Description

Tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) are chartered by and serve tribal communities across the country. There are 34 such colleges in 14 states, primarily in the Midwest, Plains, Mountain West, and Southwest, and they enroll some 30,000 full and part-time students. While their principal mission is to provide tertiary education to tribal members, they also seek to produce and disseminate knowledge that will be useful to their tribes and to Native America more broadly.
 
This latter goal has been challenging to achieve: TCU faculty have heavy teaching loads and little time to devote to research; most are based on campuses that are distant from cities and the research resources they offer; and many have not been adequately prepared to pursue advanced research successfully. The American Indian College Fund (AICF) has been working to remedy the situation.
 
Now 28 years old, AICF provides scholarships to Native students seeking college degrees and aims to strengthen tribal colleges. For the last several years, the College Fund has made a concerted effort to bolster tribal colleges’ research capacity. Building on work initially seeded by the Mellon Foundation, AICF has begun hosting an annual research conference for tribal college faculty and publishing their work in a peer-reviewed journal. These opportunities have proven immensely valuable for TCU faculty, many of whom have only recently completed advanced degrees and have had little experience with the scholarly apparatus of academia.
 
AICF intends to continue running the conference and publishing the journal—and a Luce grant would enable it to do so. The conference and journal are critically important: they provide faculty with opportunities to vet their research with supportive colleagues and to gain experience with important scholarly activities like publishing and presenting.
 
At the same time, the College Fund would use grant funds to expand and enrich its scholarly support activities. Specifically, AICF would add two new program components: an intensive writing workshop and stipends to attend other scholarly conferences in the faculty members’ fields of study. The workshop will fill a gap in the College Fund’s scholarly training “curriculum,” offering faculty help at the developmental stage rather than the presentational stage. Meanwhile, the stipends will enable faculty to engage outside of the TCU community with their disciplinary colleagues—a crucial step if their research is to gain wider notice and achieve broader impact.
 
Altogether, over the two years of the grant, AICF will host 40-50 conference presentations, publish 10 articles in two journal issues, send 20 faculty to conferences, and enroll 20 scholars in writing workshops. All of these activities include opportunities for formal and informal mentoring, which will be provided by senior scholars as well as by the College Fund’s staff. The Luce Foundation’s grant would be used to support travel and accommodations for the conference and workshop attendees, editing and publication costs associated with the journals, stipends for conference attendees, and evaluation and management of the project.
 
Recommendation:              That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a two-year grant of $248,000 to the American Indian College Fund to support its efforts to strengthen the research capacity of tribal colleges.
Approved by Board:  November 2, 2017