REPORT of the ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION 2014 the Andrew W
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REPORT OF THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION 2014 The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Report from January 1, 2014 through December 31, 2014 140 East 62nd Street, New York, New York 10065 (212) 838-8400 http://www.mellon.org Trustees Chairmen Emeriti W. Taylor Reveley III, Chairman John C. Whitehead* Danielle S. Allen Hanna H. Gray Richard H. Brodhead Anne M. Tatlock Katherine G. Farley Kathryn A. Hall Earl Lewis Glenn D. Lowry Eric M. Mindich Sarah E. Thomas Officers of the Corporation Earl Lewis, President John E. Hull, Financial Vice President and Chief Investment Officer Philip E. Lewis, Vice President Michele S. Warman, Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary Mariët Westermann, Vice President Program Officers Saleem Badat, Program Director Alison Gilchrest, Program Officer Armando I. Bengochea, Program Officer Eugene M. Tobin, Senior Program Officer Helen Cullyer, Program Officer Donald J. Waters, Senior Program Officer Susan Feder, Program Officer Administrative Staff Vanessa Cogan, Grant Information Systems Manager Oscar De La Cruz, Manager of Human Resources & Benefits Patricia J. Diaz, Associate General Counsel Rebecca Feit, Assistant General Counsel Makeba Morgan Hill, Deputy to the President and Chief Planner Susanne C. Pichler, Librarian Finance and Investment Staff Abigail Archibald, Portfolio Manager Christy Cicatello, Director of Accounting Michele M. Dinn, Senior Portfolio Manager Karen Grieb Inal, Senior Portfolio Manager Thomas J. Sanders, Chief Financial Officer Ann Siddiqui, Director of Investment Accounting Monica C. Spencer, Senior Portfolio Manager Senior Advisors Hilary Ballon Hans Rutimann As of December 31, 2014 *deceased THE ANDREW W. M ELLON FOUNDATION , a not-for-profit corporation under the laws of the State of New York, resulted from the consolidation on June 30, 1969 of the Old Dominion Foundation into the Avalon Foundation with the name of the Avalon Foundation being changed to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Avalon Foundation had been founded in 1940 by Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Andrew W. Mellon’s daughter. The Old Dominion Foundation had been established in 1941 by Paul Mellon, Andrew W. Mellon’s son. The Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies. To this end, it supports exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work. The Foundation makes grants in five core program areas: higher education and scholarship in the humanities; arts and cultural heritage; scholarly communications; diversity; and international higher education and strategic projects. Collaborative planning by the Foundation and its grantee institutions generally precedes the giving of awards and is an integral part of grantmaking. Unsolicited proposals are rarely supported. Prospective applicants are therefore encouraged not to submit a full proposal at the outset but rather a letter of inquiry, setting forth the need, nature, and amount of any request, in accordance with instructions available on the Foundation’s website, at http://www.mellon.org. The Foundation does not make grants directly to individuals or to primarily local organizations. Within each of its core programs, the Foundation concentrates most of its grantmaking in a few areas. Institutions and programs receiving support are often leaders in fields of Foundation activity, but they may also be promising newcomers, or in a position to demonstrate new ways of overcoming obstacles so as to achieve program goals. The Foundation seeks to strengthen institutions’ core capacities rather than encourage ancillary activities, and it seeks to continue with programs long enough to achieve meaningful results. The Foundation makes its grantmaking and particular areas of emphasis within core programs known in a variety of ways. Annual Reports describe grantmaking activities and present complete lists of recent grants. The Foundation’s website describes the core programs in some depth, publishes past Annual Reports, and furnishes other information concerning the Foundation’s history, evolution, and current approach to grantmaking. 7 PRESIDENT’S REPORT “When the Past is Never Gone” n his novel Requiem for a Nun William Faulkner observed, I “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” That short, sweet phrase forces us to confront our own notions—or wishes—about how far we have left behind the earlier periods in our history. In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times (“Slavery’s Enduring Resonance,” March 15, 2015), writer and social observer Edward Ball tells us that the spasmodic racial eruptions that seem to grab and throttle us occur because the ghosts of slavery have not been exorcised. Ball, a descen - dant of one of the wealthiest slave-owning families in South Carolina, and author of the highly acclaimed Slaves in the Family , a story of his family