The new Awards for Faculty guidelines are live on the NEH website: Awards for Faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Awards for Faculty at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and Awards for Faculty at Tribal Colleges and Universities. The deadline for all three programs is April 17, with drafts due by Sunday, March 25.
The biggest change this year is in the program targeting institutions with high Hispanic enrollment. It has been renamed “Awards for Faculty at Hispanic-Serving Institutions,” and the eligibility requirements have also changed.
To sum up the new requirements: applicants must either a) be affiliated with an institution that is eligible for Title V funding as determined by the Department of Education’s currently published data, or b) if they are not eligible according to the currently published data, they must supply a letter from the Department of Education that confers Title V status on their institution for 2011 or 2012. (We accept letters from either year because of the peculiarities of the timetable by which the D.O.E. generates these letters.) If an applicant is submitting a letter, it need not come in together with the application—we will accept it up until the deadline for letters of reference, which is June 3 this year.
There is also a related change in the instructions for the narrative section of the application. Applicants to the Hispanic-serving program must now end their narrative with a statement asserting their eligibility. The details, including links to the Department of Education’s data, are contained in the “Eligibility” section of the guidelines.
Why did we make this change? In short, to make the eligibility requirements fairer and more rational. Because the Department of Education’s list of Institutions with High Hispanic Enrollment had not been updated for about five years, there were an increasing number of schools that should by rights have been eligible for the program, but whose faculty were not able to apply as long as the list was not updated. The tradeoff is that the new requirements are somewhat more complicated than the old ones, since there is no longer any one list of institutions that serves as the final word on eligibility in every case.
Other improvements include a revised FAQ, which includes a table showing the differences and similarities between Awards for Faculty, Fellowships, and Summer Stipends.
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