1998
President's Report
In 1998, the Foundation's appropriations exceeded those made in the previous year by $25 million - an unprecedented increase of 20 percent. Of the new total of nearly $145 million, over 60 percent (more than $85 million) was appropriated in direct support of programs in higher education, research, and scholarly communication, with a broad emphasis on the humanities. This concentration of activity has characterized the Foundation's grantmaking from its beginnings in 1969. Similarly, as can be seen from the summary tabulation (pdf), the Foundation has continued its programmatic interests in the performing arts, museums, the environment, population, and public affairs. A list of individual grants is available in the printed annual report. Thus, the Foundation's grantmaking interests and objectives have remained remarkably constant over 30 years, but its scale of activities has increased dramatically and the specific ways in which the Foundation has sought to serve its objectives have evolved as times, needs, and opportunities have changed, and as new colleagues have been added to the staff and the Board of the Foundation.
Staffing
Much depends, always, on day-to-day leadership at the staff level, and in 1998 the titles of Harriet Zuckerman and Pat McPherson were changed to senior vice president and vice president, respectively, to reflect more accurately the key roles that these two individuals play in shaping the Foundation's grantmaking. In addition, Saul Fisher was appointed to the program/technical staff to assist with all aspects of technology within the Foundation and to work with Thomas Nygren and Gilbert Whitaker on the Foundation's program in cost-effective uses of technology in teaching. At the end of 1998, the Foundation appointed Glenda Burkhart to the new position of director of administration and special projects; in this role, Ms. Burkhart, who has a history of accomplishment in corporate positions, will strengthen our capacity to function effectively internally while simultaneously helping us address unusually attractive opportunities to work with others outside the Foundation. I must also report, with mixed feelings, the decision of Jacqueline Looney to return to Duke to accept a major appointment in the graduate school and provost's office. We are delighted that Jackie is to have such a fine opportunity, back near her family, but we will also miss greatly the outstanding leadership she has given to the Foundation's Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship Program (MMUF). Pat McPherson is coordinating the search for a successor, who will both lead the MMUF program and work on other aspects of undergraduate education.
Near the end of 1998, the Foundation also lost a remarkable woman, Margaret Massiah, who was responsible for the housekeeping staff. Margaret had worked at the Foundation longer than any current staff member, having come in 1971. Her warmth, intelligence, and infectious good spirit made more difference to the working of the Foundation than those who did not know her can possibly appreciate. A memorial service was held at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Harlem, and the outpouring of respect and affection, from so many people with whom Margaret had worked, was a moving testimonial to how much difference one person can make.
Race-Sensitive Admissions
As was anticipated in last year's report, the book on race-sensitive admissions on which Derek Bok and I had been working was published in September 1998 under the title The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions [Princeton University Press]. The book draws heavily on the Foundation's College and Beyond database, which includes detailed records of the in-college and post-college experiences of approximately 90,000 matriculants who entered 28 academically selective colleges and universities in 1951, 1976, and 1989. One of our goals was to alter in at least some degree the nature of the contentious and often high-pitched debate on this subject by encouraging more attention to careful study of facts¾how race-sensitive admissions policies have been carried out and what their effects have been on both the students who were admitted and, to the extent one can gauge it, the larger society.
We have worked hard to disseminate the findings and have been heartened by the interest that the book has elicited and gratified by the generally positive response to it. Of particular interest to many people was the new evidence presented on the educational benefits of diversity for students of all races and the considerable success achieved by many of the African-American graduates in earning advanced degrees, competing for demanding jobs in the for-profit as well as the nonprofit sector, and providing disproportionate amounts of leadership in a wide range of volunteer activities (especially in civic and community affairs). Noteworthy, too, were the strongly positive reactions by former students of all races to the efforts that have been made by their colleges and universities to enroll more diverse student bodies. Finally, the study found that, far from having been demoralized by academically demanding programs (as some have alleged), the black matriculants felt that they had learned an enormous amount and, with few exceptions, were enthusiastic supporters of the programs in which they had enrolled.
