MassBay Awarded Funding For Remote Faculty Training

WELLESLEY, MA — MassBay Community College received a $300,000 grant to respond to educational needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The grant provides funding for remote and online instructional training for up to 40 adjunct faculty who use content from the fields of Humanities and the Social Sciences to deliver student learning objectives.

NEH CARES Act Grants provide economic stabilization funds to support essential operations at more than 300 cultural institutions across the country by preserving humanities jobs nationwide, preserve and curate humanities collections, advance humanities research, and maintain buildings and core operations.

“Adjunct faculty are a vital part of our college community,” said MassBay’s Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences professor, Nina Keery. “We are thrilled to be able to support them in this way. We are also excited to be the only higher education institution in Massachusetts that was ultimately chosen to receive the grant.”

According to a press release by NEH, this was a highly competitive grant with, “more than 2,300 eligible applications from cultural organizations requesting more than $370 million in funding for projects between June and December 2020, and approximately 14 percent of the applicants were funded.” NEH Chairman, Jon Parrish Peede said, “Over the past few months, we have witnessed tremendous financial distress at cultural organizations across the country, which have been compelled to furlough staff, cancel programs, and reduce operations to make up for revenue shortfalls cause by the pandemic. NEH is pleased to provide $40 million to preserve thousands of jobs at museums, archives, historic sites, and colleges and universities that are vital to our nation’s cultural life and economy.”

The NEH was created in 1965 as an independent federal agency to support research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.