How the Mellon Foundation Destroyed the Humanities
[T]oday, 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 …. Mellon awarded $540 million in grants that same year; its endowment sits at roughly $8 billion.
[U]nder the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, who became the organization’s president in 2018, Mellon announced that it would be “prioritizing social justice in all of its grantmaking”… This new paradigm seems to find value in arts and letters only insofar as they advance approved, left-leaning causes.
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Under Alexander’s leadership, …Mellon has disbursed enormous sums of money to hyper-liberal academic initiatives [including] 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.”
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[P]eople of color from unusually privileged backgrounds are anointed as standard-bearers for a radical cultural worldview that many working-class minorities do not share—even as the former are ostensibly intended to “represent” the latter.
[Alexander] was paid $1.53 million in direct compensation and $672,785 in other compensation in 2024. I have no objection to poets making rookie-NFL-player money—though her 2024 salary is the equivalent of about 16 average tenure-track professors’ annual pay—but it does make all of the social-justice posturing a little more comical.
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[One] humanities academic ..had reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race; he did win a grant.
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. … 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.”
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In 2023, the foundation allotted $1 million to “deepen the ongoing conversation in Transgender Studies” at the University of Kansas—specifically, to “establish a cohort model for scholar-activists” and “create a more trans-liberatory local and regional landscape.”
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In 2021 Mellon gave Colorado College $1 million for a grant proposal that began: “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,” and promised to introduce “at least 50 new and relevant courses” to “empower students to be changemakers.”
Do we really need more than 100 people studying the humanities? Why not just chuck the entire field?