The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City and Princeton, New Jersey in the United States, is a foundation with five core areas of interest, endowed with wealth accumulated by the late Andrew W. Mellon. It is the product of the 1969 merger of the Avalon Foundation and the Old Dominion Foundation. These foundations were set up separately by Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon-Bruce, the children of Andrew W. Mellon. It is housed in the expanded former offices of the Bollingen Foundation in New York City, another educational philanthropy supported by Paul Mellon. Don Michael Randel is the Foundation's president. His predecessors have included William G. Bowen, John Edward Sawyer and Nathan Pusey. Randel is the former President of the University of Chicago.
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Core areas of interest
- higher education, including the humanities, libraries, and scholarly communications,
- museums and art conservation
- performing arts
- conservation and the environment
- public affairs
Research group
Mellon has a small research group that has investigated doctoral education, collegiate admissions, independent research libraries, charitable nonprofits, scholarly communications, and other issues in order to ensure that the foundation's grants would be well-informed and more effective. Some of the recent publications of this effect include Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values, JSTOR: A History, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, and The Shape of the River. Mellon's endowment has fluctuated in the range of $4-5 billion dollars in recent years, and its annual grantmaking has been on the order of $200 million.
