New Directions for Carnegie Corporation of New York
A Report to the Board by Vartan Gregorian, President

February 2, 1999

CARNEGIE FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

Throughout its history, the Corporation has supported research projects on issues central to its mission, mainly through universities and free-standing institutions. In addition, we have supported numerous fellowship programs run by others to create, promote, and advance knowledge. Travel grants for scholars and administrators were a feature of the Corporation's Commonwealth Program from 1928 to 1969, when the program was discontinued. Beginning in the year 2000, the Corporation will resume the support of individual scholarship by inaugurating a new Carnegie Fellowship Program, pending IRS approval. Its aim will be to support fundamental research by young scholars and established experts with outstanding promise to contribute significantly to the advancement of knowledge and scholarship. Up to twenty fellowships will be awarded annually in those realms that reflect the current program priorities of the Corporation: Education, International Peace and Security, International Development, and Democracy. Fellows will be expected to deal with such dominant program themes as early childhood, urban schools, teacher education reform, electoral reform, re-imagining the liberal arts curriculum, nuclear nonproliferation, higher education in the former Soviet Union, water as a source of conflict, the resolution of tensions between the concepts of national sovereignty and self-determination, electoral reform, intergroup relations (ethnic, racial, and religious) in the United States, higher education and the status of women in Africa, and the educational and cultural challenges posed by an aging America. Fellowships will be available for a period of one to two years, depending on the nature of the research subject. The maximum amount of a fellowship award will be $100,000.

The Corporation will seek nominations from an extensive network of experts on education, international peace and security, African higher education and development, and American democracy. Nominations will be sought by October 1, 1999. The selection will be announced after the April 2000 board meeting. Nominators will submit the curriculum vitae of the nominee, along with a brief project proposal prepared by the nominee. Nominees will be evaluated by the selection committee on the basis of the individual's promise and the quality of his or her proposed project, as well as on the significance of the contribution the project will make to a given field. A selection committee will be formed to include program chairs and academic advisors attached to the individual programs. The committee will select and recommend fellowship candidates to the president, who will submit a final list to the board of trustees for their approval. At the end of the fellowship period, the fellows will submit written reports to the Corporation. Depending on the quality of the projects and their national significance, the Corporation may assist in the dissemination of the reports.

Individual fellowships will not be awarded to support dissertations, debt repayments, applicants with substantial outside funding, lobbying efforts, the purchase of equipment, or rent. All fellows must be U.S. citizens or have permanent U.S. residency status.

21ST CENTURY FUND

Carnegie Corporation has created a 21st Century Fund as a mechanism for unusual institutional initiatives or grants that cut across all program areas. These will largely consist of one-time only awards to draw public and private attention to important needs and opportunities. Currently we are considering organizing an initiative in public libraries.

Public libraries in our midst are so much taken for granted that their significance as living institutions is in danger of becoming lost to us. Libraries contain the heritage of humanity, the record of its triumphs and failures and of its intellectual, scientific, and artistic achievements, and its collective memory. Libraries are not only repositories of past human endeavor, they provide tools for learning, understanding, and progress. They are a laboratory of human aspiration and a source of self-renewal, intellectual growth, and hope. One of the great challenges for all learning institutions today is to determine the place of technology in promoting the unity of knowledge. Libraries are now wrestling with this very problem — in particular how networked computers and information in electronic forms can be integrated into the historical identity of the library and, conversely, how to accommodate the library's traditional organizational structure and social purposes to these new media. There is reason to be optimistic about the possibility of a lively coexistence between the library and the computer and between the computer and the book, provided that public access is protected, that services remain free to all, and that learning through libraries is not permitted to become an isolated experience divorced from a sense of community.

The Corporation will consider recommending a series of one-time-only grants in the next fiscal year to assist in the transformations under way in a number of public library systems, so that they become even more visible and vital institutions among the people they serve. These grants will be mainly dedicated to preservation, literacy programs, and children's services.

CONCLUSION

Every institution that is imbedded in our democratic system must periodically undergo a process of examination and self-renewal if our country is to adapt successfully to broader changes in the society and to anticipate trends to which it must respond. John W. Gardner wrote at length about this in his book, Self-Renewal (1963). Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, speaks of the "conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves." The same may be said for foundations and other institutions, systems, and societies.

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