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 F.D. Bluford Library at historically Black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University has received a grant from Council on Library and Information Resources’ Recordings at Risk program. The grant funds will be used to digitize films that are pertinent to the university’s history. The university will digitize 163 at-risk films from 1937 to 1979 that document the history of North Carolina A&T and African Americans nationwide before, during, and after the mid-20th century civil rights era.
The University of Virginia received a $10 million donation from alumnus Robert Ruff that will be used to support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at the university. Ruff, a native of Dallas, is a 1981 graduate of UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce. He was a commercial banker for a decade before returning to his family’s retail hardware store business and, eventually, starting an artificial intelligence company.
Historically Black Fisk University in Nashville received a five-year, $1,437,642 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to reinstate its TRIO-Upward Bound Program after a 25-year hiatus. The program will provide support for 60 area high school students that will include intensive academic advising/counseling, college entrance exam preparation, parental support, college financial aid planning, financial literacy, FAFSA training/assistance, course selection assistance, academic assessment, scholarship assistance, career planning, cultural enrichment, support for re-entry, alternative education, and special populations and core curriculum instruction.
Framingham State University in Massachusetts is the lead institution in a five-year, $3 million grant program to support the development of a model for advancing early-career faculty of color to full-time positions in STEM subjects. Bridgewater State University and Worcester State University will partner with FSU on creating a national model for a state university system to recruit, retain, and promote cohorts of STEM faculty of color.
The University of Washington received a $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research on the reasons that Black and Latinx patients have less access to buprenorphine, a leading remedy for those who suffer from opioid use disorder.
