“Patronage” has at least two meanings. One refers to financial support for a practitioner, like an artist or writer, whose activity is valuable but not profitable. The other, evoking the image of Tammany Hall, refers to the distribution of jobs, especially government jobs, by those empowered to make such appointments. This form of patronage, a key ingredient in any political machine, is predicated on loyalty.
Today, some charitable foundations are blurring the distinction between the two meanings. Behemoths like the Andrew W. Mellon, Robert Wood Johnson, and Kresge Foundations—boasting a combined endowment of over $20 billion—variously support the arts, humanities, health sciences, and infrastructure like traditional patrons. Yet these funders also distribute jobs. This activity alone doesn’t make them political machines, but it means that they often function similarly.
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The Mellon Foundation, the country’s largest private funder of the arts and humanities, offers the clearest example. The foundation directs much of its funding to developing the academic talent pipeline. In more than a few cases, Mellon money follows—and sometimes ramrods—scholars through every career chokepoint.
Take Kaneesha Parsard, a professor at University of Chicago who studies slavery, emancipation, and gender. As a college student, Parsard received a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, which provides a stipend and graduate school prep. In grad school, she won a Mellon Mays Graduate Studies Enhancement Grant, a Mellon-funded Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, and a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
After receiving her Ph.D., Parsard became a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Race Studies at Northwestern University. She then spent two years as a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago—a Mellon-funded program designed to give each recipient a tenure-track role at its conclusion.
Mellon and a handful of other foundations use their massive endowments to shape the future of the humanities. As Tao Tan demonstrated in a recent AEI study, these groups use their resources to exercise “standard-setting power” and to “define the fundable, shaping which questions, methods, language, and research framings are most likely to attract support.”
Like old school party bosses, Mellon and other foundations effectively funnel people into state-funded jobs.
Take Hazim Abdullah-Smith, a historian specializing in “Black and queer geographies,” who received a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Abdullah-Smith is now a Mellon Scholar at Wayne State University’s Detroit Center for Black Studies. The Detroit Center is funded by a $6 million Mellon Foundation grant, some of which has been directed to “hir[ing] 30 new humanities faculty.” That’s a large sum, but it’s not enough to pay the salaries of the 30 faculty indefinitely. Eventually, the Michigan taxpayer will likely pick up the tab.
Some scholars can depend on the loyalty of their charitable patrons even when their employers spurn them. When Latinx studies scholar Lorgia García Peña was denied tenure at Harvard in 2019, for example, she quickly gained a new appointment at Tufts University—as a Mellon Associate Professor in the Department of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora Studies.
That wasn’t Mellon’s first intervention in García Peña’s career. Early on, she received a Mellon-funded Future of Minority Studies Fellowship at Syracuse University and a Mellon-funded African Diaspora Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. García Peña was later hired by Princeton, and as of 2024, serves as a co-principal investigator on a Mellon-funded research project at the College of New Jersey titled Undocumented. Black. Citizen.
García Peña hasn’t shown much respect for her employer. At the 2025 Socialism Conference, she described Princeton as “the colonizing, racial-capitalist, white-supremacist institution that pay[s] my salary.” She instructed attendees to “get the university’s money to do the work you wanna do to dismantle the university within.”
Mellon seems unfazed, provided García Peña is committed to “social justice.” Upon becoming foundation president in 2018, Elizabeth Alexander wrote: “On July 1, 2018, I assumed the presidency of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, full of respect for the Foundation’s distinguished history and bringing with me a simple understanding of our work and the lens through which I wanted us to look at it: social justice.”
Implementing this vision, the foundation later clarified, will involve working “with colleges, universities, and other organizations that embrace equity in higher learning.” In short, Mellon’s support is predicated, to some extent, on an institution’s commitment to a particular social cause.
Tyler Austin Harper recently argued in The Atlantic that the Mellon Foundation “has a more profound influence on the fiscal health and cultural output of the humanities” than any other entity. But Mellon increasingly acts like a political machine, using its resources to stack ideologically aligned scholars throughout the academy, taking advantage of a severe funding vacuum. It has no business being the country’s leading private funder of the humanities.
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