New York, New York, September 17, 2010 — Don Michael Randel, who heads the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been elected to the board of Carnegie Corporation of New York, the grantmaking foundation established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911.
The announcement was made following the foundation’s September board meeting by former Governor Thomas H. Kean, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Carnegie Corporation of New York and Vartan Gregorian, the foundation’s President.
“I am delighted that Don Randel has accepted the Trustees’ invitation to join the Corporation’s Board,” said Governor Kean. “Don’s insight as a grantmaker and his years of leadership at two of the country’s outstanding research universities will be critical to the foundation as we continue to invest in innovative ways to carry out Andrew Carnegie’s mission to advance and diffuse knowledge and understanding.”
Commenting on Don Randel’s appointment, Vartan Gregorian said, “We are honored to have Don Randel join our Board of Trustees. He is a musicologist, past President of the University of Chicago, an individual with a deep dedication to the humanities and the social sciences, as well as the current head of an institution—the Mellon Foundation—which has been at the forefront of efforts to support libraries, higher education and scholarship, as well as to preserve and disseminate knowledge. His presence on our Board, along with our other distinguished Trustees, including the presidents of MIT, Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania, will provide both expertise and guidance on issues relating to higher education, libraries and indeed, the entire realm of education and scholarship.”
In 2005, as President of the University of Chicago, Randel was awarded the inaugural Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award which recognizes higher education leaders who have demonstrated a commitment to excellence in undergraduate education, both teaching and research; the development of major interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary undergraduate and graduate programs that aim to bridge the gulf between the theoretical and the practical; university outreach to their respective communities and cooperative efforts with business, civic, and education leaders on initiatives such as K-12 school reform; and, international initiatives. Randel was honored for his curricular innovations and promotion of strong links between the university and city of Chicago.
Don Randel is a musicologist who attended Princeton University, where he received bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in music. His scholarly specialty is the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Spain and France. As a music historian, Mr. Randel is widely published, particularly on medieval liturgical chant, and he has also written on such varied topics as Arabic music theory, Latin American popular music, and 15th century French music and poetry.
In 1968, Mr. Randel joined the Cornell University faculty in the department of music. He served for 32 years as a member of Cornell’s faculty, where he was also department chair, vice-provost, and associate dean and then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He became provost of Cornell University in 1995.
From 2000 until 2006, Mr. Randel held the position of President of the University of Chicago. There he led efforts to strengthen the humanities and the arts on campus, as well as a broad range of interactions with the City of Chicago and a further strengthening of the University’s programs in the physical and biomedical sciences and its relationship with the Argonne National Laboratory. He also led the Chicago Initiative, the University’s $2 billion capital campaign.
Randel has been President of the New York City-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since July 2006. Mellon makes grants principally in five core program areas: higher education and scholarship, libraries and scholarly communications, conservation and the environment, museums and art conservation, and performing arts. Additionally, Mellon has been instrumental in the development of ARTstor, JSTOR and Ithaka, non-profit organizations engaged in various activities to further the use of information technology to benefit higher education around the world.
Mr. Randel served as the editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. He is also editor of The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th ed., published in 2003; The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, published in 1996; and The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published in 1999.