Jan 31, 2007 - Claremont, Calif. - Harvey Mudd College is one of 23 liberal arts colleges in the U.S. that will share in a $1.09-million grant for faculty career enhancement activities from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, it was announced in December.

The grant, which will be funded over five years by the foundation's Liberal Arts College Program, extends and enhances a previous grant that provided for faculty-led workshops promoting collaboration and sharing of scholarship and pedagogical strategies. An ambitious second component of the new grant is the creation of the Mellon Assemblies, which will be held during the course of the grant and enlist the next generation of faculty leaders in discovering opportunities to be more engaged in their college's mission and meeting its challenges.

The grant proposal posed the following questions as possible themes for Mellon Assembly discussion:

• How will liberal arts colleges build community (academic and social) in the 21st century?
• What are the prospects of the residential liberal arts college given changes in student demographics and student and parent expectations? What essential features are core to our mission, and how can we position our institutions to be recognized for the distinctive values we add to the landscape of American higher education?
• What are the special, non-mass-produced, unique aspects of what we do? What is "distinctively American" about our liberal arts colleges? What can be translated to other national contexts?
• How can we improve on the understanding of global issues by faculty members and students alike at liberal arts colleges?

The 23 colleges and universities that will participate in the grant are Amherst, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Denison, DePauw, Furman, Grinnell, Harvey Mudd, Haverford, Macalester, Middlebury, Oberlin, Pomona, Reed, Rhodes, Scripps, Smith, Swarthmore, Vassar, Wellesley, Wesleyan and Williams. Barnard College will serve as lead college in the project.

About the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: http://www.mellon.org/