America’s biggest funder of the humanities subsidizes ‘Ecowomanism,’ ‘Black Trans Studies’ and the like.
The University of Virginia launched a hiring spree in 2020 as it pledged to become “a racial-equity-focused university.” A special initiative promised to recruit 30 postdoctoral fellows and “open the gateway” for them to fill tenure-track jobs. One current fellow’s specialties include “transfeminisms” and “genderqueer life writing.” Another researches how Filipino nurses resist “racial capitalism.”
The program owes its existence to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funded it to the tune of $5 million. With a $7.7 billion endowment, the Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Its annual giving has long dwarfed that of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In recent years, it has been refashioned as a tool for advancing an identitarian vision of social justice. For academia, the consequences are far-reaching.
Through public-records requests, I’ve acquired dozens of proposals and progress reports for Mellon-funded projects. The records show how the foundation has lavishly promoted progressive scholar-activism. At the University of Utah, the Transformative Intersectional Collective created workshops on “transgender and queer of color critique” and “environmental anti-racism,” supported by a half-million-dollar Mellon grant. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, the “Visualizing Abolition” project promotes research and art that calls for the elimination of prisons with the support of $8 million from Mellon.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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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.
Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for The J. Paul Getty Trust