Throughout 2026, I’ve reported on how the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—the country’s largest private funder of the arts and humanities—embraced a vision of progressive social justice and used its largess to transform higher education. Mellon’s misadventures have included supporting countless self-proclaimed scholar-activists and funding advocacy groups designed to resist higher education reform.
Needless to say, this has been a year of intense scrutiny for Mellon. In February, a few days after the Wall Street Journal published my first article on Mellon, the Atlantic ran an article by Tyler Austin Harper on the same topic, titled “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities,” which itself sparked intense debate online. Now, half a year later, Mellon has issued a response.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
Earlier this month, Philip Brian Harper, Mellon’s program director for higher learning, wrote an article for Inside Higher Education titled “With the Humanities at Risk, How the Mellon Foundation Sees Its Role.” Linking to my reporting, Harper notes that Mellon has “not been spared from recent critiques” of the humanities, adding that the foundation welcomes “good faith criticism.” While late to the game, Harper should be commended for articulating a defense of Mellon’s approach, since the foundation is, to say it again, the nation’s largest funder of the arts and humanities. Yet, in making that defense, he only reveals Mellon’s self-defeating approach.
Harper makes clear that identity and demographics are central to how Mellon understands the humanities. He frames his apologia by stating that any debate over Mellon’s work should focus on the “core questions” that animate the humanities, providing a telling list: “How do we best understand the human experience? Whose experience is recognized? Who gets to participate in and inform this conversation?”
Mellon’s approach to funding higher education, as Harper describes it, roughly corresponds to these questions. Mellon funds scholarship on “our collective understanding of the human experience,” he writes, citing the Mellon-funded work at Syracuse University’s Center for Global Indigenous Cultures and Environmental Justice. Mellon seeks to expand “the range of perspectives that shape the humanities,” as embodied in its $3 million grant for the University of Rochester’s Department of Black Studies. And it seeks to reach “scholars and audiences at more varied places than ever before” through, for example, funding humanities internships, public universities, and prison education programs.
Describing Mellon’s giving strategy, Harper weaves in his response to critics. He makes no concessions to his interlocutors and argues that critics misrepresent Mellon’s idea of “social justice,” which he depicts as largely about telling “untold stories” and finding “undervalued perspectives.” Critics decry scholar-activism, but to Harper, some Mellon grantees simply seek “solutions to address the issues they study,” which is “not a perversion of the academic mission.” “[M]any critiques mistake transformation for decline,” he asserts, describing how, when various demographic minorities entered the academy, it simply transformed “the production of knowledge.”
Harper dismisses his critics’ concerns wholesale. Yet his depiction of Mellon only confirms them. While he emphasizes broadening the humanities, he ironically showcases a conception of the field that is extremely narrow.
Consider Harper’s animating “core questions.” Two of the three deal with representation. This is a striking admission: for Mellon, the humanities are largely about identity. When he puts this in concrete terms, it becomes clear that this means race, gender, sexuality, and perhaps disability status. Every grant that Harper mentions deals with a demographic identity category.
To show that Mellon still funds traditional academic fields, he points to a grant for a philosophy and media project, which, he fails to mention, specifically supports “fellowships in race and social justice.” When he describes how Mellon funds research on the “human experience”—the subject of his only question that’s not about identity—he points to a Syracuse University program “guided by the principles” of, among others, “Indigenous Ontologies” and “Epistemologies.”
This highlights the problem with Mellon’s approach. Many humanists would say that the questions driving their field touch on a much broader range of topics: freedom, love, beauty, truth, virtue, and—yes—identity. The liberal arts tradition takes these questions to be relevant to all people, regardless of what demographic boxes they check.
Mellon’s attempt to broaden the humanities, even in Harper’s own telling, has involved condensing that range of questions down to variations on one theme. To make this concrete, one has only to browse the recent recipients of Mellon-funded fellowships, like the American Council of Learned Societies’ Dissertation Innovation Fellowship or the Society for Citizens and Scholars’ Career Enhancement Fellowship. By my count, a vast majority focus on identity, racial groups, or trendy social-justice causes. Any scholar applying would be right to conclude that his best shot is to shoehorn his research into these categories. Scholars whose research can’t fit—like a philosopher studying the hard problem of consciousness or a classicist studying Homer—probably wouldn’t bother applying.
Mellon’s narrowing of purpose reflects changes from the top down. In 2011, Mellon’s then-president Don M. Randel expressed a belief that the study of the humanities was an end in itself, writing that “the humanities and the arts are central to any life that one should want to live.” By 2014, then-president Earl Lewis espoused a more instrumental approach, telling the Chronicle of Higher Education that “what we can do better than any other foundation at this point in time is to underwrite research that demonstrates the importance of diversity, in all domains, to democratic societies.” When Elizabeth Alexander, Mellon’s current president, assumed her role in 2018, she announced that every grant would be evaluated through the lens of “social justice.”
Those who wholeheartedly support Lewis and Alexander’s causes can still acknowledge the profound shift. Rather than focusing on the humanities as an end, Mellon has embraced using the humanities as a means toward something else. That effect seems clear when one surveys the output of Mellon-funded scholars. Though he asserts that critics don’t engage “seriously with the scholarship” funded by Mellon, Harper’s own piece doesn’t dive into any of the research produced through Mellon’s largess. But as I’ve previously pointed out, some of this scholarship raises serious questions, such as a Mellon-funded dissertation that presented a “a queer eco-erotic” critique of the “anti-erotic neoliberal academy.”
Harper laments declining support for the humanities, which mirrors America’s broader loss of confidence in higher education. He offers little reflection on that decline. Polling has shown a key reason: among those who told Gallup they had “very little or no confidence” in higher education, a plurality cited “perceived political agendas on college campuses.” For a whole host of Mellon grantees, the political agenda is more than just a perception. Many Mellon scholars refer to themselves as “scholar-activists,” and many Mellon grants explicitly seek to support scholar-activism. But even those invested in Mellon’s vision for social justice should think twice before using the academy as their direct vehicle.
Harper is right that the humanities are “powerful and essential.” To survive, higher education and the humanities must enjoy broad public support. It’s foolish to expect such support while steering universities toward open—and at times, openly partisan—political activism.