With the support of the Mellon Foundation, Whittier College offers the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, dedicated to increasing faculty diversity in institutions of higher learning.
Established in 1988 to address the barriers that result in the problem of underrepresentation in the faculty ranks of higher education, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) is committed to supporting a diverse professoriate and to promoting the value of multivocality in the humanities and related disciplines, elevating accounts, interpretations, and narratives that expand present understandings. Its name honors Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the noted African-American educator, statesman, minister, and former president of Morehouse College.
Founded with an initial cohort of eight member institutions, the program has grown to include forty-seven member schools and three consortia, including the UNCF consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Whittier College is part of the MMUF West Coast Region which includes Caltech, Stanford, University of New Mexico, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCR, USC, and two consortia (five Cal State campuses and the Claremont Colleges).
Open to students of all races and ethnicities, the MMUF program is committed to multivocality -- amplifying perspectives and contributions that have been marginalized within the conventional scholarly record and that promote the realization of a more socially just world. The program seeks to increase the number of students who will pursue a Ph.D. and enter the professoriate in core humanities and social science fields. Fellows must demonstrate the potential to bring historically marginalized or underrepresented perspectives to the academy, including the production of scholarly research that contributes to more complete and accurate narratives of the human experience and lays the foundation for more just and equitable futures.
Up to five Whittier College students will be selected as Mellon Mays Fellows annually and will explore their interest in college teaching in disciplines of special interest to the Foundation. Under the two-year fellowship, selected students will receive financial support to engage in independent research through the academic and summer periods, attend and present their research at local and national conferences, one-on-one support from faculty mentors at Whittier, and will engage with other MMUF Fellows at Mellon-sponsored events.