History
When the campaign was first launched, the initial Goal to raise $3 million: $1 million from APSA members and friends and an additional $2 million by leveraging internal resources and seeking funding outside of the immediate political science community. The purpose of establishing these funds was, as stated by then Executive Director Catherine Rudder, to ensure that “the fruits of the campaign would assist not only political scientists currently engaged in the study of politics, but also generations of scholars and teachers into the foreseeable future”. Now, there are a series of endowment funds that serve as the foundation for many of the research grants and programs managed by the Centennial Center; they are:
The Second Century Fund was the heart of the Centennial Campaign. The Second Century Fund supports operating costs of the Centennial Center for Political Science. Income from the endowment currently also supports the Summer Centennial Center Research Grants and “off-cycle” grants and initiatives at the Associate Director’s discretion in consultation with APSA leadership.
The APSA and the Women’s Caucus for Political Science created the Marguerite Ross Barnett Endowment Fellowship to honor the memory of political scientist Marguerite Ross Barnett – former president of the University of Houston, chancellor of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and member of the board of directors of the Monsanto Corporation – whose untimely death in 1992 at the age of 49 cut short a brilliant career of an extraordinary American. The Fund currently supports research grants for APSA members engaged in research on issues of diversity, cultural nationalism, African American voting behavior, education policy, or urban and minority policy and politics. Barnett Fund grants are awarded each year as part of the Summer Centennial Center Research Grants program.
The Ed Artinian Endowment for Advancing Publishing supports programs that encourage and assist young scholars in publishing their research. This endowment was established in memory of Ed Artinian, the founder and president of Chatham House Publishers. This fund is currently part of the Summer Centennial Center Research Grants program and is used to fund proposals directly related to publishing. These proposals typically include book workshops, proofreading costs, manuscript revisions, and research projects with a clear path to being published as an academic book.
The Endowment recognizes the contributions Representative William Steiger (R-WI) made to APSA’s Congressional Fellowship Program during his tenure in Congress. The William A. Steiger Endowment supports two initiatives within APSA, one which is managed by the Congressional Fellowship Program and one which is managed by the Centennial Center. The Congressional Fellowship Program uses the Steiger fund to enable former APSA Congressional Fellows to extend their stays in Washington in order to conduct research or complete a writing project related to their experiences as Congressional Fellows. The Steiger Fund also supports the Summer Centennial Center Research Grants. Funds from the Steiger Fund are awarded to grant proposals that aim to study issues related to legislative politics.
Presidency Research Endowment Fund is designed to support scholars conducting research on the American Presidency. The Presidency Research Fund is currently part of the Summer Centennial Center Research Grants program.
The Miller Fellowship supports scholars conducting work in national and comparative electoral politics. The endowment was developed to honor the outstanding contributions of Warren E. Miller to the study of electoral politics and other areas of political science inquiry. The Miller Fund is currently part of the Summer Centennial Center Research Grants program.
Made possible by the individual generosity of the late Walter E. Beach and his many friends and colleagues, the Beach Fund provides travel grants to junior scholars and graduate students attending the APSA Annual Meeting.
The Alma Ostrom and Leah Hopkins Awan Civic Education Fund supports the Association’s promotion of democratic engagement; efforts to advance understanding of self-governing systems; the possibilities of moving from authoritarian to democratic systems; and the role of informed citizens in enhancing the adaptive capability of democratic systems to ever-changing environments. The Alma Ostrom and Leah Hopkins Awan Civic Education Endowment, named in honor of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom’s mothers, supports training seminars, publication, out-reach activities, and research that improves the training of political scientists related to the critical role of citizens in a democratic polity. The fund is managed by the Centennial Center and is currently part of the Summer Centennial Center Research Grants program.
In 1997, Aaron Wildavsky was to receive the International Grawemeyer Award for Improving the World Order. Unfortunately, Aaron died before he formally received the award. The Award could not be given posthumously, and the University and the Award Committee decided to gift half of the award to the Centennial Campaign in honor of Aaron Wildavsky.
