Through the SSRC’s College and University Fund for the Social Sciences (CUF), we connect leaders of the nation’s most active research institutions with our network of public and private funders of social and behavioral science, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Knight Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2014, the CUF was launched with a dozen founding university members. Today, that number has grown to more than forty-five institutions, predominantly AAU research institutions.

A critical goal of the College and University Fund is to build support for a significant expansion of the infrastructure for social and behavioral science funding. With rare exceptions, funding for social science tends to be relatively small grants awarded to single researchers. Funding of that scale is simply not adequate to conduct the kind of large-scale science needed to meet the challenges of our most pressing social problems, including pandemics, climate change, persistent inequality, and threats to democratic institutions. These challenges exist at scale, and demand a research response that is proportionately at scale.