Tulane was one of
only 16 universities in the nation to receive a $50,000 NEH planning
award to compete for a $5 million implementation grant to establish a
Regional Humanities Center. Ultimately ten such centers in ten
different regions will be designated by NEH, and each grant winner
must match the federal award with non-federal dollars on a 3-1 basis.
Our competitor in the Deep South region, which encompasses the states
of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee, as
defined by the NEH, is the Center for the Studies of Southern Culture
at Ole Miss.
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All this
must be accomplished by August 1, 2001. |
Fifty thousand dollars is not a
lot of money to build horizontal and vertical collaborations among
humanities and cultural institutions of the scope expected by NEH . It
involves building capacity in the way of conferences, public outreach,
and K-12 programming. It entails extensive travel. It means making
costly investments in web-accessible databases and distance-learning
technology. Meanwhile, all this must be accomplished by August 1,
2001, the new deadline for submission of implementation grant
proposals.
Accordingly, Tulane,
appreciating both the potential represented by this highly competitive
NEH challenge grant and real costs such an ambitious undertaking like
this involves, has infused an additional $350,000 in cost-sharing and
non-cost sharing money into the planning project, (Some of this is
real cash; most represents in-kind dollars only.) At the same time,
the principal investigators (Frey and Powell) have raised from the
Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust and the Lupin
Foundation an additional $95,000 dollars, and they are aggressively
pursuing other sources of external funding. They consider the
prospects bright.
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