JBHE: Latest News for 9/9/10

Grants and Gifts

• Alcorn State University, the historically black educational institution in Mississippi, was awarded a five-year, $340,115 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to increase student retention and graduation rates.

• The University of New Orleans received a $541,807 grant from the National Science Foundation for an undergraduate research program seeking to increase the number of minority students in the biological sciences.

• Tennessee State University, the historically black educational institution in Nashville, received $2.92 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for support of the university’s food and agricultural research programs.

• The National Endowment for the Humanities recently announced more than 200 grants totaling over $31 million for humanities programs across the United States. Many of these grants went to colleges and universities for projects relating to African Americans. Here are some examples:

• Johns Hopkins University received a $182,514 grant to fund a summer institute for 25 college and university faculty members to explore the topic of black resistance in the tropical Atlantic, 1760-1888;

• Boston University received a $180,382 grant for two, one-week workshops for schoolteachers on the history of African Americans in Massachusetts;

• Henry Louis Gates Jr. at Harvard University received a grant of just over $200,000 to fund a four-week institute on African-American freedom struggles from 1865 to 1965;

• The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth received a $177,849 grant to study the role of the city of New Bedford in the Underground Railroad;

• Jackson State University in Mississippi received grants of nearly $266,000 for two, one-week workshops for community college faculty entitled “From Freedom Summer to the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike”;

• Tougaloo College in Mississippi will use a $218,856 grant to study the literature and music of Islamic nations of West Africa;

• Professor Gerald Early at Washington University in St. Louis won a $215,175 grant for a four-week institute to study jazz and Motown music and their impact on American culture; and

• Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, was awarded a $188,124 grant for a four-week summer institute that will study abolitionism and the Underground Railroad in upstate New York.