Thread by @Tyler_A_Harper

I’ve spent the last year working on a story about the Mellon Foundation, the mega-wealthy private nonprofit that has a monopoly on humanities funding in America. The article, about how Mellon has held the humanities hostage to its progressive political ideology, is out today. 🧵

https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/2021928567651594655

To put things into perspective: the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) had a grant budget of 78 million dollars in 2024. Mellon spent 540 million in grants that year. Mellon, a highly politicized private nonprofit, has a near total monopoly on humanities grant making. 2/

Mellon has long been left-leaning, but historically it funded a wide range of humanities projects. Until 2018, when the foundation hired the illustrious poet Elizabeth Alexander as president. Alexander decreed Mellon would only fund social justice work under her leadership. 3/

I interviewed 20 senior admins and profs for this story. They painted a similar picture: under Alexander, Mellon became monomaniacally obsessed with social justice, almost exclusively funding work advancing political causes at the expense of more traditional humanities work. 4/

Conservatives often offer "go woke, go broke" as an explanation for the humanities crisis. This theory gets the causal arrow wrong. The humanities went woke in part BECAUSE they were broke. They became more reliant on Mellon money and had to toe the ideological line to get it. 5/

I spoke with professors who admitted to contorting their work, faking an interest in racial justice in order to win Mellon bucks. They needed grants to support their research (or get promoted) and they had to choose between progressive play-acting or going without key funding. 6/

I spoke with grant admins who have worked with Mellon for years. Some described professors at their institutions as distraught over Mellon's pivot to only funding social justice work. Profs who don't do political work felt they were being told their research doesn't matter. 7/

Perhaps the most alarming Mellon initiative has been its Humanities for All Times project. Launched in 2021, it is explicitly about using the humanities to create "social justice leaders." It offers 7 figures to small colleges in exchange for changing their gen ed curriculum. 8/

That is, Mellon offers lavish sums of money to colleges that are willing to remake their entire gen ed curriculum — ostensibly taken by all students — in the service of a nakedly political project. The implicit vision is that a college curriculum should be activism training. 9/

My article is long and there's way too much to cover here. In my piece you'll find plenty of examples of the sorts of (often crazy) "scholar-activism" Mellon has almost exclusively funded in the Alexander years. But I want to emphasize something important about all of this. 10/

The question isn't whether you agree with Mellon's progressive viewpoint. I imagine many people reading this do. The question also isn't whether some of the scholarship and humanities initiatives Mellon has funded lately have been good and worthwhile. I'm sure some have been. 11/

The question, even if you are a progressive or agree with Mellon's worldview, is whether a private nonprofit—created by the children of a robber baron—should have a near total monopoly on humanities funding and be able to bend American arts and letters to its political will. 12/

Elizabeth Alexander—the daughter of illustrious parents, descended from a family of famous African American elites, personal friend of Barack Obama who let her read her poetry at his 2008 inauguration—earned almost 2.2 million in combined compensation by Mellon in 2024 alone. 13/

Through a spokesperson, Alexander refused multiple requests for an interview. This speaks to a broader trend within elite institutions: a belief that private orgs have the right to do as they please, without justifying themselves, even if they influence public institutions. 14/

Mellon has done some good work—funding prison education, paying for internships for undergrads—but it has also ideologically hijacked the humanities, forcing many departments, professors, and institutions to choose between desperately needed cash, or becoming propagandists. 15/

It is not Mellon's fault that they have a monopoly: they have become so singularly influential because other funders, including the federal government and universities themselves, have retreated from supporting the humanities. But the reality is that they have this power. 16/

The question remains whether Mellon, under Elizabeth Alexander, has provided the humanities with a desperately needed lifeline, or whether this pseudo-revolutionary oligarchic nonprofit has merely succeeded in turbocharging the trends that are killing the humanities slowly.