and the black people they enslaved, argues that the polic - ing of black bodies, and the legislated use of extralegal actions, has its roots in an earlier America, where every black person was assumed to be some white person’s property and many whites presumed them - selves deputized to reconnect property and owner. Many would disagree with Ball, arguing that slavery’s luminance is faint, hinting that its evocation is somehow archaic and out of place. For many, slavery seems the ultimate example of a bygone era. More than once in my 30-year career as a university professor I had a student say, “Slavery, that was about then, and this is about now.” Or, “my ancestors came in the 20th century; they had nothing to do with slavery. Don’t blame me.” My lectures about human cargoes, crop rotations, reciprocal relations, economic benefit, cultural adap - tation, and nearly 250 years of forced labor seemed incongruous to some of those young people, who were growing up in a world in which everyone was encouraged to be like Mike—the late 20th century’s global icon, Michael Jordan. Our distance from slavery has ostensibly increased significantly in recent years, in spite of the four-year remembrance of the Civil War in many regions. This is the digital age and the age of the human genome, when information flows fluidly and quickly. A “generation” is 18 months, the time it takes to introduce a new tech - nological innovation. This alteration of time and knowledge forces us to ask: What is our continuing link to slavery? Is it simply under - stood as the grandparent of segregation—that is, slavery gave birth 8 to emancipation, emancipation gave way to segregation, with seg - regation finally producing desegregation? Perhaps more pointedly, is slavery no more than a museum piece, represented in static form through scholarship, at historical sites and in museums? Most important, how do we make sense of slavery’s lingering presence in our contemporary lives? Is Ball correct that slavery haunts this post-industrial age, because like any apparition out of time, it won’t willingly leave until it knows its time and place have come and gone? Or does it linger because we don’t want it gone, not really? We conjure it back into existence through our veneration of the Civil War, in our cultural productions and reproductions, in fam - ily names and histories, in monuments, memorials, and reenactments, and in the ways we mark difference. Is this why slavery’s ghost—and the specter of race and difference—never seem to leave us? One means of answering these and other questions is through the scholarship of the humanities and the arts, since we cannot exor - cise the past without confronting it fully. Take, for example, historian David Eltis’s digital project, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (http://www.slavevoyages.org), which documents the move - ment of millions of humans from the interior of the African continent to its western coasts, and then on to Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. With a historian’s eye for detail, aided by the computer’s ability to store and sort vast amounts of information for almost imme - diate retrieval and analysis, Eltis helps us see the transatlantic slave trade for what it was: a global affair predicated on the exchange of humans, goods, and commodities for the enrichment of a complex network of actors over several centuries. Along the way African names, birthplaces, words, and kinship ties were pushed deeper and deeper into the creases of human memory. In their place, over the course of several centuries, ideologies surfaced to justify slavery, religion was invoked to maintain slavery, laws evolved to regulate slav - ery, practices matured to sustain slavery, opponents appeared who questioned slavery, individuals were born who fled slavery, and states did battle to perpetuate slavery. And in our own time, we, descendants of that earlier period, work hard to forget slavery, only to find ourselves stunned when the past refuses to stay gone. But let’s step back further. The forced migration of more than 25 million—when we combine the transatlantic trade and the trans- 9 Saharan system that sent another 13 million plus from Africa into the Middle East, Persia, and India—was not the first great migra - tion of peoples away from the African continent. The most pivotal move occurred more than 60,000 years ago, when our African ancestors began a journey that altered human history. The decod - ing of the human genome confirms what physical anthropologists have said for more than two generations: human life began on the African continent. At some fundamental level we are all African. Or, stated differently, all humans share 99.9 percent of the same genetic material. If that’s the case, much of human history has been about 0.1 percent! In fact geneticists find greater detectable human vari - ation on the African continent than there is in the rest of the world, when they examine the telltale markers found on our Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA.