Description
The Higher Education Program provided a grant to the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (WWNFF) in 2016. This grant enabled WWNFF to pilot a new fellowship program to improve communication and collaboration between state policymakers and higher education leaders.
WWNFF President Arthur Levine and his colleagues had observed a growing divide between policymakers and political leaders on one hand and academic leaders on the other. With the support of the Luce Higher Education grant, Woodrow Wilson designed and implemented a fellowship program to educate state leaders about the complexities of higher education and higher education policy and to build enduring relationships between academic and policy leaders within a state. Woodrow Wilson shared the cost of the pilot, contributing about 41% of the budget from its own resources.
The pilot focused on four states where Woodrow Wilson had strong relationships—New Jersey, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Indiana. Each state team comprised two representatives of higher education and two of state government. The inaugural group included, among others, the president of New Jersey’s Montclair State University, a Georgia state senator with responsibility for higher education, Indiana’s higher education commissioner, and the president of Bunker Hill Community College in Massachusetts.
During two convenings, the teams of fellows learned from one another and from experts in the field. They also, unexpectedly, conceived projects in their states that would address specific challenges they faced. New Jersey, for example, recognized the need for a strategic plan for higher education in the state. Indiana, meanwhile, determined that its existing plan to increase enrollment at two-year institutions needed to be broadened to address the higher education pipeline more generally.
The fellows were enthusiastic about the pilot and eager to execute the projects they had devised. The Luce Foundation provided $50,000 at the end of 2018 to fund micro-grants to the state teams to support these projects.
Woodrow Wilson is committed to continuing the fellowship program, with some adjustments. Indeed, from the outset, WWNFF had planned—if the pilot was a success—to seek funding to recruit additional cohorts of fellows. The current plan is to operate the program for five years, if funding can be secured.
WWNFF has identified four states for the second year of the program—Colorado, Montana, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Once again, each state team comprises four or five members representing higher education and state government. The teams will convene for two weekend symposia and engage with expert consultants between meetings. Woodrow Wilson’s project team will visit each state and work with the teams to develop projects to be implemented following the conclusion of the fellowship year.
Woodrow Wilson, with our knowledge, contacted the Mellon Foundation about providing partial support for the initiative’s second year. Encouraged by Luce’s investment in the pilot, Mellon awarded a grant, which covers half the budget. That grant has enabled WWNFF to launch the second year, recruit a new group of fellows and conduct the first weekend symposium. The Luce grant—somewhat smaller than Luce’s first grant—will pay the balance of the costs of the second cohort
Patrick Callan, former head of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and Judith Rizzo, former director of the Hunt Institute, which works on public education policy, will oversee this project. They were the pilot project leaders and have begun working with the second cohort already.
APPROVED BY THE BOARD ON MARCH 6, 2019.
