President's Welcome

I am especially pleased to invite you to the website of the Teagle Foundation. I do so as I take my own new vantage point to the work of the Foundation. For some twenty years I have been a member of the Board of Directors, and now serve as President. Since its establishment in 1944 by Walter C. Teagle, the Foundation has devoted the largest part of its resources to issues that are at the heart of today's national educational policy agenda: college access, quality, and affordability. Each of these topics opens into an enormously complex and challenging set of interwoven questions that bear on the future of America's democracy and its competitiveness in a global era. All of the issues have taken on a new urgency as the economy struggles to emerge from a severe recession, and as colleges and universities labor with sharply reduced resources and answer pointed questions about both their efficiency and effectiveness in educating students.

The focus of the Teagle Foundation's work for the last several years has been on the quality of liberal education, especially through grants to explore the use of evidence to improve student learning. A large number of awards have supported collaborative projects among colleges to develop new practices and try novel approaches in gathering and using evidence. Other collaborative work has focused on developing fresh ideas about the purposes and practices of liberal education. We also have brought some of these concerns into focus in our early and active support for the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, which focuses on coordinating broad efforts to advance student learning. Nor has the issue of access been lost from direct concern, as indicated in both our grants for the College-Community Connections program and in our support for ExxonMobil Scholarships, our oldest grant program.

Bob Connor, my predecessor as President and now Senior Advisor to the Foundation, and Donna Heiland, Vice President, and Cheryl Ching, Program Officer, have developed an unusually informative and engaging website. One of its many purposes is to convey information about the Foundation's grantmaking: how we develop program areas, our current and past Requests for Proposals, a list of the projects we support, and guidelines for our grantees. Another equally important function of our website is to highlight some of the latest thinking and best practices in contemporary liberal education. The Foundation has found that sharing knowledge, ideas, and practices provides a dramatic multiplier effect to our philanthropy. Of particular interest to visitors might be publications developed by our grantees, essays written by Foundation staff and others, and a list of additional resources (articles, bibliographies, databases, websites, etc.) that are not produced by the Foundation but are related to its work. A selection of my own writings can be found here. Also worth visiting at are the Liblog, the Foundation's weblog on liberal education, and the Teagle Podcast, which includes interviews with grantees and other higher education leaders.

I trust that you will find our work and our website to be of interest.

Richard L. Morrill