On September 29, 2025, a group of nonprofit leaders and university insiders gathered at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, D.C., to talk through how to defend America’s embattled colleges and universities. Over three days, the group discussed how to make higher education “a right for all,” how to “protect and/or rebuild DEI,” and—more practically—how to collaborate on upcoming elections.
The event was the soft launch of the Alliance for Higher Education (AHE). The group, which debuted publicly in January, represents those who believe that higher ed should fight back against its critics and would-be reformers. This resistance includes political activism: “Our tradition of institutions not speaking out about politics has simply backfired,” Mike Gavin, the alliance’s inaugural president, wrote in a whitepaper I obtained. At the meeting, the group planned student voting campaigns that would, according to other documents I obtained, “focus on opportunities to flip.”
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This wink-and-nod partisanship was an odd fit for many at the gathering, which featured a who’s who of higher-education nonprofits, including senior leadership from PEN America, the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), and the American Council on Education (ACE). As nonprofits, these groups are not conventionally partisan.
It likewise represented a new strategy from AHE’s key backer. Also present at the meeting was Carolyn Dinshaw, a senior program officer at the $7.8 billion-endowed Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her attendance was no surprise: the event, as one email I obtained put it, was “Mellon-backed.” Though the relationship has never before been made public, the Alliance for Higher Education is Mellon’s brainchild. Mellon played a critical role in forming the group.
Mellon has long been the country’s foremost funder of the arts and humanities, outspending even the National Endowment for the Humanities. Over the last decade, it has adopted a distinctly ideological agenda. When Elizabeth Alexander took over as its president in 2018, she announced that every dollar Mellon gave would advance one overarching cause: “social justice.”
As I’ve reported previously, Mellon has in recent years given universities hundreds of millions of dollars to promote a racialist vision of social justice. Its giving has included $5 million to UT San Antonio for a project called “Democratizing Racial Justice,” $5 million to the University of Virginia to hire postdocs studying race and equity, $1 million to the University of Kansas to promote transgender “scholar-activism,” and $1 million to Wesleyan University for its “Embodying Antiracism Initiative”—to name only a few grants.
Mellon has perhaps been the top funder of what has been called the “social justice university,” a vision for higher education that heavily emphasizes identity and critical methods. Over the last few years, popular discontent with higher education, and especially the backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), has threatened Mellon’s work.
The alliance serves as an administrative hub for groups fighting reform, including the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education and the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, as well as a rapid-response organ. In August, when the Department of Education released its “National Call to Action” asking universities to develop public statements on issues like free speech, pluralism, and foreign funding, the alliance shot back in a joint statement with PEN America, calling it a “disingenuous” attempt to apply “ideological pressure.”
Through a series of public records requests, I’ve obtained thousands of documents, including emails, project proposals, lecture slides, and meeting recordings related to the Alliance for Higher Education. These records show how, behind the scenes, the Mellon Foundation is organizing and spending big to defend its vision for higher education. As the records suggest, Mellon has geared up for a political fight.
The Alliance for Higher Education had seemingly humble beginnings. When the organization was announced early this year by a reporter at Inside Higher Education, the story focused on Mike Gavin, its founding president, who recently stepped down as president of Delta College, a community college in rural Michigan. While at Delta, Gavin ran a group called Education for All (or “Ed4All”), billed as an informal network of community college presidents who wanted to “resist anti-DEI bills and rhetoric.” Some interviews depict the alliance as a simple continuation of Ed4All, and when the group was announced, Gavin declined to say who was funding AHE.
Founded in 2023, the year that several states moved to defund DEI bureaucracies, Ed4All served as a virtual gathering place for college presidents alarmed by Governor Ron DeSantis’s broadsides against Florida’s DEI infrastructure. To organize the resistance, Gavin hosted in-person convenings, published guides, and held a monthly video call.
Gavin’s efforts were informed by his academic background, which he describes as rooted in critical race theory. The same year Ed4All was founded, he published a monograph titled The New White Nationalism in Politics and Higher Education: The Nostalgia Spectrum.