The most troubling finding, which we have discussed at length in many settings, is that, overall, the grades African-American matriculants earn at selective colleges and universities are lower than their classmates' and that only about half of the difference in average class rank can be attributed to differences in SAT scores, high school grades, and socioeconomic status. The reasons for this phenomenon, generally called "underperformance," are not well understood. Among the possible explanations are poorer high school preparation that is sometimes concealed by high grades, vulnerability to negative stereotypes, peer pressures, and difficulties in adjusting to the unfamiliar academic and social environment of predominantly white and highly selective colleges. Fortunately, there are examples of experimental programs that suggest that underperformance can be reduced or eliminated altogether, and the Foundation is sponsoring a variety of studies intended to increase our understanding of the problem and identify ways of encouraging all students to achieve their full academic potential. Other studies are intended to help schools find ways of expanding the pools of strong minority candidates for admission.
We were also reminded¾quite often and quite appropriately!¾of the study's limitations, including its focus on only a relatively small sector of American higher education. The sector of higher education represented by the academically selective schools in our database comprises only about 20 percent of all four-year institutions, and it would of course be highly desirable to examine the experiences with diversity in the other sectors. Two colleagues of ours, Henry Drewry and Humphrey Doermann, are now engaged in a companion study of historically black colleges and universities (which is, however, based on a more limited dataset and has somewhat different objectives); other studies, several sponsored by the Foundation (see the inventory of Foundation-sponsored research in higher education in last year's report), are concerned with community colleges and higher education in general. The debate over race-sensitive admissions is particularly intense within the academically selective sector, including the leading professional schools of law, medicine, and business, precisely because these are the schools that are fortunate enough to have to make difficult choices among far larger numbers of qualified candidates than they can accommodate. But of course the importance of diversity in higher education extends far beyond these institutions.
A second limitation of our study is that it pays inadequate attention to underrepresented minority groups other than African-Americans, primarily because the numbers of students from other groups in the 1976 entering cohort (on which our study focuses heavily) were too small to permit the kind of statistical analysis on which the study depends. A distinguished demographer, Marta Tienda, will be analyzing the experiences of the Hispanic students who are being enrolled in larger and larger numbers by these schools, and the Foundation is also sponsoring other research that will be more inclusive yet in terms of the student populations that it covers.
More generally, the publication of The Shape of the River has stimulated a great deal of interest in additional research on race and opportunity as well as on other aspects of higher education¾including, for example, the respects in which going to college does and does not promote "well-being;" peer group effects on the learning experience; and the changing uses that women have made of educational opportunities at selective colleges and universities. The Foundation will continue to support the most promising proposals it receives, subject only to budgetary constraints and the need to manage access to the College and Beyond database in ways consistent with limited staff resources and the promises of confidentiality made to participating institutions and individuals.
The Performing Arts - Orchestras
Also in 1998, the Trustees reviewed a careful study of orchestras (principally mid-sized ones) conducted by Catherine Wichterman, the Foundation's program officer for the performing arts, and endorsed a new initiative intended to strengthen artistic direction within this important field. The study was highly participatory, in that it involved the convening of an "Orchestra Forum" and the continuing exchange of concerns and ideas among a group of musicians, executive directors, conductors, orchestra trustees, and other staff members. The conclusions drawn from the Forum are incorporated in a paper by Ms. Wichterman that constitutes the last part of this report. While the paper identifies a number of concerns and some problems that can truly be called "structural" (ambiguous and split leadership, for example), it ends on an optimistic note. The orchestra field appears ready to confront such questions and to move in new directions. Accordingly, the Foundation expects to make three-year grants to approximately five orchestras annually. Grants will range from $250,000 to $1,000,000 and will be designed to help orchestras more clearly define their artistic identities, increase the role of musicians and composers in artistic decision-making, better integrate artistic and institutional planning, and strengthen ties to their communities. In keeping with its belief that substantive change requires long-term investment, the Foundation will also be prepared to renew grants to individual orchestras for up to ten years in hopes that their work will not only improve their own operations, but also provide strong examples to the field.
