Carleton Announces Mellon Undergraduate Fellowship Grant Renewal

Northfield, Minn.––Carleton College has announced that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has renewed its support of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Program with a grant of $269,400 to fund four additional cohorts of Mellon Fellows and Program activities. 

“I see the renewal of the MMUF Program grant as an affirmation of Carleton’s diversity efforts, which aim to ensure that all students have opportunities to pursue excellence in their studies,” Carleton President Robert A. Oden Jr. said.

 “We are very pleased that the Foundation has renewed its support of the program,” Joy Kluttz, director of the office of intercultural and international life, said. “We have a fantastic cohort of fellows and have recently made several important changes in the structure of our program. This renewal represents an affirmation of this new vision of the program, and we are excited about the future.”

 “The founders of MMUF believed—and they were right—that the experience of real research and sustained intellectual inquiry would lead students to pursue their intellectual passions beyond college and to seriously consider a life as a scholar and teacher in America’s colleges and universities,” Bill North, associate professor of history and the program’s faculty coordinator since 2002, said.

Nationally, the program’s success is evident. Of the approximately 3,300 students chosen as Mellon Fellows, 98 percent graduate with their BA, 60 percent pursue graduate work, and 35 percent continue to the PhD level. At present, the MMUF Program has produced overall 311 PhDs with another 150 fellows nearing completion of their degrees.  Thirty-seven MMUF Fellows now have tenure at their institutions.  At Carleton, the MMUF Program has graduated 93 fellows, more than half of whom have gone on to pursue PhDs, MFAs, and MAs in a wide range of fields as well as professional degrees.  At present, 12 ambitious and talented fellows—from disciplines ranging from African/African-American studies to English to history to sociology/anthropology—comprise the Carleton cohort.

Established by the Mellon Foundation in partnership with a select group of undergraduate colleges and universities in 1988 and named in honor of scholar-educator-activist Dr. Benjamin E. Mays (1894-1984), the MMUF Program encourages scholars from groups underrepresented in or committed to diversifying the academy to pursue advanced degrees, especially the PhD, in their chosen fields so as to enrich and transform these areas of knowledge as well as America’s institutions of higher education. It does so by offering students the opportunity to conduct two years of funded independent research on a topic of their choice and design in the company of a dedicated community of student scholars both on campus and around the nation and with the support of a faculty mentor.