Shaped by Gavin’s vision, Ed4All regarded the social justice bureaucracy as an indispensable feature of higher education. In one whitepaper I obtained, the group declares the need for a coalition with an “unapologetic, visionary commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” When Gavin spoke at conferences, he put it more bluntly: one slide I obtained declares that “Anti-DEI is Anti-Democracy.”
Gavin’s emails, internal planning documents, and public statements articulate a distinct public engagement strategy: universities should throw out the old playbook and abandon their staid defensive posture. The resistance should wage a more muscular—and overtly political—fight. The title of his monthly zoom call was “Moving out of defense.”
Gavin depicted Ed4All as a champion of academic freedom, as he would later depict AHE—but with telling limits. Academic freedom, for instance, has been “weaponized” to justify inviting speakers whose ideas bring no “educational value” to campus, Gavin’s whitepaper notes.
In other words, some individuals and ideas might not merit protection. “These thoughts and speakers gain validation by their very presence on a college campus,” the paper adds, noting that colleges should revisit their free expression policies “with the possibility of contextualization being offered for speakers and thoughts lacking educational value.”
While Gavin called for a more muscular push, Mellon was quietly preparing one.
For several years, the foundation has supported projects designed to fight conservative-led higher education reform. In 2023, it gave $1.25 million to PEN America for a project documenting “legislative challenges to academic freedom,” run by Jeremy Young, a vocal critic of conservative attempts to rein in or dismantle DEI bureaucracies. Young recently left PEN America for the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) to run another Mellon-backed project on restoring public trust in higher education.
In 2024, Mellon gave a $1.5 million grant to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to create its Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. That center, as I’ve previously reported, made a goal of undermining university-based centers for civic education, like the University of Florida’s Hamilton School, an initiative championed by reformers.
“I would love to strategically map who these f—ers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out,” Isaac Kamola, the director of the AAUP’s Mellon-funded center, said during a meeting.
Behind the scenes, Mellon has been thinking bigger. According to meeting audio from late 2024, Kamola told his colleagues that Mellon had hosted a convening to brainstorm a large-scale organization aimed at “defending higher education.” Jeremy Young, then at PEN America, was also at the convening.
In the recording, Kamola tells his colleagues that Philip Brian Harper, Mellon’s program director for higher learning, said that Mellon had approved a budget of “around $10 million” to build a rapid-response organization aimed at defending higher ed, one that would specifically oppose legislation.
Kamola emphasized that Mellon should not publicize the initiative. “This is not public, so don’t share this anywhere,” he told his group. To this day, Mellon has kept the project quiet. In August, when Harper published an Inside Higher Education article titled “With the Humanities at Risk, How the Mellon Foundation Sees Its Role,” he made no mention of a multimillion-dollar advocacy effort.
Yet emails I obtained show that the Alliance for Higher Education has been funded, spearheaded, and managed by Mellon.
Mellon took interest in Gavin in early 2025, a few months after it held the convening that Kamola and Young attended. That April, Carolyn Dinshaw, the Mellon program officer, emailed Gavin to set up a short meeting to update him on “the Mellon endeavor we discussed earlier this year and to make a small request.” A few days later, Harper—the person in charge of Mellon’s higher education giving—followed up himself, thanking Gavin for talking to Dinshaw about “potentially serving on the working group for the Alliance for Higher Education.”
Harper set up a longer meeting with Gavin, and Gavin’s follow-up email suggests that Harper offered him an even more serious role. “I did talk with my family last night, and had some time to reflect and I had a series of questions,” Gavin said to Harper in an email that May. He added, “I am so flattered and hopeful about the work we can do!”
A month later, Gavin emailed the advisory board of Ed4All, telling them he planned to start a 501(c)(3), noting that he’d obtained funding from “Lumina, Mellon, and ECMC”—Lumina and ECMC are education-focused foundations—but that this should be kept quiet “to minimize their own risk.”
Emails show the alliance was treated as Mellon’s initiative. In September, Andrew Pace, the executive director of the Association of Research Libraries, wrote to Harper with the subject line “Alliance for Higher Education.” He thanked Harper for talking “about the plans for your very important alliance.”