Art Conservation and Museums
About two years ago, the Foundation's Trustees decided to separate responsibilities for what had been two components of a single broad field then called "Arts and Culture:" namely, the Performing Arts, on the one hand, and Museums and Art Conservation, on the other. Each of these areas of activity is sufficiently important to deserve "stand-alone" status, and the areas are so different as to require separate leadership. Angelica Zander Rudenstine is the Foundation's senior advisor for museums and art conservation, and some sense of the range of projects and programs of current interest to the Foundation can be noted from grants made last year:
- A grant of $2.6 million was made to Carnegie Mellon University for use by the Mellon Institute's Research Center on the Materials of the Artist and Conservator in support of research in conservation science. For the past ten years, the Center has been under the leadership of Paul Whitmore, a research chemist, who has pursued steadfastly his commitment to "provide scientific information to the art, library, and conservation community, so that the creators and preservers of artifacts can make rational decisions about prolonging the life of these objects." In keeping with that mission, the Center's research has been focused on: (a) exploration of the fundamental chemical and physical processes by which art and library materials tend to degrade; (b) development and implementation of tests that will evaluate long-term stability of these materials, thus explaining and predicting problems of impermanence; and (c) development of practical means by which conservators can identify existing or potential problems, monitor their onset, and prevent or cure them.
- Three grants were made in the field of photograph conservation. The largest of the three (over $2.1 million) was made to establish a two-year postgraduate curriculum in photograph conservation to be based in Rochester, New York, and to combine the resources of the George Eastman House, the Image Permanence Institute, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. A smaller grant (of $360,000) was awarded to the University of Delaware for a complementary program of collaborative workshops in photograph conservation. A third grant was made to the to the Museum of Modern Art ($1.1 million) to help establish a department of photograph conservation, a fully equipped facility, a senior endowed position, research programs, and advanced training for future conservators.
- Under the Foundation's program of grants to college and university art museums, an endowment challenge grant of $450,000 was made to the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College to strengthen the educational role of its collections and programs.
- Under a new program to establish entry-level positions at leading museums for postdoctoral scholars, a grant of $360,000 was made to the Cleveland Museum of Art.
In the next few years, the Foundation plans to increase its grantmaking in the museum and art conservation fields, continuing forms of support that have characterized its programs to date, while also encouraging productive uses of digital technologies that will enhance modes
of access to important visual and other related materials. We believe that these technologies have the capacity to assist established scholars (and students) to make much more effective use of works of art while simultaneously enriching the educational process.
Fellowships, and especially Postdoctoral Fellowships
In our view, there is no more important form of support for the humanities and the related social sciences than the provision of funding for outstanding graduate students and young scholars. Other annual reports have contained full descriptions of the Foundation's ongoing programs of support for doctoral education¾which consist of both institutional grants and portable fellowships. In 1998, approximately $18 million was appropriated for these purposes. There is only one change in arrangements that should be mentioned in this report: Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, has assumed responsibility for administering the program of portable, entry-level fellowships that makes approximately 85 new awards each year. I wish to record here our appreciation to Alvin Kernan, the Foundation's senior advisor in the humanities, who administered this fellowship program with distinction for the previous six years.
Postdoctoral fellowships, which have a long and distinguished history in the sciences, (Note 1) are becoming increasingly important in the humanities. While modest amounts of money have been appropriated for such fellowships for many years (starting with grants to Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan, as well as some research universities, in the 1970s and 1980s), 1998 was a record-setting year in this regard. In total, more than $15 million was appropriated under this broad heading.
Liberal Arts Colleges
The Foundation's early emphasis on providing postdoctoral fellowships for use by liberal arts colleges has continued, and since 1994, grants have been made to Amherst, Barnard, Oberlin, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and Williams Colleges and Wesleyan University. Haverford, Pomona, Carleton, Macalester, Smith, and Vassar were added to this list in 1998. The program has two objectives: to allow outstanding young academics to begin their teaching careers despite the difficult job market and to enable selective colleges to enrich their curricula and refresh their faculties. While the details vary somewhat from college to college (as they should, since each institution is encouraged to think about its particular circumstances and needs), the general arrangement is for postdoctoral fellows to teach one course per term, to participate in faculty seminars which sometimes involve several neighboring institutions, and to receive support and encouragement for their research. Fellows are normally appointed for two-year terms after national searches, and the colleges usually seek individuals who will strengthen departments that are thinly staffed or will offer specialized courses that could not be introduced otherwise.
