Tyler Austin Harper (Atlantic staff writer, former humanities professor) argues that the crisis in the humanities isn't just about funding cuts or progressive faculty — it's about what happens when a single private foundation becomes the dominant funder of an entire sector of American education. The Mellon Foundation ($8B endowment, $540M in grants in 2024) now dwarfs the NEH ($78M) and every other humanities funder. Since 2020 it has explicitly tied all grantmaking to social justice. Harper documents the consequences: a dissertation fellowship program that once funded topics from Descartes to medieval literature was replaced by one where all 45 awardees in 2025 work on identity/social justice. Scholars describe being "tightly coached" to add social justice jargon to proposals. A religious studies professor was told his project had no chance because "it was purely research." Harper's key argument is that this isn't about individual professors going woke — it's a structural problem where funding monopoly produces ideological monoculture. Written from a center-left perspective sympathetic to the humanities, not a conservative hit piece.
And this is the link for poor people What Is the Mellon Foundation Doing to Higher Education? – The Atlantic
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