PLAN, Manage Your Professional Development as a Graduate Student
Posted Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
The Rackham Graduate School is pleased to announce a $4.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create an endowment for the support of doctoral students in the humanities. The generous grant from the Mellon Foundation will be supplemented by $500,000 from the President's Challenge, established by University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman to support graduate education.
The Mellon funds will be used to create a set of fellowship enhancements to be used to attract outstanding students to the University of Michigan. Allocations of Mellon funding will rotate among humanities programs, based on an assessment of financial need, a commitment to program quality, and a commitment to student support.
"The Mellon Foundation has been our most significant partner in graduate education in the humanities," said Janet A. Weiss, Dean of the Rackham Graduate School. "The Foundation has generously supported innovations in graduate education in the humanities at the University of Michigan for many years. The Mellon endowment will make a significant difference in our ability to recruit outstanding students and it will enhance our students' ability to complete original and innovative work in a timely way."
The University of Michigan has 21 doctoral programs in the humanities and graduated 85 Ph.D.s in the humanities in 2007. Doctoral students in the humanities are important to the University for both teaching and research, and maintaining the excellence of our faculty and of our undergraduate programs depends to some extent on attracting excellent graduate students to our Ph.D. programs. Funding these students can be challenging. There are few external research grants available to faculty in the humanities and students are supported primarily through fellowship funding and teaching assistantships. The endowment from the Mellon Foundation is thus especially needed and welcome.
