Under the theme Education and Culture, the Foundation seeks to improve teaching and learning; encourage scholarship and scholars and strengthen the resources on which they depend; develop talent and resources in the creative and performing arts; preserve and revitalize traditional cultures and art forms; and foster analysis of policy issues in higher education and the arts.

Highlights of the year included programs in the U.S. to help students at urban community colleges go on to earn baccalaureate degrees, to integrate new scholarship into the curriculum, and to maintain the vitality of the academic profession. A major new initiative was the establishment of an organization to help the nation's performing arts and other institutions stabilize their finances.

TEACHING AND LEARNING

Efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning in higher education emphasized the special needs of minorities, women, and other disadvantaged groups.

Using as a model its recent City High School Recognition Program (see page 10), the Foundation this year launched the Urban Community College Transfer Opportunities Program. Seventy-one community colleges serving large numbers of minority students were invited to submit proposals for projects that would better prepare their students for upper-division studies at four-year institutions. Twenty-four were selected to receive awards of $25,000 (see listing, page 50). The funds will support such projects as joint courses with "feeder" high schools, transfer agreements with four-year institutions, better information and counseling services, and faculty mentor systems to provide students with academic and personal support. In the program's second stage, up to ten of the colleges will be invited to expand their original projects and will be given additional grants of up to $250,000 each.

A recent development in American higher education is the emergence of community-based colleges (cbcs)—small, private institutions, in rural or urban areas, serving the special educational needs of mainly minority communities. Most of the fifty or so cbcs that opened their doors between 1965 and 1980 have survived, but all have experienced difficulty in managing their finances and keeping adequate records of their students' academic performance. To help strengthen these institutions, the Foundation granted $235,000 to the Association for Community Based Education (acbe) for training of cbc staff in financial management and academic record keeping. The colleges will also be assisted in obtaining short-term bank credit through a $1 million loan guarantee fund secured by a Foundation program-related investment and managed by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

Inadequate writing skills are a common cause of student failure and poor performance in American colleges. Approaches to instruction suggested by cognitive research, however, together with word processing and computer technology, now present opportunities for significant improvement. This year, the Foundation awarded $415,912 to the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh to develop and test a computer-based program in which freshmen will be helped to improve their writing skills.

Women's studies programs have proliferated on many American campuses in recent years, but the results of this research are only now beginning to have an impact on the major academic disciplines. For projects to integrate the new scholarship into the liberal arts curriculum, the Foundation granted a total of $493,557 to Wellesley College, Spelman College, and the University of Arizona. Wellesley's Center for Research on Women will publish a guide to recent research on women in thirteen humanistic disciplines. Spelman's new Women's Studies Center will develop courses on black women for the core curriculum of Spelman and four other colleges in the Atlanta area. Arizona's Southwest Institute for Research on Women will incorporate the results of recent women's studies into introductory humanities, social science, and science courses at thirty-six state universities in sixteen western states.

The National Council for Research on Women, founded in 1981 to coordinate the activities of the nation's thirty-six university-based women's studies centers, was granted $296,600 to expand its activities. The centers, many of which have received Foundation support, have generated