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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28014 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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"The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities" in The Atlantic has garnered a fair amount of attention. The article is an addition to the problems with academia pile, but I figure it is worth documenting.

Tyler Harper argues that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Mellon) is the last true giant grantmaker for the humanities. The problem for traditional humanities faculty, now beholden to this purported monopoly, is that Mellon announced it aimed to prioritize social justice over pure research. Mellon has made good on that 2020 promise and this can be lazily verified by briefly scrolling Mellon's grant database.

Atlantic Philanthropies, a onetime stalwart, reduced its funding for the humanities in the 1990s. The Rockefeller Foundation began moving away from humanities funding in the 2000s. In 2022, the Ford Foundation announced plans to drastically reduce its higher-education funding in order to focus on racial-justice-movement building. With the broader ecosystem of humanities-focused philanthropies all but dried up, only one major private grant-maker is left standing.

In 2024, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) allocated $78 million dollars of its federal money towards competitive grants. That same year Mellon graciously funded $540 million in grants and fellowships. A historical look at NEH appropriation on the NEH website demonstrates the shrinking pie. A shrinking pie problem that is compounded by greater fragmentation. Over the last 15 years core disciplines (English, history, philosophy) have seen significant decreases in enrollment and funding. Ethnic, gender, and cultural studies experienced something of a boom through the 2010s that contributed to fragmentation, and now, pain.

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.”

Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice. The fellowship is explicitly “designed to intervene” before a student’s research direction is finalized, which means, in practice, that Mellon can steer students who are just beginning to settle on a dissertation topic toward its preferred areas of inquiry.

Tyler Harper has described himself as "a soft 'Marxist'" whose "politics slouch toward reformist social democracy, not revolutionary overhaul." You might expect that helps insulate him from criticism in the 10 Reasons Why Big Grant Money Strangled My Dissertation frame he constructed, but you'd be wrong. People aren't happy about this article.

On Bluesky, Roxane Gay retorts that Mellon is not "the only humanities funder", although this is not something I see in dispute in the article. Mellon did provide something like 65% of all competitive grant money for humanities research in 2024. That doesn't directly translate to a claim that most academic researchers are funded by Mellon grants. There are still many small(er) grants going to humanities research, such as ACLS or Getty. There might be expectations in these, but they are not the kinds of grants that place ideological demands on institutions to shape their output.

I can find no easy way to break down Mellon's grantmaking by interest or cause in the time it took to create an afternoon write-up. I can tell you that Mellon's 2024 annual report is narrative focused. If we compare it to the bastion of non-profit transparency that is Gates foundation we can see only one of these proudly tells me that $934 million dollars went towards Gender Equality. Mellon's report seems unconventionally opaque, but forgive me if I am mistaken. I've conjured up a best guess estimate of 40% unambiguously scholar-activist, 30% traditional boring research, and 30% traditional research smuggled through justice-like lens, but this is not a rigorous analysis.

An NYT comics guy, Sam Thielman, provides an example of a more common reply to the piece: "That thing about the Mellon Foundation in The Atlantic may be the worst piece of feature writing I’ve ever read in my life. Just shamefully undercooked on every level—reporting, rhetoric, framing. Just a total embarrassment". NYT comic guy may not be a meaningful voice on his own, but he reflects a kind of popular reaction from the left to this critique as well others that came before it. On the flip side, we have fun anecdote from a Jonathon Fine who describes his Mellon fellowship interview as "the scariest and most antagonistic interview" he ever had.

I don't think there is anything unfair about a value for money transaction for grants and fellowships. If the problem is the monopoly pushing social justice, then a few additional endowments from billionaires to compete would fix it, right? Well it's not always so easy as Lee Bass could tell you way back in '95:

Last week the king of all fund-raising foul-ups was unveiled when Yale University admitted that it was returning, at the donor’s request, a $20 million gift from Texas oil billionaire Lee M. Bass. Scrambling to put a spin on the fiasco, Yale claimed that giving back the money, intended to endow a new program in Western Civilization, was an act of courage in the face of unreasonable demands. Some critics of the administration claimed a Pyrrhic victory for multiculturalism. At heart, though, it was managerial ineptitude and a clash of egos that ruined the deal.

The saga began four years ago when then dean of Yale College, professor Donald Kagan, a vocal champion of the study of Western Civilization, helped inspire the $20 million donation from Bass, a 1979 graduate of Yale. Bass, whose family had given a total of $85 million to Yale by the early ’90s, agreed to fund seven new full professorships and four associate positions in Western Civ.

No, it is not the right time to file your critique against academy, they said-- yesterday and twenty years before. I am inclined to defend the pursuit of knowledge. Nonetheless, the nerds who merely want to spend their time dwelling in the archives to answer novel questions will stay there for as long as they possible can before they bother with silly things like power. Add it to the list of things robots will have to save.

Ironically Timothy Mellon is a big fan of Trump, he helped pay salaries for the US military during the shutdown and donated to Trump's campaigns. It seems he is not in control of the foundation, however. A certain Elizabeth Alexander runs the show.

I think this notion of letting people who aren't your children run your foundations is quasi-cuckoldry, I highly doubt the actual Mellons who made all that money were big fans of race-focused humanities work, just like the Carnegies were more on the 'libraries are good' end of the philanthropy spectrum.

Just think about what Henry Ford was like and what his foundation is doing. It's true that he employed black workers with equal wages but it's not like he was going out of his way to do it, as compared with fostering anti-semitism:

Since the middle of the 20th century, many of the Ford Foundation's programs have focused on increased under-represented or "minority" group representation in education, science, and policy-making.

Soros has the right idea. Keep it in the family. Value drift is not just for AIs.

There was also an instance in Australia where a billionaire tried to fund pro-Western civilization sentiment in academia, against the kicking and screaming and wailing of our education sector.

It does seem insane that any big endowment will probably scope drift over time towards funding random extreme stuff, but I guess impractical to combat. Even if you keep it your own genetic heirs you're gonna hit an extremist eventually in either direction.

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