Grants for doctoral students remain available (letter)

To the Editors:

Colleen Flaherty’s September 20, 2022, write-up, “Ford Foundation Ends Fellowship Program”, on the sunsetting of the Ford Foundation Fellowship Plan, offered vital context about this lengthy-jogging program’s performance in diversifying the ranks of PhD-level students in greater instruction and the rising troubles to funding this function.

Flaherty rightly highlights the need for new considering and action in phrases of funding versions even though recognizing the opportunity of scholars and scholarship to boost positive social transformation.

Her depiction of the ending of the Mellon-funded, American Council of Uncovered Societies-administered Dissertation Completion Fellowship plan, nevertheless, overlooks the support Mellon and ACLS keep on to deliver doctoral learners and early-job students, including all those representing numerous backgrounds, fields of review, and institutions in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

For sixteen yrs (2006-2022) the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship method furnished a lot more than 1,000 doctoral pupils with means and a guidance network created to aid them full their dissertations by providing them time to concentration exclusively on their analysis, freed from mounting educating and administrative responsibilities. We are very pleased of the accomplishments of this system, which has presented critical classes and insights that we have utilized to our ongoing commitment to diversifying the academy and supporting students who have ordinarily been underserved by it.

ACLS is also psyched to continue on our partnership with Mellon. Previously this 12 months we introduced the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation system, which specifically welcomes applications from PhD candidates whose views and/or investigate initiatives cultivate bigger openness to new resources of awareness, innovation in scholarly communication, and, over all, responsiveness to the interests and histories of folks of coloration and other historically marginalized communities. The system aims to reward doctoral students demonstrating promise of foremost their fields in vital new instructions. Providing an early-stage intervention at the formative stage of the improvement of the dissertation, before producing is significantly sophisticated, the system will allow fellows to acquire modern strategies to dissertation research—publicly engaged, trans- or interdisciplinary, collaborative, significant, or methodological. They will join a peer network of like-minded scholars and get skilled mentoring and qualified development.

Information of the discontinuation of very long-standing sources for doctoral students will disappoint lots of, as there is no scarcity of have to have for assist, in individual among the communities of colour who have long been marginalized in better education. At the similar time, we glimpse forward to giving ACLS fellowship and grant systems supposed to usher in what we see as a new academy that welcomes a a lot more assorted professoriate and a huge assortment of fields of analyze and ways to scholarship—key elements to the ongoing progression of humanistic awareness.

Joy Connolly
President
American Council of Figured out Societies

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