Established by Nan and Bob Keohane in honor of British historian and politician, James Bryce. This fund supports the global study of political life and the internationalization of the political science discipline and profession. The fund is currently part of the Summer Centennial Center Research Grants program.
The purpose of the Special Fund for the Study of Women and Politics is one of the most broadly (and succinctly) written Centennial Center funds: “to support scholars conducting work in the field of women and politics.” Historically, it has been one of the most popular funds. The fund is part of the Summer Centennial Center Research Grants program.
Chun-tu Hsueh and his wife Huang Te-wa began this fund with a grant of $25,000 in 1998. Mr. Hsueh is the President of the Huang Hsing Foundation, which holds as its mission “to promote international understanding and provide support for international conferences in the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, and both sides of the Taiwan Strait.” The Fellowship is named for Ms. Huang’s late father, Huang Hsing (1874-1916), the military leader of the Chinese revolutionary republican movement and the co-founder of the Republic of China. Currently, the Hsueh fund is part of the Summer Centennial Center Research Grants program, where it is used to provide funding for research projects that study the politics of East Asia.
The Paul A. Volcker Endowment was founded to support research and theory on public administration issues affecting governance in the United States and abroad. The Volcker Fund promotes and supports excellence in research and theory on public administration issues affecting governance in the United States and abroad. The fund is named in honor of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and his exemplary contributions to enhancing and promoting the practice and image of public service in the United States.
The Sector Latino de Ciencia Politica (Latino Political Science Caucus) and the APSA Committee on the Status of Latinos/as in the Profession sponsored the instantiation of the fund and have played a key part in its continued administration. The Fund’s primary goal is to encourage and support the recruitment, retention, and promotion of political science students and scholars who study and research Latina/o politics (especially students and tenure track junior faculty). Grants will be made to individuals, institutions, and projects whose purposes most clearly match the goals of the Fund, and whose proposals most persuasively demonstrate capacity for successful completion.
E. Pendleton Herring, APSA’s 48th President, started the Herring Fund for Art and Politics with a gift of $28,873 to APSA in August of 1999. The initial purpose of the fund appears to have been related to the maintenance of the Pendleton Herring Political Print Collection. Presently, the fund supports projects related to the study of political art, with a special focus on art that explores the concept of democracy or democratic politics.
The Rita Mae Kelly Endowment Fund was founded in memory of Rita Mae Kelly, a scholar of gender and politics, who died after a prolonged illness in 2001. The Fund was conceived by three of Dr. Kelly’s peers: Judith Baer, Valerie Martinez-Ebers, and Jane Bayes. The Fund was established in affiliation with the Women’s Caucus for Political Science, the Latina Caucus in Political Science, the Committee on the Status of Latinos/Latinas in the Profession, the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Organized Section, and the Women and Politics Research Organized Section. Dr. Kelly’s peers created the Fund to support scholarship focused on “the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity and political power.” The Fund intended at its inception to fund research grants for pre-dissertation graduate students, an award, or a public presentation on the topics described above. In recent years, the Rita Mae Kelly Fund has been part of the Summer Centennial Center Research Grants program.
Paul Rich and the Policy Studies Organization began a fundraising drive in 2004 aimed at raising $75,000 to name the Centennial Center Library as a permanent tribute to Seymour Martin Lipset for his contributions to scholarship and public affairs. The Centennial Center library provides access to numerous journals and daily periodicals, along with select books. The library provides space for small meetings or interview sessions and has “plug-in” capabilities for scholars stopping by the Center for day visits.
The Centennial Center started, what was originally titled the Radin Fund (now Pracademic Fund) in 2013 from a generous future bequest of the estate of Prof. Beryl Radin, following her call for a renewed focus on ‘pracademic’ work at the 2012 Gaus Lecture. The Radin Fund is intended to award a sum of money to a deserving public administration faculty member. The money would allow that faculty member to work for one year in the field alongside practitioners. The fund would cover tenured and untenured faculty to work in public sector organizations as well as organizations involved in policymaking and the policy implementation process. This fund is on the Centennial Center’s budget, but it is used by the Government Affairs Department to fund the Pracademic Fellowship program.
