This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
"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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
This is WAD. Unless you've explicitly set up a structure to avoid it, it's basically impossible to keep family control of nonprofit foundations on a multi-decade timescale, let alone a multi-generation timescale, so you should expect that any megarich family's tax-exempt money is eventually going to go to an Elizabeth Alexander (though divorcing your wife or dying before her is a quicker route to that).
It's the naivete that staggers me about all this, what reason could there be to give other people your money and just let them do their own thing? Who trusts some random 'professional manager' in a suit before their own flesh and blood children they've personally raised over decades?
It's really not that hard to manage investments. These 'expert' active managers aren't much good at it either compared to index funds, a decent person could just read a few books on risk management and do fine.
It's not hard to pick out things you want to support either. Obviously there's a level of discipline and taste involved if you want to maximize cost-efficiency. That is genuinely skill-intensive. But people on the left don't worry about waste or squandering, Bezos's ex wife is just shovelling money into the faces of progressives without regard for careful strategy. It all goes back through into their cadres anyway, so it's hard to truly squander money... Spending money is just about the easiest job in the world.
So you're sold the story that it'll always be your family foundation. You're in control, you set the mission statement, you pick the board, your kids will be on it. But, over time, there's a lot of social pressure to let the right people on the board (if you have other big donors, they'll insist on putting their people on the board, that's "just how it's done"). And then, all of a sudden, the board has total control of "interpreting" your "mission", goodbye and don't forget to wipe the urine off grandpa's grave on the way out. Rich people are infinitely more naïve about using their money than you'd think. If you want to avoid that, you have to make the 501c3 a disposable entity so that you can dispose of the board with it.
It's actually far harder to spend that much money than one would assume, too. You have to hire experienced finance guys just to get it out the door on a reasonable schedule, and that's probably one reason these things swing so hard to the left. The institutional left is a gaping maw for money. They have an infinite recruiting pool for potential salaries, or at least as infinite as there are underemployed kids with fake majors, and you rarely have to worry about them actually achieving their goals because reality is in the way. I have no idea the extent to which the tax code was written for that purpose, but it sure did serve the long-term goals of the various people who made 501c3s what they are today (including the dearly beloved then-Speaker Johnson, known as an idealist who would never twist public policy for personal ends).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link