Will Bill Ayers and Vladimir Lenin help prepare offenders to reintegrate into the community?
At the Stateville Correctional Center—a maximum-security prison in Illinois, which Gov. JB Pritzker ordered closed last year for unrelated reasons—a group of professors offered courses for inmates, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. One course, “Research, Writing, and Mass Incarceration,” began with a workshop run by Bill Ayers—a co-founder of the Weather Underground, a Marxist terror group responsible for dozens of bombings in the U.S. in the 1970s.
The Mellon Foundation has given at least $60 million to prison education projects since 2015. While many grantees provide liberal-arts courses and vocational training, others have followed the foundation’s own recent trajectory, embracing progressive activism as their guiding principle.
Increasingly, these nonprofits, activists and scholars have focused their prison education projects on political education and “shifting the narrative.” The Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, which has received $1.39 million from Mellon since 2019, titled its 2021 conference “What Is to Be Done?,” a title borrowed from a 1902 communist pamphlet by Vladimir Lenin.
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John D. Sailer is senior fellow and director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on X here.
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