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December 12, 2005

FORD FOUNDATION SELECTS CLARK FOR $100,000 GRANT

University joins National initiative to promote academic freedom and constructive dialogue

WORCESTER, Mass. - After a national competition in undergraduate education that drew more than 675 proposals, the Ford Foundation has selected Clark University as one of 27 higher education institutions to receive $100,000 grants for projects that promote academic freedom and constructive dialogue on campus.

The grants are part of Ford’s Difficult Dialogues initiative, created in response to reports of growing intolerance and efforts to curb academic freedom at colleges and universities. The goal is to help institutions address this challenge through academic and campus programs that enrich learning, encourage new scholarship and engage students and faculty in constructive dialogue about contentious political, religious, racial and cultural issues.

“Clark University has proposed an innovative plan to engage students in constructive discussions on campus about controversial cultural and political issues,” said Jorge Balán, a Senior Program Officer at the Ford Foundation.

The University will institute an interdisciplinary initiative that engages all facets of its community in an effort to create a culture of dialogue on campus. This will be achieved through 1) faculty development, 2) expansion of the curriculum via first year seminars, new courses and revisions to existing courses in order to engender dialogue; and 3) a pilot year-long Difficult Dialogues Symposium, including public conversations and faculty-student workshops on such topics as terrorism and civil liberties, the relationship between fundamentalism and secularism, diversity and money, religion and government, dialogue itself, etc. The emphasis in these symposia will be to encourage intellectual engagement and open discussion; to develop skills and awareness of genuine dialogue and discourse, including modeling engaged listening and discussion; to develop skills in mediation, and to remove the pressure of conventional classroom performance norms so that students can participate honestly and without fear of being graded.

Principal investigators at Clark are Sarah Buie, Director, Higgins School of Humanities and Professor, Visual and Performing Arts, and William Fisher, Director of the International Development, Community and Environment Department.

Over the course of the two-year initiative, the Difficult Dialogues grantees will be invited to share their experiences and ideas at regional conferences coordinated by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Center will also host a Web-based forum for project directors to share ideas online.

Examples of other projects that will receive funding include: at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, new courses, faculty seminars and campus roundtables on religion and religious conflict; at Queens College in New York, the development of a new curriculum for promoting understanding and informed discussion about the conflict in the Middle East; at Mars Hill College in North Carolina, training for faculty and student leaders to foster productive discussions of race, sexual orientation and religion; and a project at Yale University that will examine whether courses about controversial issues increase tolerance and respect for different viewpoints among students.

“Colleges and universities are uniquely suited to expand knowledge, understanding and discussion of controversial issues that affect us all,” said Susan V. Berresford, president of the Ford Foundation. “The selected projects illustrate the thoughtful and creative ways institutions are promoting intellectually rigorous scholarship and open debate that is essential to higher education.”

The Ford Foundation launched Difficult Dialogues in April 2005 by inviting proposals from all accredited, degree granting, non-profit institutions with general undergraduate programs. A panel of external higher education experts reviewed the preliminary proposals and selected 136 institutions to submit final proposals.

Difficult Dialogues is part of a broader, $12 million effort by the Ford Foundation to understand and combat anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry in the United States and Europe. It builds on the foundation’s history of supporting efforts by colleges and universities to foster more inclusive campus environments and to engage effectively with the growing racial, religious and ethnic diversity of their student bodies.

For more information on the Difficult Dialogues initiative and a complete list of awardees, visit the Ford Foundation Website at http://www.fordfound.org/news/more/dialogues/index.cfm.

The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization. For more than half a century it has been a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide, guided by its goals of strengthening democratic values, reducing poverty and injustice, promoting international cooperation and advancing human achievement. With headquarters in New York, the foundation has offices in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Russia.

Clark University is a private, co-educational liberal-arts research university with 2,000 undergraduate and 600 graduate students. Since its founding in 1887 as the first all-graduate school in New England, Clark has challenged convention with innovative programs such as the International Studies Stream, the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the five-year BA/MA programs with the fifth year tuition-free for eligible students.

Angela M. Bazydlo
Associate Director of Media Relations
Clark University
Worcester, Mass.
phone: 508-793-7635
www.clarku.edu

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