The John S. Knight Writing Program at Cornell University has been awarded a $5 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to strengthen, broaden and extend the outreach of the program.

The result of the grant will be to transform the program into the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, said Jonathan Monroe, director of the Knight Writing Program, professor of comparative literature and the George Reed Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Cornell.

Cornell has committed an additional $1 million in matching funds to the institute, Monroe said.

"Cornell has produced a generation of students and teachers capable of expressing themselves creatively through the written word, whether they wind up being engineers, doctors or lawyers," Hodding Carter III, the Knight Foundation's president and CEO, said today (March 1, 2000). "Jack Knight would have liked that, because clear writers and good thinkers are more likely to be good citizens. This new grant cements Cornell's reputation as the place to go for those who care about the teaching and learning of writing."

The award, made as the foundation begins observing its 50th anniversary, is the largest approved by the board in 1999. It will be distributed over three years.

"We deeply appreciate Knight Foundation's generosity," said Cornell President Hunter Rawlings. "I am particularly pleased that this award is tied to Cornell's undergraduate living and learning initiative, which is aimed at bringing the unique resources of a research university to bear more directly on the lives of its students.

"The Knight Writing Program has become a national model, and we are committed to preserving and enhancing its pre-eminence in the teaching of writing skills and in helping to replicate the program's successes at other institutions," he added.

The grant will help fund sophomore writing seminars, residential writing mentors, technology enhancement and performance assessment, Rawlings said.

Of the $5 million Knight award, $3 million will be used to endow a new Sophomore Writing Seminar Program. That will fund five seminars, each with a limit of 15 students, in 2001-02; 10 seminars in 2002-03; and 13 seminars in 2003-04, with funding for 13 seminars per year in perpetuity thereafter. Cornell has agreed in return to full funding of an additional 15 seminars per year beginning in 2004-05, for a total of 28 sophomore seminars per year beginning in 2006.

"These 28 sophomore seminars will create a new tier of Knight Institute course offerings beyond the First-Year Writing Seminars and in addition to the 30 Writing Seminars in the Majors courses which Cornell is also committed to funding as part of the agreement on an annual basis," Monroe said.

The remaining $2 million of the award will provide for continuation of the Summer Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, now in its fourth year; two new three-year positions, one for a coordinator of sophomore seminars and one for a coordinator of electronic communication and assessment; and two state-of-the-art Knight seminar rooms that will be part of new construction that is part of the living-learning initiative on West Campus, Monroe said.

Cornell's $1 million in matching funds will ensure in perpetuity the sophomore seminar coordinator position and the two Knight seminar rooms, he added.

The John S. Knight Program originally was created at Cornell in 1986 with a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation in the memory of founder and Cornell alumnus John S. Knight. Initially intended as a one-time memorial grant, the foundation was so pleased with the success of the program that it made additional grants over the years and asked Cornell to develop a national program. In 1999, some 3,800 Cornell students enrolled in classes associated with the Knight Program.

Monroe said that fundamental to the program's success are the twin ideas that students learn the most and learn to write best by engaging what most interests them, and that writing is most effectively conceived not as a mere tool or skill, but as a learning activity bound up with and inseparable from the specific contents, activities and habits of thought and inquiry particular to specific disciplines.

"The Knight Institute has established itself over the past several years as the leading program in the country in encouraging discipline-based approaches to the research and teaching of writing," Monroe said. "It has directly influenced curricular developments in colleges and universities ranging from peer institutions, such as Harvard, Duke and Princeton, to such diverse schools as Florida A&M, Temple and Dull Knife Memorial College in Lame Deer, Mont.

"Now, thanks to the generosity of the Knight Foundation, Cornell is poised to provide, after three decades of development, refinement, expansion and outreach, a fully articulated undergraduate writing curriculum with a programmatic approach to the teaching of writing at all levels," Monroe said.

Knight, a 1918 graduate of Cornell, created the foundation 50 years ago. He was a reporter, editor and director of the Knight-Ridder Newspapers. He was a Cornell trustee from 1953 to 1964, a Cornell presidential councillor and an enthusiastic supporter of the Knight Writing Program at Cornell during his lifetime.

Established in 1950, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation makes national grants in journalism, education and arts and culture. Its fourth program, community initiatives, is concentrated in 26 communities where the Knight brothers published newspapers, but the foundation is wholly separate from and independent of those newspapers.