Don Randel, president of one of the nation’s leading philanthropic organizations, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will meet with UC Davis leaders and faculty and deliver a public address next week during a three-day visit to campus.

Randel, a former president of the University of Chicago and vice provost of Cornell University, will speak on “The Values of the University” at 5:30 p.m. April 27 in the Vanderhoef Studio Theater at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. The event is free and open to the public.

“Dr. Randel reminds us that, in times of economic crisis, we must not lose sight of our principles and values as an institution of higher education,” said Chancellor Linda Katehi, “and of the important ways in which the humanities inform our understanding as we address the social, economic and political challenges facing our world.”

Randel’s visit gives UC Davis an opportunity to raise its profile with the head of a foundation that annually awards more in grants — $201 million last year — than the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“I hope that he will learn about the high quality and distinctive kinds of humanities scholarship and teaching at UC Davis and that he will help us find ways to achieve our goals,” said Jessie Ann Owens, dean of the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies.

Owens and Randel both are musicologists who earned their doctoral degrees at Princeton University. Owens personally invited Randel to be the final speaker in this year’s Public Intellectuals Forum sponsored by the UC Davis Humanities Institute.

Randel is known as an eloquent spokesman for humanities. With endowments down sharply and universities cutting budgets all across the country, he reflected on the perceived plight of the discipline in a speech last year at The George Washington University.

Wanted: More young people

“Sometimes,” he said then, “it seems as if what we want is as simple as more respect … the respect of our academic colleagues in other fields, even though we do not bring in big research grants; the respect of our students, even though we cannot guarantee their future employment; the respect of the general public, even though we have trouble describing our contributions to the gross domestic product.”

But, he concluded, “the real complaint of the humanities is precisely the same as the real complaint of the sciences: not enough American kids (and the grownups that they become) want to pursue these fields seriously because other things matter more than living the life of the mind, a life in which continuously opening and stretching the mind — to ideas, to nature, to other people — is felt clearly and passionately to be the only life worth living.”

Randel has been president of the Mellon Foundation since 2006. Before that, he spent six years as president of the University of Chicago after 32 years as a member of Cornell’s faculty. At Cornell, he also was department chair, vice provost, and associate dean and then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

His scholarly specialty is the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Spain and France. As a music historian, he is widely published, particularly on medieval liturgical chant, and has written on such varied topics as Arabic music theory, Latin American popular music and 15th century French music and poetry.

Andrew Mellon, a banker, art collector and former U.S. treasury secretary, became one of the wealthiest men in the United States before he died in 1937. The New York-based foundation that bears his name was established in 1969 with the consolidation of separate foundations created by his son, Paul Mellon, in 1941, and daughter, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, in 1940.

Mellon Foundation

The foundation has $4.9 billion in assets and is required to grant annually 5 percent of its average monthly balance of assets. It provided nearly $287 million in grants in 2007, before the economic downturn cut deeply into the endowment.

The foundation makes grants principally in five areas — higher education and scholarship, libraries and scholarly communications, conservation and the environment, museums and art conservation, and performing arts. Over the years, UC Davis has received about $3 million in Mellon grants, with most of that to the sciences.

The foundation also issues annual Distinguished Achievement Awards of up to $1.5 million in honor of scholars who have made significant contributions to humanistic inquiry.