At Columbia University, the Racial Justice and Abolition Democracy Project created a curriculum to help college students imagine a “society without jails and prisons.” At Morgan State University, the Black Queer Everything initiative developed “transformative pedagogies” about “racism, inequality, and injustice.” And at UCLA, the Race in the Global Past through Native Lenses program promoted using “tribal critical race theory” to interpret precolonial history.
Beyond their radical bent, these programs have one thing in common: the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funds them. The organization’s namesake made his mark on American politics a century ago as Treasury secretary. Today, his foundation injects identity politics into our universities and bankrolls the career development of activist scholars.
In past City Journal articles, I’ve shown how universities advance identitarian activists into faculty positions. I’ve reported on administrators’ clever recruiting tactics to select ideologically aligned scholars, which raise serious questions about academic freedom. This scholar-activist pipeline, I’ve shown, benefits extensively from federal funds.
But perhaps the key player in this scheme is the Mellon Foundation. Documents I’ve acquired through public records requests reveal the extent of the $8 billion behemoth’s influence on every level of higher education—and its support for the scholar-activist pipeline.
The foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member