From Tyler Harper in The Atlantic:

Today, no single entity, including the federal government, has a more profound influence on the fiscal health and cultural output of the humanities than the Mellon Foundation. The National Endowment for the Humanities’ grant budget was $78 million in 2024 (its overall budget was less than half of what it was in 1980, when adjusted for inflation). Mellon awarded $540 million in grants that same year; its endowment sits at roughly $8 billion.

Mellon’s largesse is badly needed, especially as the Trump administration has threatened further cuts to the NEH. But the foundation’s virtual monopoly on humanities funding means that it has the power to remake entire fields according to its desires. And in recent years, under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, who became the organization’s president in 2018, Mellon has embraced an understanding of the humanities that is much more utilitarian, and far more political, than the one put forward by the 1964 commission. In June 2020, Mellon announced that it would be “prioritizing social justice in all of its grantmaking”—“a major strategic evolution” for the organization. This new paradigm seems to find value in arts and letters only insofar as they advance approved, left-leaning causes. [BL: most of the causes are not left-leaning, they are neoliberal distractions]….

The humanities went woke in large part because they were broke. As other donors, the government, and universities themselves all but abandoned these fields, Mellon became a lifeline. But the foundation has proved to be—as Jacques Derrida might have said—a kind of pharmakon: a Greek word that the philosopher noted could be translated as either “remedy” or “poison,” depending on your perspective.

The 1964 report failed to anticipate that, in the 21st century, one of the most substantial challenges to the intellectual and political autonomy of the humanities would come not from a government agency, but from a private organization. American humanists now find themselves in a position that the report’s authors would have considered a nightmare: A multibillion-dollar politicized grant-making entity has a stranglehold over humanities research and teaching, and is using that power to push them in a direction that blurs the boundaries between scholarship and activism, pedagogy and politics.

Under Alexander’s leadership, even as it has cut back on funding for less political projects, Mellon has disbursed enormous sums of money to hyper-liberal academic initiatives at institutions both public and private. These have included grants to Portland State University to help its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department become more “ungovernable,” creating “spaces where activism is encouraged” and “queer and feminist resistance” takes place; to Texas A&M at San Antonio for the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva (a group of academics and activists who “use Shakespeare to reimagine colonial histories and to envision socially just futures in La Frontera”); to Northwestern University for a project that explores how “Black dance practices” work to “instantiate Black freedom”; to Northeastern University for its Digital Transgender Archive to establish a new “lab” on the West Coast; and to UC Davis’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies to create a working group on “Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism.”

One may feel a variety of ways about the worldview that Mellon has chosen to promote through its grant-making. But the salient question is not whether its politics are laudable or lamentable, or even whether the projects it funds are beneficial. The real questions are: What are the consequences when eye-watering sums of money are put behind the idea that the purpose of American arts and letters is not wisdom but advocacy? What happens when the humanities are seen not as having intrinsic worth, but as valuable only insofar as they can be of service to a cause? And what happens when the “choice” of whether to accede to this vision of the humanities becomes—when there is only one real funding game in town—a matter of survival versus collapse?

Obviously the consequences of this approach when a reactionary authoritarian regime is in power will be dire. But even without Trump, the consequences will be very bad for humanistic inquiry, which is about being human, not about the cause du jour of the liberal bourgeoisie.

Folks should read Humboldt, who had the wisdom to realize that it would be better if universities had their own endowments, that separated them from the state or other financial benefactors. (Thanks to Moti Gorin for the pointer.)