Efforts
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“I used the generous APSA Centennial Center funding to launch a podcast series focused on collaboration in political science. The first episodes of the Co-Authored podcast have focused on the collaborations of: Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones; Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady; and the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS). Future episodes will focus on Piven and Cloward as well as collaboration and loss. All of the episodes can be found here as well as on iTunes.
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- Bracic, Ana. 2016. “Reaching the Individual: EU Accession, NGOs, and Human Rights.” American Political Science Review 110(3): 530–46. doi: 10.1017/S000305541600023X.
- Busby, Ethan C. 2021. Should You Stay Away From Strangers? Experiments On The Political Consequences Of Intergroup Contact. Cambridge University Press
- De Bruin, Erica. 2021. “Policing Insurgency: Are More Militarized Police More Effective?” Small Wars & Insurgencies 33(4–5): 742–66. doi: 10.1080/09592318.2021.1980186.
- Huber, L., & Gunderson, A. (2023). Putting A Fresh Face Forward: Does the Gender of a Police Chief Affect Public Perceptions? Political Research Quarterly, 76(3), 1418-1432. https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129221142598
- Jardina A, Mickey R. White Racial Solidarity and Opposition to American Democracy. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 2022;699(1):79-89. doi:10.1177/00027162211069730
- Kumar, T., “Home-price subsidies increase local-level political participation in urban India” Journal of Politics. 84, 2022.
- Leiter, Debra, Reilly, Jack, Vonnahme, Beth. 2021 The crowding of social distancing: How social context and interpersonal connections affect individual responses to the coronavirus*. Social Science Quarterly 102: 2435– 2451. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.13060
- Leonard, Meghan E. 2016. “State Legislatures, State High Courts, and Judicial Independence: An Examination of Court-Curbing Legislation in the States” Justice System Journal 37(1): 53-62
- McCrary, Lorraine. “The Politics of Community: Care and Agency in People with Intellectual Disabilities at L’Arche,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 9.2 (2021): 409-422.
- Moldavanova, A. V., & Akbulut-Gok, I. (2022). Inter-organizational networking and the Great Recession: Lessons from Detroit arts and culture organizations. International Journal of Public Administration, 45(3), 213-227.
- Nikolayenko, Olena. “Invisible Revolutionaries: Women’s Participation in the Revolution of Dignity.” Comparative Politics 52, no. 3 (2020): 451–472
- Revkin, M. R. (2022). How does subnational variation in repression affect attitudes toward police? Evidence from Iraq’s 2019 protests. Violence: An International Journal, 3(1), 85-99. https://doi.org/10.1177/26330024211070318
- Saha, Sparsha., Weeks, Anna C. Ambitious Women: Gender and Voter Perceptions of Candidate Ambition. Political Behavior 44, 779–805 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09636-z
At present, the Centennial Center’s public engagement programs, including the Public Scholarship Program and Pracademic Fellowship Program, broaden the impact of political science research and provide scholars the opportunity to directly shape policymaking. The Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER), with its focus on rigorous, ethical, community-engaged research, exemplifies our commitment to ensuring that political science is not confined to ivory towers but actively contributes to societal well-being and affecting change.
“For both Bautista-Chavez and Chan–two faculty women of color from immigrant families that have been vilified in various ways across the United States and throughout U.S. history–CER means developing research not only about communities of color and immigrant communities, but with communities of color and immigrant communities, and not only treating people of color and immigrants as subjects of study, but also recognizing the agency and expertise of people of color and immigrant communities. ICER was a transformative experience during which both Bautista-Chavez and Chan gained renewed confidence in their research, received feedback on their research projects, and developed a community of scholars with shared research commitments”.
Source
Future
[Figure 1: Summer Centennial Center Research Grants, 2019-2023]
[Figure 2: Spring Centennial Center Research Grants, formerly known as “Small Research Grants” , 2019-2023]
Scholars are grappling with heightened demands to conduct rigorous, impactful research, all while facing severe resource constraints. The Centennial Center, a critical lifeline for scholars, is urgently in need of bolstered support to ensure the Center’s continued effectiveness and support for academics in these challenging times.