1988

In last year's annual report (pdf), it was my privilege to review the major programs of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation during the years when John E. Sawyer was President, and in that way to pay tribute to his leadership. This year I would like to comment briefly on some current aspects of the Foundation's programs and to call attention to new staffing arrange ments that have been made. Then I would like to yield the balance of these pages to the Executive Vice President of the Foundation, Nell L. Rudenstine for a discussion of a new initiative undertaken by the Foundation in the field of literacy.

Programs and Grants

The record of the Foundation's grants in 1988 is described in detail in the printed annual report. A summary table is available here (pdf). In keeping with our plan to maintain a reasonable degree of continuity of support, a number of these grants are renewals.

The Foundation's strong commitment to graduate education, for instance, is reflected in the large appropriation made again this year for the Mellon Graduate Fellowships in the Humanities. Similarly, recent appropriations to The Center for Plant Conservation and The Trust for Public Land illustrate the Foundation's long-term interest in Conservation and the Environment. Grants for library preservation and for activities in the field of population also demonstrate the Foundation's willingness to provide funding over an extended period when it is appropriate to do so.

The Foundation has believed for many years in institution-building, and this continues to seem a wise approach-especially at a time when so many pressures continue to push in the direction of project support. Tageted grantmaking is effective in many contexts, but we believe it is also necessary to look directly to the health of major institutions that provide settings for both the development of new ideas and the nurturing of talent. Substantial grants made in 1988 to the Population Council and to the National Humanities Center in North Carolina are indicative of this emphasis. Similarly, a modest officers' grant was made to The New-York Historical Society to assist with the Society's planning process at a critical point in its history.

If resources are to be available for new initiatives, the Foundation must also be willing to bring to an end other programs that have largely served their purposes. Consistent with the natural rhythm of grantmaking, we made a final series of appropriations in 1988 in support of teaching and research by young scientists in medical schools. This program has been very successful, we believe, and more than $24 million has been invested in it over the last 15 years, but the staff and Trustees decided (in part on the basis of advice from those with whom we consulted) that the time had come to bring it to an orderly conclusion.

Some new directions are also represented in grants made during 1988. While the Foundation's resources will continue to be concentrated heavily on institutions and activities within the United States, a very limited number of grants will be made abroad when such grants can reinforce broader themes of the Foundation and address needs of particular urgency. Two examples can be given.

• Appropriations to three of the leading "open" universities in South Africa (the University of Cape Town, the University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of the Western Cape) were designed to support their libraries and to assist-through faculty-development programs-with the critical task of maintaining faculty morale during exceedingly hard times. The broader objective was to raise at least a small flag in support of beleaguered educational institutions of high standards, working hard and courageously on behalf of core values which we share: opportunity for all, without regard to race, and freedom of inquiry and expression under the most difficult conditions.

• Appropriations to the British Library and to the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge were intended to complement and reinforce the Foundation's commitment to preservation and access in this country by supporting a coordinated program of preservation-microfilming among research libraries in Great Britain. The funds are to be spent principally for the actual filming of materials-to archival standards- and for the attendant creation of adequate on-line bibliographic records. No two libraries will film the same materials, and the bibliographic records will be accessible not just to the libranies in Great Britain, and perhaps on the continent, but to those in this country as well. The long-term goal is to link preservation efforts on an international scale, in order to avoid redundancy and to spread the costs over a wider span of institutions and countries.

The grants to the open universities in South Africa and to the British university libraries had matching components, since in both instances we sought to encourage fundraising efforts and to stimulate other donors to help. Oxford and Cambridge are actively engaged in developing a better balance between private and public sources of support, and we believe that the interests of the academic community worldwide will be served if that objective is achieved.

A different kind of initiative for the Foundation, directed to a pressing problem in this country, grew out of a useful series of discussions with college and university presidents. When asked to identify the most serious problems facing higher education, the lack of minority faculty members was cited frequently. Following a considerable amount of additional research and consultation, which led us to conclude that this was indeed an area in which new efforts were badly needed, the Foundation made initial grants in December 1988 to eight colleges and universities to establish the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship Program-with students to be chosen and the program to be administered by the participating institutions.

This program is intended to encourage outstanding minority students to pursue Ph.D. degrees in the arts and sciences. Careful selection of participants, close interaction with faculty members, and opportunities for summer research are elements of the program. Provision is also made for repayment of undergraduate loans as students make progress with their graduate studies-the objective being to remove the disincentive effect of accumulated loan obligations when students consider teaching and research careers.

We are working closely with coordinators at the participating colleges and universities to be sure that records are maintained on a consistent basis. It is important, we believe, not only to monitor carefully projects of this kind, but also to learn as much as we can from them about the factors that influence the career decisions of exceptionally able minority students. Right now, far too little is known to allow anyone to speak confidently about the most effective ways of increasing significantly the representation of minority scholars on the faculties of the leading colleges and universities. We expect in time to develop complementary programs, involving other sets of educational institutions, as we continue to examine alternative approaches.

In defining directions for the Foundation, we are committed to placing a premium on research as a guide to the development of programs-but without, we hope, making a fetish of this way of working. "Research" may actually be too grandiose a term to describe what we have in mind. Under this heading, we include a wide variety of studies, some short in duration and highly informal, others more elaborate.

To illustrate, our colleague, Carolyn Makinson, Program Associate in Population and Public Affairs, is reexamining the field of population, to which the Foundation has a long-term commitment. She is consulting with experts in the field-including reproductive biologists, demographers, and individuals with a primary interest in public policy-in order to sharpen our sense of those aspects of the field that are most promising and most in need of the forms of support that we can provide.

