Mellon Foundation – Program Officer, Higher Learning
The Mellon Foundation (“Foundation”) is a not-for-profit, grant-making organization that believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom to be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. The Foundation makes grants in four core
program areas — Higher Learning, Arts and Culture, Public Knowledge, and Humanities in Place— and through its signature Presidential Initiatives. The Foundation seeks a Program Officer for its Higher Learning team.
The Higher Learning program strives to make advanced humanities knowledge as broad, deep, and varied as possible, in terms of both the perspectives it represents and the audiences it reaches. Understanding such optimized knowledge to be an intrinsic social good, we work with colleges, universities, and allied organizations to ensure that its value is widely recognized and that the power deriving from it is equitably distributed. We support curricular, scholarly, and structural innovations that further these goals, at all levels of the higher-ed system.
This is a five-year, term-limited position reporting to the Program Director, with a start date of July 1, 2026. The Program Officer will participate in grantmaking across all of Higher Learning’s strategic areas. The position is to be held by an experienced and innovative humanities scholar who possesses a broad and extensive professional network and a demonstrated capacity for collaboration.
Higher Learning’s program strategies are to:
- Provide liberal arts educational opportunities to the widest possible share of the population, including postsecondary students at all levels who would benefit from intensive humanities study
- Elevate the knowledge that informs more complete and accurate narratives of the human experience
- Broaden the range of perspectives in US academic faculties and institutional leadership while championing humanities expertise
Recent examples of projects funded through the Higher Learning program include “Making Humanities Education Accessible for Post-Traditional College Students,” “LatinTX: Place, Race, and Latinx Critical Environmental Justice in Texas,” and “Crossroads Cohort: Africana Studies at the Intersection of Art History and Art Making.” Please visit the Foundation’s grants database to see all of the grants made through Higher Learning to mid-2024.
To see more about this position and how to apply please click here.