“America’s biggest funder of the humanities subsidizes ‘Ecowomanism,’ ‘Black Trans Studies’ and the like,” explains John Sailer in the Wall Street Journal:
The University of Virginia launched a hiring spree in 2020 as it pledged to become “a racial-equity-focused university.” A special initiative promised to recruit 30 postdoctoral fellows and “open the gateway” for them to fill tenure-track jobs. One current fellow’s specialties include “transfeminisms” and “genderqueer life writing.” Another researches how Filipino nurses resist “racial capitalism.”
The program owes its existence to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funded it to the tune of $5 million. With a $7.7 billion endowment, the Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Its annual giving has long dwarfed that of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In recent years, it has been refashioned as a tool for advancing an identitarian vision of social justice. For academia, the consequences are far-reaching.
Through public-records requests, I’ve acquired dozens of proposals and progress reports for Mellon-funded projects. The records show how the foundation has lavishly promoted progressive scholar-activism. At the University of Utah, the Transformative Intersectional Collective created workshops on “transgender and queer of color critique” and “environmental anti-racism,” supported by a half-million-dollar Mellon grant. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, the “Visualizing Abolition” project promotes research and art that calls for the elimination of prisons with the support of $8 million from Mellon.
For much of its existence, the Mellon Foundation narrowly supported the arts and humanities. One signature project was the creation of JSTOR, the widely used online database of academic research. The foundation avoided controversy.
That changed with the dawn of the social-justice era. As early as 2014, then-president Earl Lewis told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the foundation would take a more activist approach, especially around issues of race. On taking over…
More at this link.
The Mellon Foundation is named for Andrew Mellon, a prominent American banker, industrialist, and philanthropist who served as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury (1921–1932) under three Republican presidents. The Mellon Foundation’s narrow-minded wokeness since 2014 is a perversion of donor intent.
Cornell University has had a class called “Queer Marxism.” Occidental College offers the course “Black Queer Thought,” which critiques “the demands” of “patriarchy and capitalism.”
Colleges have also offered courses on “Queering God” and “How To Be A Bitch.”
“To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says Ibram Kendi’s book How to Be An Antiracist, which has been assigned reading for many students.
The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book How To Be An Antiracist is that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi in that book. That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushed the progressive media organ Slate.
