Gerety and Schapiro's application cited the two Colleges' needs to "examine a broad range of issues that affect faculty during their professional lives, such as juggling teaching and research at a liberal arts college, the challenge of employing new pedagogies and technologies and the need for long-range professional planning."
"The Mellon Foundation wants to know how they might be of help to institutions like ours," said Dean of the Faculty Lisa Raskin. "We also would like to hear from the faculty to see if there's anything the institution can do whether or not we receive future funding from Mellon."
Professor of Psychology and Women's and Gender Studies Rose Olver and Associate Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies Michèle Barale will direct the project. According to Olver, they will lead a committee of six faculty members which will meet with other faculty members throughout the year. The grant expires at the end of this year.
Amherst and Williams will share the grant. The two schools will work independently, but they may compare results, according to Raskin.
"I expect that the committee will have a preliminary report by the beginning of the fall semester 2001 and a final report by the end of that semester," said Olver.
Barale expects the report to touch on a number of topics. "There is no singular problem or area that is under review," said Barale. "As professors mature within their fields, new interests develop and old interests take off in directions never expected. At the same time, our personal lives and concerns change and need some inclusion in an examination of professional development: the need for, say, child care that matches the kinds of hours academics keep or the difficulty of balancing teaching and research with caring for aging and sometimes ill parents, whether living nearby or in distant cities."
Barale and Olver have high expectations for the project but do not know exactly what will result from it. "We assume that both academic and personal growth are shaped-obviously and subtly-by a series of factors," said Barale. "We expect, for instance, that men and women might differently experience their development within the profession, even as they share a number of perceptions. Or not. We think that we may find that racial and ethnic differences among faculty account for distinctively differing accounts of academic growth, as well as a host of mutual accounts. Or not. We expect to be surprised."
The Mellon Foundation has been giving grants for faculty development to liberal arts colleges since its inception in 1969, according to the organization's website. The Foundation's current focus is on "providing support for faculty as they integrate electronic materials into their classes in order to improve the quality of teaching, learning and scholarship.