Our two-year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “At Risk U: The Past, Present, and Future of Academic Freedom,” aims to move the campus community from a reckoning with the university’s history as a land-grant institution to a more complex understanding of present-day struggles over academic freedom, democracy, and higher education. The Sawyer Seminar’s events and activities will better position us to intervene in institutional structures and campus cultures. At stake is a deeper understanding within and beyond the campus community of the costs of econometric risk thinking for the just future of the public university.
As part of our efforts to bring the broader campus community into this extended collaborative inquiry, in Spring 2026 we offered a call for seed-funded proposals to support a variety of projects that build on the key ideas and themes of the Sawyer Seminar. The call invited proposals for projects that center interdisciplinary and humanistic approaches to the study of the historical and contemporary economic, political, and technological challenges confronting US higher education and democracy. The application process has concluded, and we’ ll be announcing funded projects in the coming weeks across the following categories of support:
- Team Teaching (to design and team-teach a course related to the topic): $10,000
- Reading Groups (to convene a reading group on the topic): $5,000
- Event Development (to organize panels, exhibits, performances, or mini-conferences): up to $10,000
- Research Assistantship (25% for 1 semester to support faculty-led research on a key seminar theme): $13,000
- Course Revision (for implementation of research themes into individual parts of existing courses): $1,000