The Cooperative Program in the Humanities was conceived in 1962-1963 by several members of the faculties and administrative staffs of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, who wanted to combine the resources of the two schools to support teaching and research in the humanities in the upper South. In particular, they wanted to provide professors in the humanities the opportunity to spend an academic year in scholarly activity at Durham or Chapel Hill. In August 1963, the Ford Foundation granted $800,000 jointly to the two universities to create the Cooperative Program in the Humanities. This sum was expected to last for three years, and the terms of the grant allowed great flexibility in its expenditure. Further grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, and the William H. Donner Foundation allowed the program to enlarge the number of participants and to extend its work through the 1970- 1971 academic year.
The program's main purpose, throughout its existence, was the awarding of nine-month fellowships to members of humanities faculties. Fellows were selected from colleges and universities in Virginia and the Carolinas. While residing in Durham, N.C., or Chapel Hill, N.C., they received from the program an amount equivalent to their salaries at their home institutions. Between 1964 and 1971, 98 scholars from 38 colleges and universities participated, producing as a result 18 books, 80 articles, and numerous essays, conference papers, poems, and musical compositions.
The Cooperative Program in the Humanities took on the responsibility of recruiting advanced graduate students at Duke University or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to susbstitute for program fellows at their home institutions. In addition, the program brought visiting professors to Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, awarded a few summer research grants to faculty of the host universities, and attempted briefly to provide graduate students editorial experience through internships at the presses of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University. Finally, the program spawned a summer institute, the Southeastern Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. This institute survived for several years after the Cooperative Program in the Humanities ended.
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1963 -
1965
:
Professor R. M. Lumiansky (Duke), Chairman
Professor O. B. Hardison (UNC), Co-chairman
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1965 -
1971
:
Professor James L. Godfrey (UNC), Chairman
Professor John Lievsay (Duke), Co-chairman, 1965-1968
Professor Wesley Kort (Duke), Co-chairman, 1968-1970
Professor Hans Hillerbrand (Duke), Co-chairman, 1970-1971
From the guide to the Cooperative Program in the Humanities Records, 1963-1973, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. University Archives.)
