Whenever you see a bizarre trend in academia, it’s worth asking whether its homegrown or funded from outside. I recently wrote about how the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has worked hard to make “trans studies" a legitimate academic field.
Here are some of Mellon's grants 🧵
The “Black, Indigenous, & Trans of Color Histories Lab” received $460,000 from Mellon in 2024. The “lab” recently hosted a symposium titled “Trans Joy, Pleasure, Freedom.” Its keynote address was delivered by a Rutgers doctoral student & self-described “p*rn archivist.”
Notably, the “lab” includes several Mellon grantees. Co-lead Joshua Reason was a Mellon undergrad & dissertation fellow. Alejandrina Medina, another co-lead, received a Mellon-funded “Trans Studies” fellowship—as did the event’s keynote speaker.
Another Mellon-backed grant pays San Francisco State University professors to take a course on incorporating “trans and queer ethnic studies” into their teaching.
Here’s the proposal, which I acquired via a public records request.
Another proposal promises to support “tribal and Indigenous communities” through “Two Spirit and Indigenous Trans Studies curriculum and service” at Fresno State University.
In 2023, the University of Kansas (KU) received $1 million for the “Trans Studies at the Commons” program, which seeks to transform the university’s “local and regional landscape to be more transliberatory,” in part by funding a cohort of “scholar-activists.”
The grant proposal (⬆️⬆️) notes: “We want to make use of [the] liberal past of Lawrence”—the city where the university is located—“to galvanize efforts aimed at transforming the cultural and social landscape in favor of social justice today.”
The projects get weird.
One Syracuse University project summary declares that self-identified transgender scholars “are born into a diasporic condition—not quite ever grounded in the heterosexual, cisnormative, white-supremacist nuclear family.”
The Mellon-funded Syracuse project aims at “hatching trans resistance in response to fascism’s many guises.”
Read about this and so much more in my latest in @CityJournal. Universities, even just for their own survival, should be much more skeptical toward funders like Mellon that traffic in pseudo-disciplines like transgender studies.
city-journal.org/article/mellon…
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