Research Universities
Recent experience with these fellowships has been so positive for both the colleges and the young scholars that the Foundation decided to make more awards of this kind to research universities. Institutional eligibility has been restricted to universities that have not benefited from the Foundation's Graduate Education Institutional Grants Program. The broad objective has been to assist these universities in improving their academic offerings while controlling the size of their graduate programs and allowing outstanding young scholars to acquire further teaching and research experience. In some measure, these postdoctoral fellowships are seen as substitutes for increases in the size of graduate programs in fields where there are already enough (maybe more than enough) large programs. Northwestern University was among the first of the research universities to be awarded a grant of this kind and was the first to be recommended for renewal (in 1998). We intend to make more grants under this program.
A much more specialized use of postdoctoral fellowships is being made by the Pontifical Institute of Mediæval Studies at the University of Toronto. The recruitment of postdoctoral fellows is an integral part of an ambitious program to strengthen the Institute and take fuller advantage of the extraordinary scholarly resources that it possesses. Fellows will normally be expected to work on their own research projects, participate in seminars along with faculty, other fellows, and advanced students from the Institute and other parts of the University of Toronto, and obtain intensive training in such specialized skills of medieval studies as paleography, diplomatics, numismatics, and editing of texts. The idea is to increase the Institute's "critical mass" of medievalists during the next few years, while the Institute's overall program is being revitalized. At the same time, these postdoctoral fellowships will enable individuals to obtain training in specialized subdisciplines that is not available elsewhere.
Appalachian Colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Postdoctoral fellowships and other forms of support can also be very helpful in allowing colleges with limited resources to provide research and learning opportunities for individuals already on their faculties. In 1998, $2 million was appropriated to the Appalachian College Association to provide permanent support for faculty fellowships and grants. Similarly, the Trustees voted to renew support for a highly successful program that has allowed groups of faculty from Appalachian colleges and from historically black colleges and universities to have the opportunity to participate in the Salzburg Seminar program in Austria. Previous participants from these colleges have written glowing reports of the ways in which their teaching has benefited from their involvement in the Seminar program.
Research Libraries and Centers for Advanced Study
The American Philosophical Society sought and obtained support for yet another approach to the provision of faculty fellowships that also has an institutional development component. The APS will use its grant to supplement sabbatical salaries and permit a select group of scholars to spend a full year on scholarship and, when appropriate, take advantage of the collections housed at the Society's library in Philadelphia. In this way, the fellowship program will help to invigorate this venerable association by increasing its engagement in significant scholarly activity.
Two other well-known centers of research and advanced study received renewed support in 1998 for fellowships to be offered to humanists: the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Institute for Advanced Study. While both the Center and the Institute are perhaps best known for their work in other fields, each has a history of supporting excellent scholars from the humanities, and the Foundation has been pleased to provide funding that has allowed strong support for humanists to be provided alongside support for significant numbers of outstanding social scientists and natural scientists.
New ACLS Fellowships
The final grant to be mentioned in this section was awarded to the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). An appropriation of $2,235,000 was made to inaugurate a new program of fellowships aimed at supporting ambitious long-term research by recently tenured faculty members in the humanities and related social sciences. The idea is to encourage research that is more adventurous, wider-ranging, and requires a longer commitment than is often present today in these disciplines. The intention is to help sustain the momentum of scholars who have recently qualified for tenure. Such fellowships would enable faculty members to devote a full year to research, by providing a stipend approximating their annual salaries, and also the opportunity to spend the year at one of a limited number of multidisciplinary residential centers for advanced study which welcome and encourage work of this kind.
The proposal calls for a total of 27 fellowships to be awarded through three rounds of competition to outstanding individuals within five years of being granted tenure. The grant will provide centers selected by the fellows (and, of course, those which accept them) with support to help defray the costs. Plainly, the absence of this form of targeted funding is not the only problem facing scholars in the humanities. Also, many scholars may prefer-and have access to-other forms of assistance. Nonetheless, additional fellowships, given specifically for ambitious research projects, will provide uninterrupted time and allow opportunities for scholars to work in settings which encourage research and tough-minded critical interactions with colleagues. The president of the ACLS believes that these fellowships will have a useful "signaling effect" in indicating to other scholars that such research is of special importance.
