$8.5M gift powers ongoing impact of CUES on university education

An anonymous $8.5 million gift has created an endowment to support the Center for University Education Scholarship. 

CUES programs focus on advancing university teaching and learning. This can take many forms: funding faculty to undertake research into new teaching methods, bringing people together from different colleges and disciplines for workshops, structuring collaboration across the university and more.

"CUES was born out of a cause shared among faculty and leadership on our campus and an anonymous donor: the university learning experience," said Guadalupe Lozano, CUES director and holder of the Center for University Education Scholarship Endowed Chair. "Realizing our mission in practice is a collaborative effort sustained by many." 

Now entering its eighth year, CUES has engaged more than 2,200 participants across the university and funded over 50 fellows and grantees from 13 colleges/units and 29 departments. As of March 2024, CUES projects yielded 34 publications and nine significant productions by fellows and grantees, with 80 national and international and 21 local and regional talks and workshops.

CUES fellows and grantees have also brought in over $2.4 million in additional internal and external grant funding stemming from their CUES projects. For example, 2021 CUES Distinguished Fellow Aresta Tsosie-Paddock, assistant professor of American Indian studies, and her team were awarded a $1.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to fund the West Regional Native American Language Resource Center. 

Recent CUES-funded collaborations on campus include a project to develop a linguistically responsive training model for teaching assistants to draw on students' multilingual backgrounds and empower them to make informed language choices. Another project aims to explore how to enhance and improve the impact of teaching teams (cohorts of instructors, TAs and learning assistants) on students' sense of belonging and academic self-sufficiency. 

An academic program review completed in the spring set the stage for continued impact. Read about the APR findings and learn more about the seventh cohort of CUES Distinguished Fellows – for the first time including faculty not housed under a college – in the 2024 annual report.