We are also reviewing the Foundation's pattern of grantmaking in the broad and rather amorphous area of public affairs. Stephanie Bell-Rose, Program Associate for Public Affairs and Higher Education, is surveying the current status of the major research organizations and "think tanks" (principally in Washington and New York) and also examining the question of what role, if any, this Foundation might play in the field of public education, looked at from the perspective of public policy. We are conscious of the need to develop a more coherent approach in public affairs and are well aware that there are difficult choices to be made. It is important, in our view, to support efforts and organizations that enjoy strong leadership; also, to the extent possible, we would like to develop more overlap between the interests of the Foundation in public affairs and the activities of the Foundation in other areas-or at least to recognize more consciously the overlaps that already exist.

Neil Rudenstine has finished a most interesting study of trends in both program directions and finances-and the intersections between the two-within the world of the major art museums. His conclusions emphasize the desirability of developing programs that will serve as counterweights to other pressures-including, for example, those created by intensive special exhibition programs. We are now exploring ways to strengthen curatorial and related functions within major museums, and perhaps to assist in increasing the ratio of "core" income to total income.

Finally, mention should be made of a large-scale study of prospects for faculty staffing in the arts and sciences on which Julie Ann Sosa (currently a graduate student at Oxford University) and I have been working. The project began modestly enough as a means of informing ourselves about a set of problems to which earlier programs of the Foundation had been addressed-especially faculty development. But it then took on a life of its own as we learned of the availability of some unexpectedly rich sources of data and as we became more conscious of the need for a comprehensive analysis of the changes that are likely to occur in supply/demand relationships over the coming decades.

We have tried to build an apparatus that can be used to generate projections based on detailed age distributions of faculties and varying assumptions about such factors as retirement rates, population trends, enrollment patterns, shifts in the popularity of fields of study, changing student/faculty ratios, the duration of graduate study, and numbers of Ph.D. 's awarded. The issues are intriguing, and the findings of this research (which are to be published by the Princeton University Press in the fall of 1989) could have implications for graduate schools and governmental policies as well as for programs here at the Foundation.

Let me conclude this section by reaffirming the Foundation's responsibility to evaluate carefully the results of its grant programs, while resisting a mechanical or bureaucratic approach. Within this context, the Foundation will encourage prudent financial management when grants for endowment are provided, and we are now exploring ways to achieve this end.

Staffing

As readers of these reports will know, J. Kellum Smith, Jr. has served with distinction as Vice President and Secretary of the Foundation, and as the staff member with the principal responsibility for population, medicine, and public health, since 1974. On December 31, 1988, Mr. Smith retired from these positions. While all of his colleagues recognize that he deserves a respite from the heavy day-to-day administrative duties that he has discharged so admirably for so long, we are also well aware of how hard it will be to sustain the professionalism and standard of care that have marked his work.

It is reassuring to be able to report that Mr. Smith has agreed to continue to advise me and others at the Foundation, while pursuing his own writing projects. At their December meeting, the Trustees voted with enthusiasm to confirm the appointment of Mr. Smith as the first "Senior Fellow" of the Foundation. I would add this personal note: I will be forever grateful for the gentle tutoring that I have received from Mr. Smith during my first year at the Foundation, and for his friendship. Fortunately, neither need end.

Mr. Rudenstine has succeeded Mr. Smith as chief "contact person" (not our phraseology!) at the Foundation, in addition to serving as general deputy to the President and leading the Foundation's activities in the arts and humanities. Mr. James M. Morris has succeeded Mr. Smith as Secretary, while continuing to serve as Program Director for Higher Education.

The character and quality of the staff of any organization make a decisive difference to what can be accomplished. That simple proposition holds with particular force in the case of this Foundation because the professional staff is both so small and so important in developing programs for review by the Trustees.

Following extensive searches, five new staff members were appointed in 1988:

• Rachel Bellow joined the Foundation as Program Associate for the Arts, with particular responsibility for the performing arts, having previously worked with issues of arts policy and with programs designed to assist individual writers and artists.

• Stephanie Bell-Rose, whose background is in law and public affairs, is now Assistant Secretary of the Foundation, Program Associate for Public Affairs and Higher Education, and the lawyer among us.

• Henry Drewry accepted appointment as Program Associate for Higher Education, with special responsibility for a new program of undergraduate fellowships for minority students (described briefly above), after having worked for many years in the field of teacher preparation at the same time that he was teaching history in both secondary school and university settings.

• Carolyn Makinson, who previously directed a population survey in Burundi and did research on child mortality and health in Egypt, is now Program Associate for Population and Public Affairs.

• Roberto Ifill, now serving as Lecturer in Economics and Dean of Freshmen at Williams College, will join the staff in mid-1989 as Program Associate for Higher Education and Public Affairs with particular responsibility for liberal-arts colleges.

In my judgment, we are very fortunate to have attracted such outstanding new colleagues. The double titles carried by some reflect our desire to take full advantage of the broad interests of staff members and to be alert to grantmaking opportunities that cut across standard program categories.

We have also arranged for Gardner Lindzey, a distinguished psychologist who is concluding ten years as Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, to work with us in the field of literacy, and for Harriet Zuckerman, Professor of Sociology at Columbia, to advise us in the broad field of science and society. The willingness of such able and experienced individuals to participate in particular aspects of the work of the Foundation enables us to extend our reach without (we hope) creating new complications for our grantees or for ourselves.

The following section of this annual report is devoted to a discussion of the field of literacy and the Foundation's activities within it. Mr. Rudenstine has been exploring the dimensions of the field-reviewing the literature and consulting with knowledgeable people-and his conclusions, as they affect the programs of the Foundation, are summarized below.

William G. Bowen
President
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
140 East 62nd Street
New York, NY 10021
(212) 838-8400