Mellon’s support came not just through funding but ideas, infrastructure, and even personnel: Camilla Somers, the alliance’s inaugural chief of staff, previously worked at Mellon for six years as manager of strategic initiatives and planning, according to her LinkedIn profile.
In June 2025, Somers left Mellon to work as a program consultant at the think tank New America. According to emails I obtained, Somers managed the rollout of the alliance during this stint, making decisions and communicating on its behalf. When, for example, New America hosted an alliance working-group retreat—a small group that included Gavin, Kamola, and Harper—Somers sent out the meeting logistics and agenda.
Somers’s work was done on Mellon’s dime, and her emails discussing payment arrangements give clues to the extent of Mellon’s support. “New America should be designated as the client since they’ll be paying for the contract costs using funds from a Mellon grant,” she wrote to a consultant at Spitfire Strategies, the communications firm working with the alliance. Per the emails, the Mellon-funded contract with Spitfire totaled around $340,000.
At the fall 2025 meeting, the alliance’s vision crystallized with the help of an eclectic group including a senior advisor at the American Federation of Teachers, the head of diversity at the American Medical Association, and the president of Southern Illinois University.
Officially, the convening was put on by Ed4All. But in emails with Spitfire Strategies consultants, Gavin decided it was time quietly to roll out the alliance.
The convening was also billed as a Mellon event. “Mellon has backed the event, so there is no cost for attendance/meals/hotels,” Gavin said in an email to Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, who did not end up attending.
Of those who did attend, many were Mellon grantees. The institutions represented included the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, which has received at least $6.7 million from Mellon since 2020; the American Council on Education, which received $5.5 million from Mellon since 2020, including for its Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education project; and the AAC&U and PEN America. Mia McIver, executive director of the American Association of University Professors, was on the attendance list but couldn’t make it.
One spreadsheet I obtained showed the alliance’s goals, or “milestones,” and listed which groups signed on to collaborate on each. One milestone, for example, was to develop state legislation to “protect and/or rebuild DEI.” Another was to fight “anti-DEI,” “anti-academic freedom,” and “anti-institutional autonomy” legislation. Another was to create a “framework,” meant to be adopted by colleges and corporations, to “fund colleges differently and protect DEI.”
Notably, the list reflected Gavin’s political attitudes. One of the soft launch’s milestones reads: “Student voting campaign in full force to ensure states vulnerable are protected.” It adds: “focus on opportunities to flip.” The groups that signed on to collaborate include the Institute for Citizens and Scholars and the AAC&U.
Looking for “opportunities to flip” a midterm election is an unusual goal for any nonprofit, but it’s consistent with how Gavin approaches politics. A slide I obtained from one presentation he gave at another event shows the partisan breakdown of the upcoming U.S. House of Representatives election. It reads: “Voting and higher education matters.”
After the soft launch, Gavin followed up on the “midterm strategy.”
“At the meeting Ed4All had in DC, we broke into groups and got commitments from groups listed to collaborate on mid term election strategy—I had presented a map as I saw it with regard to some places to focus,” he said in an email to Todd Wolfson, president of the AAUP. The agenda for Gavin’s next meeting notes on the top: “For Mid-Terms, we will have a Map to Concentrate on Specific Areas of states and the country.”
Trust in higher education is at a historic low, and many of those who are distrustful cite perceived “political agendas” as a key reason. Some universities have responded by looking at the source of the mistrust. This spring, Yale University published a report on the issue. Responding to concerns about politicization, Vanderbilt and Washington University commissioned a series of reports on the state of the humanities and social sciences.
The Alliance for Higher Education shows how Mellon is pushing universities to take the opposite approach, no matter how self-defeating.
In some circles, perhaps thanks to Mellon and its alliance, this defiant response is now in vogue. In August, AAUP president Todd Wolfson, who now sits on the alliance’s board, stirred controversy. The century-old faculty union announced that it would be making its first-ever political endorsement, for the more progressive candidate in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary: Abdul Al-Sayed.