Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
The law school at the University of Oregon received a three-year, $300,000 grant from the Law School Admission Council to create a PreLaw Undergraduate Scholars Program. The goal of the program is to provide an intensive focus on the skills required to succeed — in law school, the law school admission process, and a career in law — to 20 college students from groups that are underrepresented in the legal profession. The three-week summer program is open to students who completed at least 24, but no more than 72, credit hours in higher education.
The American Chemical Society received a $3,015,000 grant from the Genentech Foundation to support the ACS Bridge Project through 2023. The project aims to boost the percentage of students from underrepresented minority groups earning chemistry-related Ph.D.s to match the percentage of those in these groups who currently receive bachelor’s degrees in the field.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation for a project that provides programs to improve mentor and mentee experiences, from seminars to peer mentoring circles for women and members of underrepresented groups. The goal is to foster institutional change, support faculty retention and promote faculty career development and professional achievements. “Oftentimes women and underrepresented faculty of color do not receive the same type of mentoring that White men do in academia and we can see major disparities when it comes to who progresses to tenure who progresses to full professor who gets grants,” said Kia Caldwell, a professor of African American studies, special assistant to the provost, and co-principal investigator of the project. Dr. Caldwell is a graduate of Princeton University, where she majored in Spanish literature and civilization. She holds a master’s degree in Latin American studies and a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.