In addition to these targeted appropriations, several other sets of grants made by the Foundation in 1998 included support for postdoctoral fellowships. Postdoctoral appointments, for example, are a central feature of all the grants in support of Sawyer Seminars, and they are also an important component of the large grant made to the Social Science Research Council in support of its interdisciplinary program of research on international migration. Set against the extremely large unmet need for support of this kind, as evidenced by the extraordinary number of applicants for both the fellowships described above and many other programs (such as the portable ACLS fellowships and "residential" fellowships supported by Foundation grants at leading independent research libraries and centers for advanced study), these new Foundation-sponsored awards may be reckoned as modest in number. They are. But they also can be seen as representing a substantial increment to the existing pool of resources. The Foundation continues to hope that other funders will also want to provide increased support for scholars in the humanities at various stages in their careers.
South Africa
While the Foundation's grantmaking continues to be strongly focused on US institutions, the Trustees have also approved a variety of grants in support of educational and research projects located in South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. As noted in previous annual reports, a substantial investment has been made in strengthening Eastern European institutions (mostly but not only universities) as Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland have made the transition from Communist control to democratic rule. That program is now largely complete. In the last few years, the Foundation's main international emphasis has been in South Africa, with total appropriations reaching a high of nearly $13 million in 1998. Thomas Nygren is the program officer with overall responsibility for the Foundation's interest in South Africa, but other staff members are also involved in recommending grants within their areas of special competence.
Graduate Training and Faculty Development
However serious one may judge the need for support for graduate students and young faculty in the United States, it is hard to conceive of a caliper capable of measuring the corresponding set of needs in South Africa. The legacy of apartheid has left many of South Africa's leading universities with a common dilemma: although they have made impressive progress in transforming their student bodies from majority white to majority black¾a task that, while immensely challenging, is being accomplished in a relatively short time (Note 2)¾the more difficult task of transforming their faculties is growing increasingly urgent. For example, in the arts faculty at the University of Cape Town, 41 percent of new undergraduates in 1998 are black, 25 percent of new graduate students are black, and only 8 percent of the academic staff are black. At the University of the Witwatersrand, 15 percent of all academic staff are black; at the University of Pretoria, the percentage is even lower.
Multiple pressures discourage black students from pursuing graduate study. Those from families with limited financial means often are expected to become wage earners as soon as they earn their bachelor's degrees, both to support their families and to help younger siblings enter college. At the same time, black graduates are in high demand in the private and public sectors, especially those with degrees from the leading universities. Moreover, most universities can provide only limited financial support for graduate students. In this context, finding outside support for graduate fellowships and other incentives that will encourage students to pursue academic careers is a top priority for South African universities.
Efforts continue to be made to recruit faculty from outside South Africa, but the most appealing strategy is, in the words of a recent proposal, "to grow our own timber." Fortunately, South Africa, unlike many other countries with pressing needs for highly trained talent, has the academic infrastructure to provide excellent graduate training. To take advantage of this extraordinary "asset in being," the Foundation made grants of over $5 million in 1998 for graduate training at the University of Cape Town (UCT), the University of Pretoria, and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Similar grants were made to the University of Natal and to Rhodes University in prior years.
Additional commitments of $1 million each were made in support of two related initiatives: a collaborative program that provides advanced training and research opportunities at UCT for faculty from universities in seven other sub-Saharan African countries; and a new program of postdoctoral fellowships for African scholars at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard. Over time, it is hard to imagine how the educational systems of countries such as South Africa can meet the needs of their societies without even greater investments in well-conceived programs of advanced training and faculty development.
Library Automation and Collaboration
Over the past two years another primary focus of the Foundation's grantmaking program in South Africa has been to promote regional library collaboration. Three regional consortia have received major grants for joint automation of their library systems and another two regions are considering similar projects. An additional $1.5 million was appropriated for this purpose in 1998. Progress to date has been encouraging, and one milestone was reached last year when a second wave of institutions made the commitment to join the GAELIC consortium (consisting of universities and technikons in Gauteng Province and its environs). It is estimated that the combined catalogues of all 12 libraries in the GAELIC consortium will contain approximately 40 percent of South Africa's total stock of books.
