Bard College has received a $399,000 award from the Mellon Foundation to support a three-year project on voting rights, the college announced this week.

The initiative, a collaboration with North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Tuskegee University, Prairie View A&M University and The Andrew Goodman Foundation, will, the college stated in a release, use the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and outlawed age-based voter discrimination, as a prism through which to understand the history of voting and disenfranchisement in the United States and the role of college communities in the fight for voting rights.

“We are thrilled that the Mellon Foundation is supporting this project, which unites four universities and a non-profit that have been centrally involved in defending the rights of students to vote and the fight against race-based disenfranchisement,” stated Bard Professor of Political Studies and Vice President for Academic Affairs Jonathan Becker. “Young people are the country’s future and defending their voting rights is essential to a healthy democracy.”

The applied-learning research curricular project will produce research and teaching materials on the history of voting rights, with a special focus on the 26th Amendment, in the form of written and video case studies, recorded lectures and oral histories. These materials, the college stated, “will be contextualized by the historic and contemporary struggles for voting rights on these campuses and will in turn be used in the classroom in co-designed and co-taught network collaborative courses that will take place simultaneously at the four main partner institutions of higher education: Bard College, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Tuskegee University, and Prairie View A&M University.”

The materials will also be used to train student ambassadors of The Andrew Goodman Foundation, a national organization with a mission to make youth voices and votes a powerful force in democracy. The foundation, the college stated, will lift up their students’ ongoing work on these campuses and across its network, and historically ground and help shape their future civic engagement activities as promoters and defenders of the right to vote.

This project highlights how academic institutions and their leaders can also serve as important civic actors in promoting and defending democratic principles. The four institutions centrally involved in the project offer unique insights into the role of colleges in the fight for voting rights, particularly the fight against discrimination based on race and age.

Bard College has for the last 25 years participated in four successful lawsuits, one federal and three state, that established student voting eligibility, a polling site on campus, and the adoption of a state law mandating polling sites on college campuses with more than 300 registered student voters and outlawing campus gerrymanders.