for the future," said ACLS President John H. D'Arms.
The Andrew W. Mellon and Ford Foundations have made endowment grants of $5 million and $4 million, respectively, to improve the council's capacity to award individual peer-reviewed fellowships for scholars in the humanities. These grants inaugurate a five-year campaign by the ACLS to double the amount of fellowship support that it annually awards to scholars, and to fund these increases in the future by doubling the ACLS endowment available for fellowships, from the current $25 million to $50 million.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York will grant the ACLS $1 million over four years to plan and begin a new program of assistance to humanities scholars and institutions abroad, where fragile institutions need sustained support, such as in the former Soviet Union and sub-Saharan Africa.
The foundation grants are the start of an endowment campaign that will enable ACLS to increase the stipends it provides to junior faculty fellows from $20,000 to $30,000 a year and to senior scholars from $20,000 to $50,000 a year. The council's total annual spending on the fellowships will more than double, from $1.1 million to $2.4 million.
ACLS fellowships are designed to permit scholars to devote a full year to research and writing in such fields as literatures and languages, history, anthropology, political theory, philosophy, classics, religion, the history of art, linguistics, musicology, and the study of diverse world civilizations and cultures.
"These substantial and welcome grants arrive at a critical moment," said D'Arms, "and will help begin to address a long-standing problem in the humanities. Federal and other national funds for humanistic research have been declining for many years. The Mellon and Ford Foundations, through their substantial support for ACLS fellowships are restoring vitality to the national support system. And by helping us to strengthen the process by which we select our fellows, they also improve our ability to identify more of the truly significant, imaginative and adventurous research which humanists are attempting to undertake."
Over the past 15 years, ACLS officials point out, there has been a 40 percent decline in the total number of humanities fellowships nationwide, as well as a significant decline in their purchasing power. The ACLS endowment funds now provide 55 fellowships a year, and since scholars normally request their colleges or universities to bring them up to full salary so as to support a year's leave, the increase in ACLS stipends helps lessen financial burdens for the institutions.
"These foundation grants to the ACLS are wonderful news for the humanities," said Cornell President Hunter Rawlings.
"These fields are at the very center of the liberal arts," he said. "Fellowships for extensive research on really significant topics help our professors become stronger scholars and therefore more confident and more effective teachers. In most cases, colleges and universities share the costs of research leaves with ACLS. The plans announced [Feb. 5] will balance that partnership and send strongly positive signals to humanists on all campuses. I know from discussions with John D'Arms that these foundation grants -- magnificent as they are -- will not alone fully endow the ACLS Fellowship Program. I hope other donors and institutions will join the campaign to support these fellowships."
Over the past 60 years the ACLS has awarded about 3,000 fellowships, many to scholars at early stages in their careers, including such leading figures in the humanities as Svetlana Alpers, Ernst Badian, Alan Brinkley, Caroline Bynum, Noam Chomsky, Giles Constable, Lizabeth Cohen, Andrew Delbanco, Denis Donoghue, Stanley Fish, Michael Fried, Peter Gay, Clifford Geertz, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lynn Hunt, Tony Judt, Irving Lavin, Paul LeClerc, R.W.B. Lewis, Henry Millon, Helen North, Francis Oakley, Nell Painter, J.G.A. Pocock, Albert Raboteau, Richard Rorty, Fritz Stern, Helen Vendler, and Christoph Wolff.
The American Council of Learned Societies is a private non-profit federation of 60 national scholarly organizations, founded in 1919. Information about the council and its fellowship programs is available on its World Wide Web site at http://www.acls.org/welcome.htm.
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