As these library systems become more fully automated and gain experience in working together, other opportunities¾and other needs¾present themselves. The existing national union catalogue owned by the South African Bibliographic and Information Network (SABINET) is in serious need of upgrading and is having difficulty meeting the demands placed upon it by its members, and especially by the evolving regional library consortia which are effectively creating new regional union databases. Thus, an opportunity now exists to build upon the regional efforts supported by the Foundation; to this end, an appropriation of approximately $1 million was made in 1998 to support the purchase of new software and hardware and the merging and matching of member library catalogues into a new union database.
Development of New Teaching Tools
South African universities have a tremendous need to find new ways to teach basic skills to entering college students who come from widely disparate academic backgrounds. The old method of introductory lecture courses has both intrinsic limitations and assumes roughly comparable precollegiate preparation on the part of all students. Furthermore, as enrollments increase in the face of severe budgetary restrictions, more cost-effective methods of instruction simply have to be found. The resources do not exist to continue to teach as in the past, even if this were thought desirable on the merits. This combination of circumstances, juxtaposed with faculty capable of innovation, creates a highly unusual opportunity to experiment with new self-paced modes of instruction that take advantage of electronic technologies. There is a willingness to experiment in South Africa, driven by necessity, that is not present in anything like the same degree in this country; and yet it may turn out that teaching approaches developed initially for use in South Africa will prove to have much wider applicability.
This line of thinking has led the Foundation to make a substantial investment in the work of a team of investigators at the University of Cape Town (called the Multi-media Education Group, or MEG) led by a distinguished archaeologist, Martin Hall, who now also serves as dean of higher education development. In December 1996 the Foundation made a grant of $480,000 for use over three years (supplemented a year later by a grant of $70,000) for a project entitled Deep Foundations. The goal of the project is to use technology to develop a set of cost-effective instructional materials that can be used to help lessen differences in students' precollege preparation and make better use of faculty members' and instructors' time. The pedagogic objective has been to devise instructional tools that improve the teaching of basic skills in the context of an academic subject-for example, African history and archeology-rather than in a setting that is purely remedial. By using instructional technology, students can overcome deficits in learning skills at their own pace without the stigma of taking remedial coursework. The broader goal is to improve retention rates and lessen the overall time-to-degree for students facing financial and academic pressures.
Over the past two years, MEG has successfully developed several courseware models, tested them in the classroom, and conducted initial evaluations of their effectiveness. Examples include Africa 1300, which is an introduction to basic archeological concepts within a Southern African context (students can "visit" archeological sites which combine graphics, text, video clips, and links to other resources); the Isiseko Project, which is a courseware template that seeks to provide a foundation (isiseko) to learning by introducing concepts of critical reasoning, argumentation, and referencing in subjects such as history and English literature; Online Writing is an integrated online environment designed to teach writing to students learning English as a second language; Introduction to Xhosa is a computer-supported course for the principal African language in the Western Cape that replaces rote learning and drill with everyday scenarios in and around Cape Town; and, finally, the Azaro Project is intended to extend the life of computer hardware by adapting courseware to "low end" computer platforms.
The group is now in a position to build on these pilot projects and extend them to a wider range of disciplines and courses. One major new initiative is to address under-preparedness in basic numeracy skills. All of the new projects have a strong emphasis on evaluation and cost-effectiveness with the goal of creating sustainable new approaches to teaching and learning. The great potential value of this research and experimentation led the Trustees to approve an additional appropriation of $2 million in 1998, which is intended to provide stable funding over a five-year period.
Demographic Research and Training
On the recommendation of Carolyn Makinson, the Foundation's program officer for population, grants of $1,650,000 were approved in 1998 to strengthen demographic research and training in South Africa. During the apartheid era, demography and the study of population issues were highly politicized, both in terms of the kinds of research undertaken and highly restricted use of data and findings. There is now an urgent need to establish strong university-based programs in this important field, to conduct independent scholarly research on population issues, and to encourage collaborations between South African scholars and scholars from abroad in the analysis of existing data sets, including data from the recent census, which appears to be of higher quality than previous censuses and surveys.
