The Atlantic has an interesting story up today about the ways in which a single foundation with a massive endowment has become the primary source of outside funding for humanities work at colleges and universities. How this happened is interesting. There was a time when the Mellon Foundation was just one of several foundations that directed money toward the humanities, but over the last few decades, most of the others have fallen away. That left Mellon as the major source of funding for humanities grants.
Today, no single entity, including the federal government, has a more profound influence on the fiscal health and cultural output of the humanities than the Mellon Foundation. The National Endowment for the Humanities’ grant budget was $78 million in 2024 (its overall budget was less than half of what it was in 1980, when adjusted for inflation). Mellon awarded $540 million in grants that same year; its endowment sits at roughly $8 billion.
Unfortunately, the Mellon foundation's focus has also changed. During Trump's first term, Mellon selected a new leader who has made social justice the primary focus of all grant-giving.
Under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, who became the organization’s president in 2018, Mellon has embraced an understanding of the humanities that is much more utilitarian, and far more political, than the one put forward by the 1964 commission. In June 2020, Mellon announced that it would be “prioritizing social justice in all of its grantmaking”—“a major strategic evolution” for the organization. This new paradigm seems to find value in arts and letters only insofar as they advance approved, left-leaning causes...
Under Alexander’s leadership, even as it has cut back on funding for less political projects, Mellon has disbursed enormous sums of money to hyper-liberal academic initiatives at institutions both public and private. These have included grants to Portland State University to help its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department become more “ungovernable,” creating “spaces where activism is encouraged” and “queer and feminist resistance” takes place; to Texas A&M at San Antonio for the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva (a group of academics and activists who “use Shakespeare to reimagine colonial histories and to envision socially just futures in La Frontera”); to Northwestern University for a project that explores how “Black dance practices” work to “instantiate Black freedom”; to Northeastern University for its Digital Transgender Archive to establish a new “lab” on the West Coast; and to UC Davis’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies to create a working group on “Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism.”
Elizabeth Alexander is a poet who is friends with the Obamas.
Alexander reportedly said in her interviews for the role that she planned to pivot the foundation’s attention to social-justice work, and she has kept her word. “There won’t be a penny that is going out the door that is not contributing to a more fair, more just, more beautiful society,” she declared in 2020.
There's an old saying, "what you subsidize, you get more of" which applies here. By pouring millions of dollars into social justice and only social justice, the Mellon Foundations is effectively forcing academics in the humanities to create more social justice oriented work. Given that there is no other significant source of funding, they either get with the program or learn to do without. Indeed, the article suggests Mellon has a hands on approach to helping professors shape their research into something Mellon could potentially support.
One professor told me that, after he and his colleagues were turned down for various Mellon grants, a representative from the foundation began helping them draft a new proposal that would more likely be approved. “We were pretty tightly coached,” he said. “It certainly felt like we were being told, ‘Do this, this, and this in order for it to work on our end.’ ” Ultimately, he said, a fair amount of social-justice jargon was tacked on to the proposal, “in consultation with, or perhaps at the insistence of, the representative from Mellon.” His team won the grant.
But shaping the landscape of humanities programs one grant at a time is really small ball. Mellon has offered schools money if they are willing to revise their entire curriculum in a social justice direction.
Some of Mellon’s recent grants have the potential to remake liberal-arts education entirely. The foundation’s Humanities for All Times project, launched in 2021, is premised on the notion that “today’s humanities undergrads are tomorrow’s social justice leaders.” Over the past several years, the foundation has regularly invited small cohorts of liberal-arts colleges to apply for grants—up to $1.5 million each—that support social-justice-aligned curricular development. The application guidelines note that “submissions oriented toward revising an institution’s entire general education program are especially welcome.” That is to say, college administrators and academics are encouraged to submit proposals for projects that would overhaul their core requirements for all students, in every major, in the service of a progressive political program.
A 2021 Humanities for All Times grant proposal from Colorado College reads like conservative satire: “We recognize the myriad ways in which white supremacy has shaped our institution and have been taking steps to work our way out of its grip,” it confesses near the beginning. The application promises the introduction of “at least 50 new and relevant courses” to “empower students to be changemakers.” Mellon gave the college $1 million to carry out this work.
The author's larger point is not simply that turning universities into fountains of woke, social justice agitprop is bad. His larger point is that the whole point of the humanities, in their purest form, is to stand outside politics and any other immediate and pressing concerns of the moment. But by making social justice the focus of all of its grants, the Mellon Foundation has turned the pursuit of knowledge into the pursuit of partisan advantage. That's now how the folks at the foundation see it of course (though Elizabeth Alexander refused to be interviewed and explain her perspective) but it's arguably how it is.
In any case, if you were wondering who was turning American universities into woke propaganda factories over the past decade, the Mellon Foundation is certainly part of the answer.
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