In 2015, Tri-C received a $10 million gift to create the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Humanities Center. Located at the Eastern Campus, it serves students at all four of the Tri-C campuses. The principal focus of the Center is to the Mandel Scholars Academy, which offers approximately 150 students a unique academic program which emphasizes humanities education, leadership development, and authentic experiences with civic engagement. The program covers the cost of tuition, fees and books for full-time, in-state students.
Students in the center take an innovative series of three humanities classes. The first is titled “The Individual and Society,” followed by the “History of Cleveland,” and the capped off by a course called “Community Engagement.” In that final course, scholars work with a community partner to complete a project or solve a problem. Recent community partners for projects include the Cleveland NAACP, the Baseball Heritage Museum, City Fresh, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (moCa), Literary Cleveland, and the YWCA of Cleveland, to name a few.
Outside the classroom, Mandel Scholars participate in at least three CLEadership activities each semester, co-curricular events designed to complement their academic experience and including a wide range of options, from trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art and tours of Cleveland to lectures by visiting scholars and sit-down meetings with political leaders. Students in the program also have opportunities to participate in activities like Cleveland Leadership Center’s Advanced Leadership Institute, the telos institute’s leadership foundation and educational trips such as an annual civil rights tour of Alabama. Thanks to the generosity of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation, 100% of the costs associated with these activities are paid for by the Mandel Center.
Matthew Carey Jordan, who now leads the organization as dean and chair for humanities at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Humanities Center at Cuyahoga Community College, seems to be the perfect person to lead all the programming associated with the center, which is arguably one of Cleveland’s most innovative educational centers. Passionate about bringing contentious topics into the college classroom where diverse groups come together to learn the skills necessary for effective leadership, Dr. Jordan’s own scholarly work has focused on the philosophy of religion and moral philosophy. A native of northeast Ohio, Dr. Jordan is a graduate of Ohio University and Biola University, and holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from The Ohio State University. He is also active in the world of honors education more broadly, currently serving as the chair of the National Collegiate Honors Council’s Student Interdisciplinary Research Panels committee and as the president of the Mid-East Honors Association.
The Center is also a hub for humanities education and engagement in the Greater Cleveland community. From moderated dialogues on contentious issues as part of the annual Cleveland Humanities Festival to lighthearted educational events such as the 2019 Battle of the Literary Masters (where a pair of scholars debated whether C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien was the greater author), the Center seeks to be a resource for anyone in northeast Ohio who desires to live a more thoughtful life. The Center’s most recent foray into the public realm is its new podcast, More Human, which features conversations with students and scholars in northeast Ohio about their work and the value of the humanities. One of the first guests on the podcast was Teaching Cleveland’s Greg Deegan, who was featured on an episode (tentatively) scheduled to be released on April 11.
Officially, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Humanities Center exists to advance humanistic inquiry in northeast Ohio and to develop civic-minded leaders who have thought broadly and deeply about the human experience. To learn more about this dynamic institution, visit [email protected].
For any educators and students interested in additional information about the Mandel Youth Humanities Academy, where high school students receive a generous summer stipend to learn about Cleveland, should check out their website.
