2026 Higher Learning Program – Dec 1

Posted by Mellon Foundation on November 11, 2025

Mellon Foundation issues open call for concepts for 2026 Higher Learning Program

The Mellon Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty and empowerment that can be found there.

The foundation has issued an open call for concepts for its 2026 Higher Learning Program. Through the call, the foundation invites institutions of higher education to submit applications for research and/or curricular projects focused on either of the following two areas:

Unruly intelligences: The emergence of generative AI has triggered a firestorm of techno-utopian promises and apocalyptic predictions alike. These reckonings often imply that AI is “intelligent” in the human sense, even though—from the iconic use of this term in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”—Alan Turing called this attitude “dangerous” and famously defined artificial intelligence only in terms of how well computers could imitate human thought. Are we now facing an existential abdication of human capacities to machines? Or the usual evolution of how we define intelligence in keeping with our shifting technologies? Meanwhile, the terms of human and more-than-human intelligences are also unstable, with greater or lesser value assigned to particular populations, species, and objects according to our historical, social, and ecological contexts. How might different forms of AI—generative, predictive, agentic, and others, including models that are currently still theoretical—complicate or exacerbate the inequalities that arise from these norms? With so much at stake, the humanities have an urgent role to play in shaping contemporary understanding of artificial and other intelligences—and in making practical, informed recommendations about how to regulate and/or adopt AI in our learning, work, and most intimate lives.

Normalization and its discontents: The concept of normalcy is paradoxical. It entails the statistically average that is at the same time a moral imperative, a completely ordinary state that is nonetheless much to be desired, a cultural ideal. Moreover, the normal often functions as the ideal even when it is not numerically average. Despite the seemingly universal character of these formulations, the normal entered Western consciousnesses only in the modern era with the 19th-century efflorescence of statistics, bringing with it its opposite: the deviant, exceptional, aberrant, not normal. How does the concept of normalcy govern notions of human life, and when doesn’t it? What are the structures and systems that keep it in place, in realms as disparate as the aesthetic, socioeconomic, psychological, physiological, political, spiritual, and ethical? What, if anything, does the historical knowledge of its recent invention—and vigorous social rejections—enable?

Applications must be demonstrably grounded in the humanities and led by humanities scholars. Experimental methodologies, interdisciplinary and community collaboration, and pathways to informing campus and/or wider policies and practices are welcome. Projects should engage teams of scholars and/or students, and have visible, enduring impact at the institution. Awards will range from $250,000 to $500,000 for a duration of up to four years.

This call is open to all accredited, nonprofit, four-year-degree-granting higher education institutions in the United States and its territories that offer a liberal arts education. Institutions are limited to submitting no more than three concepts by the application deadline.

All interested applicants must first register by December 1, 2025. After Mellon staff have processed the registration request, eligible applicants will gain access to the application form in Mellon’s grants portal. Applications will be due February 17, 2026, at 3:00 p.m. ET. Finalists will be selected, and invitations for full proposals will be issued during the summer of 2026, with final grant recommendations presented for prospective approval no later than November 2026, for a December 1, 2026 start date—and potentially sooner.

For complete program guidelines and application instructions, see the Mellon Foundation website.

Deadline: December 1, 2025 (Registration)