As a recipient of a prestigious $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Amherst College will develop an initiative to identify and prepare students from underrepresented minority groups to become faculty in the humanities.
The grant is part of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) program, which seeks to increase diversity in the faculty at institutions of higher learning. Established in 1988 with an initial cohort of eight institutions, the program has grown to 48 member schools and three consortia.
Amherst joins schools such as Barnard College, Bowdoin College, Brown University, Duke University and Stanford University, as well as three universities in South Africa and a consortium of HBCUs. As of 2017, more than 5,000 students had been selected as fellows, more than 700 of whom have earned doctorates. More than 100 have become tenured faculty.
Dr. Norm Jones, Amherst’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, said the college’s institutional commitment to advancing equity and inclusion makes it well suited to take on such an important initiative.
“We often talk about our work in the context of faculty, students and staff, but these three domains are inextricably bound and depend on one another to create a community in which all people thrive,” said Jones.
Jones will be one of the MMUF program directors at Amherst. Dr. Marisa Parham, a MMUF alumna and professor of English, and Dr. Allen J. Hart, the James E. Ostendarp Professor of Psychology – both of whom are faculty diversity and inclusion officers – will help design Amherst’s MMUF activities. Additional faculty members from Black Studies, Sexuality, English and Women’s and Gender Studies will also participate.
The basic goal of MMUF is to increase diversity across academia. To do so, fellows from underrepresented minority groups are selected and supported as they pursue doctoral studies. The focus is careers as faculty. It does not include professional pursuits such as medicine and law.
