The phrase “no strings attached” often carries an unsavory connotation today, but the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation still proudly uses it every year to describe its annual fellowships, often known as “genius” grants, which now give recipients a hefty $800,000 over a five-year period to spend however they wish.
Founded in 1981—the year of Catherine MacArthur’s death—the fellowship program claims to honor recipients who “highlight the importance of imaginative thinking in creating works of art and new forms of knowledge,” “spotlight the value of risk-taking in addressing deep-rooted societal problems,” “expand our understanding of creativity,” and “inspire and cultivate the next generation of innovators.”
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How are recent MacArthur fellows enriching our nation’s thought, understanding, innovation, and problem solving? To judge by recent honorees, through gender-bending dance, minority gay love stories, performative outsize rural photos, and other woke absurdities.
For 2026 fellow Trajal Harrell, a choreographer who observes American life from Zürich, Switzerland, the ticket to a genius grant was dance that “explores notions of the performing body, realness, and authenticity” by speculating how “underground drag and ballroom competitions” of the Harlem ballroom scene might have complemented a 1960s-era “avant-garde performance style” that “emphasized body neutrality and the movement of dance over its storytelling aspects.” Fiction writer Bryan Washington, who resides in Tokyo, enriches us through his novels and short stories that “feature queer men of color and their inherited and chosen families.” Visual artist Chip Thomas installs “large-scale black-and-white photographs on abandoned buildings, grain silos, and other roadside structures across the Navajo Nation” in order to “confront the legacies of colonial violence and environmental degradation.”
If you are unconvinced that any of these fellows will save the American republic or inspire the intellectual leaders of tomorrow, you might find comfort in Princeton University associate professor of history and Peewaalia tribal history liaison Elizabeth Ellis’s prodigious research into how “small Indigenous nations of the Lower Mississippi Valley . . . routinely welcomed migrants or refugees to their communities” two centuries ago. That seems unlikely to break ICE’s resolve any time soon, but for the next five years Ellis will receive quarterly payments of $40,000 from the MacArthur family’s tax-exempt assets to make her work more persuasive.
The MacArthur Foundation did reward scholars working in less obscure areas this year, but the identitarian twists remain inescapable. University at Buffalo associate professor of environment and sustainability Holly Jean Buck will receive four-fifths of a million dollars to continue her work on “social, ethical, and political dimensions of emerging climate and energy policies,” with the goal of making those policies socially “equitable” by advocating the elimination of all fossil fuels in a way that “elevates voices and ideas that might otherwise go unheard.” Her true “genius” might lie in finding a way to combine net-zero and DEI shibboleths so beguilingly that agents and leaders of a $10 billion foundation sifted her name from a pool of some 2,000 nominees.
Judging by this year’s class of MacArthur fellows, it may help not to be a white male, a demographic that includes only two of the recipients—just 10 percent of the total. Black recipients, meantime, received seven of this year’s fellowships, or 30 percent, while the four Asian, two “Latinx,” and two Native American recipients are also overrepresented given their general presence in college and university faculty. One could make a DEI-inflected “disparate impact” argument to decry the discriminatory results of a selection process that appears to be heavily biased against white males—but perhaps fittingly, the work of one of this year’s Asian recipients, Berlin-based “sound artist and performer” Christine Sun Kim, involves what MacArthur calls the “complexities” of deafness. Indeed.
The MacArthur Foundation itself seems unconcerned about any loss of prestige. This year’s fellows “explore the depths of our humanity,” said MacArthur vice president Kristen Mack, and “show us new ways to understand the world.” As Mack and her colleagues turn the MacArthur legacy into a high-stakes laughingstock, some of us might prefer the old way. One hopes that today’s rising philanthropists will learn MacArthur’s expensive and embarrassing lesson and establish awards that once again honor true excellence and are immune to racial and ideological capture.