Teagle Grantmaking: A Retrospective

From the President

For this issue of the Teagle Foundation’s Annual Report, I outline the considerations that enter into how we use our grantmaking to support the Foundation’s mission of strengthening liberal arts teaching and learning. This account includes the general approach followed during the presidencies of Robert Connor (2003-2009) and Richard Morrill (2010-2013), as well as my own, together with our staff colleagues and with the engagement of our board.

Before the era of the Connor presidency, the Foundation supported many worthy institutions and projects in the area of higher education, but it was during Robert Connor’s presidency that Teagle began to operate in a way that most would consider strategic. This involved identifying some major issue/challenge/problem in the world of liberal arts higher education and seeing how the Foundation could contribute to positive change, using its relatively modest resources in the most leveraging manner.

Connor chose to focus on the issue of assessment in the service of improving teaching and learning. Improving methods of assessment involved shifting attention from what faculty present to what students actually receive. While improvement in methods of assessment serve the purpose of accountability to various authorities, Teagle’s focus was on the feedback loop between improved assessment and more effective teaching; the major participants in and audience for the work carried out during this time were faculty members themselves. 

Teagle became involved in assessment at a time when it was receiving insufficient attention and the Foundation was thus able to play an important leadership role in this area. As more organizations and institutions became involved in the field of assessment, the Foundation, during Morrill’s presidency, came to focus on faculty work more generally—how it was organized, how faculty worked together (or not), and consequences for the curriculum. Assessment was treated as a general dimension of grants made at this point, as grantees were asked to evaluate the outcomes of their work relative to student learning.

One initiative that has been ongoing since the time of Robert Connor’s presidency and continues into the present is College-Community Connections, which provides support for partnerships between colleges and community-based organizations that open the doors to a liberal arts college experience for students from underserved neighborhoods. It is the one program that has been focused on New York City and its surroundings. While participants have to reapply to renew their support, we have no expectation that community-based organizations will be able to support the program without our help and thus do not have the same expectations for grantees to produce their own sustainability plans. Some of the participating colleges will need such continuing support as well, though we encourage those that can absorb their partnership into the ongoing priorities of their institutional budgets to do so.

In the last few years, the Foundation has engaged in the following initiatives, again based on the identification of major issues in higher education influencing liberal arts teaching and learning: 

• Faculty Planning and Curricular Coherence: support for efforts to create stronger intellectual links among courses in a curriculum, including general education offerings; majors, minors, and concentrations; and pathways for transfer between institutions.

• Liberal Arts and the Professions: support for projects to transcend the divide between liberal arts education, on the one hand, and professional or vocational training, on the other.

• Graduate Student Teaching in the Arts and Sciences: support for transformation in graduate education so that students can be prepared for their work as teachers as well as researchers.

• Hybrid Learning and the Residential Liberal Arts Experience: support for projects to incorporate on-line resources into classroom-based teaching.

The last two of these initiatives have been discontinued. The initiative on preparing graduate students as teachers was putting us in the position of making grants to relatively well-financed institutions to develop and refine efforts that should properly be central to their practice. We were, moreover, concerned that much of the work was being directed through teaching and learning centers rather than integrated and sustained as priorities of disciplinary departments. While we were pleased with the development of these special pedagogical training centers, we believed that a change in departmental cultures was central to further progress and also that institutions of higher education should themselves adopt a stronger role in this project. We continue to follow work in this area with interest, especially as it involves disciplinary associations; the American Historical Association stands out as a leader in this area.

The initiative on hybrid learning went the way of our assessment work – the incorporation of on-line resources into liberal arts teaching was becoming sufficiently pervasive to be viewed as something to include (in this case, as appropriate) into grants made under other topic-specific initiatives. Moreover, we felt that other organizations were in a better position to bring distinctive strengths to this area.

Teagle grants generally bring together groups of collaborating institutions. Grantees are also asked for how they plan to disseminate their results beyond the immediate participants in the project. The goal here is to seek to amplify the effect of grants that are perforce modest in their size if not their ambitions.

We also engage in ongoing evaluation of our projects and initiatives. In addition to the self-evaluations we expect as part of our reports from grantees, we also turn to outside assistance in evaluating each of our initiatives as well as our work overall. We turn to the Center for Effective Philanthropy for overall evaluation of the Foundation’s grant-making and engage appropriate experts for the evaluation of specific initiatives.

We also make it a practice to communicate with other foundations on a regular basis. In some cases, we have co-funded projects. In other cases, we have seen challenges we ourselves are able to address only on a relatively modest basis be taken on and scaled up by a foundation with greater resources. The reverse may also occur: we can follow up on a large-scale project supported with funds from another foundation by digging deeper to achieve more fundamental and lasting change at a smaller set of institutions. 

At regular intervals, the board and staff participate together in a process familiar to all organizations that seek to be as effective as possible in fulfilling their missions: a strategic planning retreat. We will be engaging in such a process this fall. Among the general questions we will be addressing are the following:

• What do we see as the major problems facing liberal arts higher education and which ones do we feel in a position to address? Which of our current initiatives will we continue and which new ones should we be exploring?

• How do we balance projects that seem relatively certain of success with those that are riskier but promise greater returns? 

• How might we want to adjust the size and time span of our grants?

• How effective is our process of assessment?

• How might we strengthen the dissemination of practices that grow out of our grants and generally share the results of our work more effectively?

It is our hope that the Teagle Foundation can not only continue but also improve upon its work at a time when liberal arts education clearly needs all the help it can get.

- Judith R. Shapiro, President