Information Technology and Intellectual Property Rights
The Trustees of the Foundation have an annual Retreat, usually in the fall, for the purpose of reviewing broad directions. One of the topics discussed at length last October was the growing impact of information technology on essentially all of the fields in which the Foundation has an interest. Of course, the Foundation itself has sponsored important work in this area, most notably the creation of JSTOR (an electronic database of the backfiles of core scholarly journals), several pilot projects in the cost-effective uses of technology, library automation initiatives of many kinds, the development of new application procedures at the graduate level, and a wide variety of electronic publication projects. The Trustees reiterated their sense that the new technologies will have increasingly powerful effects on scholarly communication and on many forms of teaching and learning. The Foundation intends to maintain its traditional emphasis on the importance of substance and content, rather than technique for its own sake. At the same time, the growing experience of staff members with applications of many kinds leads us to believe that we may have a useful role to play in mediating between rapidly developing technological possibilities and particular uses that seem most likely to benefit education and research of the kinds that the Foundation has supported over many years.
One objective, among others, is to protect against the risk that certain fields, such as the humanities, and certain types of institutions, such as small colleges and leading foreign institutions, will be left behind as new opportunities arise. In company with many others, we believe that information technology may serve either to broaden access to scholarly resources such as journal literature and art collections or to widen the gap between the "haves" and "have nots" through the uneven dissemination of new ways of accessing and using scholarly resources.
JSTOR
As an independent not-for-profit organization, JSTOR now reports separately on its progress and plans. The Foundation retains a close affiliation with JSTOR, however, because there are so many ways in which the interests and capacities of the two entities intersect. The extraordinary acceptance of JSTOR by the scholarly community has been demonstrated by, among other things, the number of searches conducted and the number of articles printed from the database during 1998 (1.37 million searches and 415,000 articles printed-more than a four-fold increase in both figures in the course of a single year). The popularity of JSTOR has naturally led to strong expressions of interest in adding content, and in 1998, the Foundation joined with several other donors (the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation) in providing the seed capital needed to create a general sciences cluster that will include the complete backfiles of Science magazine, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Transactions of the Royal Society, dating back to the 17th century. When this project is completed, it will be possible to search for Isaac Newton as an author and print out his seminal papers and letters on natural philosophy!
The Foundation will also continue to look for opportunities to connect the core content of JSTOR with other valuable caches of scholarly literature. Related objectives are to extend the use of JSTOR worldwide and, to the extent feasible, encourage adoption of standards that will facilitate the eventual linking of databases of many kinds. (Note 3) JSTOR's own board of trustees will be devoting considerable time in 1999 to selecting the most pressing priorities and developing plans for sustained growth of this fascinating enterprise. The Foundation, for its part, will be seeking synergies with JSTOR wherever they seem most promising. The list of grants made in 1998 contains numerous examples of instances in which the Foundation elected to support the complementary activities of organizations such as the Ecological Society of America, the presses of the University of Chicago and the University of California, the College Art Association, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the American Political Science Association, and the Latin American Studies Association. (Note 4)
Cost-Effective Uses of Technology
While the Foundation remains committed to funding particularly attractive projects designed to improve the quality of teaching while controlling or, better yet, reducing costs, the actual number of grants made in this area has been below original expectations. Finding potential projects that meet all of the Foundation's requirements has proven difficult, and staff members (and the Foundation's advisory committee) are more and more persuaded that additional efforts need to be made to encourage the thoughtful assessment of ideas that are intriguing but untested. The natural enthusiasm of the proponents of new teaching methods sometimes means that they are less inclined than would be desirable to track carefully all the costs involved in a new project and relate these costs to measurable improvements in educational effectiveness. As noted earlier in this report, the work by Martin Hall and his colleagues at UCT in South Africa may prove to be more instructive in these respects than some projects launched in this country, where the pressure to "do more with less" is not as pronounced. I do not wish to give the impression that we are discouraged by our efforts to date in this broad area, but it is fair to say that we now have more realistic expectations. We have been sobered by our increased awareness of how few useful models of assessment exist today.
One of the byproducts of our experiences with varied applications of information technology has been a recognition that the Foundation, in keeping with other non-profits, has to develop a more carefully thought-out set of policies governing the ownership and use of what are, in effect, "products" produced in part with Foundation funds. At its December board meeting, the Trustees reviewed a statement of general principles, which, in slightly modified form, is reproduced below.
