HuMetricsHSS Initiative Receives $650,000 Mellon Grant

Michigan State University has received a $650,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue the work of the Humane Metrics for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HuMetricsHSS) initiative. The initiative is led by an international group of individuals from the academic and non-profit sectors, including Nicky Agate, Snyder-Granader Assistant University Librarian for Research Data and Digital Scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

“The HumetricsHSS team has come to realize that when institutions align values with practices, they collectively begin to reshape the culture of higher education,” Agate observes. “We recognize that a focus on process rather than product provides many opportunities for embedding those values—such as equity, openness, community, or transparency–in every aspect of work.” 

The HuMetricsHSS initiative helps academic and cultural heritage institutions develop locally relevant values-based frameworks both to assess scholarly output, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, and to facilitate values-enacted decision-making and prioritization at all institutional types and levels. These new frameworks encourage institutions to move beyond traditional measures such as published articles and books in evaluating the work of faculty and staff.

With the new funding from the Mellon Foundation, the HuMetricsHSS initiative will provide models of institutional transformation, scale up trainings and infrastructure, and build and expand communities of practice, in part through a new fellowship program open to faculty, staff, and librarians at higher education institutions based in the United States. 

Read the full press release on Michigan State University’s website.