Statement of Principles Concerning Intellectual Property Rights
- While the Foundation does not seek to constrain or interfere with the intellectual property rights policies of its grantees, the Foundation reserves the right to review and evaluate the reasonableness of these policies as an integral part of its grantmaking activities.
- In evaluating the reasonableness of the intellectual property rights policies of prospective grantees, the Foundation will satisfy itself that the policies ensure that products developed with the assistance of Foundation grants will be used for the greatest possible educational, social, and charitable benefit. To this end, the Foundation's grantmaking philosophy is to encourage proposals and practices that promise to yield products for broad public use and to discourage those that involve or promote proprietary interests except to the extent that a charitable end may also be served.
- When a prospective grantee has not adopted an intellectual property rights policy, the Foundation will typically defer consideration of the grant proposal until a formal policy has been approved. In the case of a possible grant to a consortium, it is not necessary that every member of the consortium have an existing policy as long as the consortium itself has adopted a policy for the treatment of intellectual property rights and will be responsible for overseeing outcomes at the individual institutions that comprise the consortium.
- While the Foundation recognizes that the creators of intellectual products and their host institutions should have substantial rights over how their products are created, modified, and distributed, the Foundation's policy is to encourage wide and equitable access to the products or devices developed with its funds. In order to protect and advance this objective, the Foundation expects to review and approve plans for distribution and sale of such products.
- In selective instances, the Foundation may wish to assert ownership or lesser rights with respect to the intellectual property resulting from Foundation-funded research. There may be situations in which the Foundation, in pursuit of its charitable purposes, will want to take an active role in shaping decisions concerning the ways in which intellectual property will be used. Also, if significant commercial benefit is anticipated or generated as a result of a Foundation grant, the Foundation will expect to share equitably in revenues received by the grantee organization. The Foundation believes that apportioning ownership, control, and income between the Foundation and its grantees should reflect the proportion of costs covered by the Foundation's resources in producing the intellectual property. Needless to say, any revenue received by the Foundation would be directed to the support of its charitable purposes.
This statement is only a starting point, and these principles will of course evolve with experience. It is clear, however, that when the Foundation invests in the development of new technologies, it will expect to participate in discussions concerning the ways in which these new approaches to teaching and learning will be used¾how they will be distributed and priced. Grantees have understood the importance of clear agreement on such matters and have welcomed the kinds of case-by-case discussions that we think are going to be required. The Foundation's continuing support of the Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College (which, in conjunction with a large number of liberal arts colleges, is doing pioneering work in developing new ways of using information technology to teach foreign languages) offers one of the clearest examples of the desirability of thinking through what makes sense for participating scholars, their home institutions, and the Foundation. Staff of the Foundation will welcome suggestions from readers of instructive "cases" as well as general principles that others have found useful in reconciling the diverse legitimate interests involved in exploiting new ideas.
Other Ongoing Activities
In concluding my part of this annual report, I want to repeat a caveat contained in earlier reports. In 1998, as in every other year, the Foundation made grants in many fields besides those highlighted in these pages. It has seemed better to provide a reasonable amount of detail about some activities rather than attempt to cover a wider range more superficially. In future reports, we expect to discuss in detail the lessons learned from the Foundation's extensive investments in efforts to enhance the quality of doctoral education in the humanities and related social sciences while limiting time-to-degree and increasing completion rates. New initiatives for liberal arts colleges, including support for revised approaches to foreign study programs, will also be the subject of later reports. Similarly, the Foundation's programs in population and conservation and the environment continue to evolve in new directions while retaining many of their existing characteristics. Each of these fields deserves individual attention. Finally, special mention should be made of the program in Refugees and Forced Migration, which has now completed its second full year. We are extremely pleased by the burgeoning interest of students as well as faculty members in programs of training and research that we hope will enhance the effectiveness of the many organizations that work so hard on behalf of broadly agreed upon humanitarian goals. But this field is also complex, and it too deserves more than the cursory mention that it is receiving this year.
There is certainly no lack of fascinating fields and projects to discuss, and I am reminded again of what a privilege it is to participate in this work with dedicated colleagues on the staff and on the Board of Trustees.
William G. Bowen
President
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
140 East 62nd Street
New York, NY 10021
(212) 838-8400
Notes
