The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities
In 1964, an influential report identified a disquieting trend in academia. “Increasingly during the past few years,” it began, “concern has been expressed about the condition, in this country, of those fields of intellectual activity generally called the humanities.” The 200-plus-page document was a publication of the National Commission on the Humanities, which had been established the previous year.
Reading the commission’s findings six decades later, one could reasonably conclude that what today gets called the “crisis of the humanities” is not so much a discrete 21st-century emergency as the latest expression of an educational catastrophe long in the making. The challenges outlined in 1964 are familiar: meager funding, insufficient support for graduate students, too few faculty jobs, an education system that glamorizes science and math, dense writing that alienates the public, and on and on. “The state of the humanities today creates a crisis,” the report concluded. “There is genuine doubt today whether the universities and colleges can insure that the purposes for which they were established and sometimes endowed will be fulfilled.”
This doubt has not much diminished in the intervening decades, nor have the problems the report identified. Yet what is most notable in the report is not these similarities, but the commission’s prescient fear that the solutions to what ailed the humanities—namely, more cash and large-scale institutional support—also carried risks. “For the very reason that the humanities are concerned with quality, with values, with emotions, and with the goals of living, they must remain free,” the report proclaimed. “To control them is to dictate opinion and to subject all men to the tyranny of a controlling authority in the most intimate and sacred concerns of our existence as human beings.”
The commission’s boldest recommendation was that a new, publicly funded national foundation be established to dispense money to the humanities. But it also cautioned that this path was fraught. The report argued that, although building a taxpayer-financed agency to support American arts and letters was necessary, no federal body should have a monopoly on this grant-making, lest the humanities become unduly influenced by politics. “We must unquestionably increase the prestige of the humanities and the flow of funds to them,” the commission wrote. “At the same time, however grave the need, we must safeguard the independence, the originality, and the freedom of expression of all who are concerned with liberal learning.”
The report recommended that federal funding for the humanities be supplemented by ideologically diverse, nongovernmental donors. “The day must never come when scholars and artists can look only to the federal government for the help they need,” it said. “The notion of any one ‘chosen instrument’ of government in this area must be abhorrent to anyone who cherishes the humanities and realizes that if they are not free they perish.”
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Stop trying to make the humanities ‘relevant’]
For a while, things seemed to go more or less according to the commission’s plan. President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1965 in direct response to the report. A few years later, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was created to finance American arts and letters. It would become part of a broader network that included the Ford Foundation, which began funding the humanities in the 1950s, and the John Templeton Foundation, which began funding research in religion and philosophy in the 1980s. The benefaction of these private nonprofits eventually came to exceed, by a substantial margin, the money dispensed by the government, which has declined over time.
In recent decades, though, the priorities of many of these nonprofits have shifted. The Atlantic Philanthropies, a onetime stalwart, reduced its funding for the humanities in the 1990s. The Rockefeller Foundation began moving away from humanities funding in the 2000s. In 2022, the Ford Foundation announced plans to drastically reduce its higher-education funding in order to focus on racial-justice-movement building. With the broader ecosystem of humanities-focused philanthropies all but dried up, only one major private grant-maker is left standing.
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.
Over the past decade or so, conservative critics of higher education have tended to offer a rather simple explanation for the humanities’ decline. Their argument amounts to a version of “go woke, go broke.” According to this theory, ultraprogressive faculty coalesced around an unpopular liberal orthodoxy, turning off undergraduates (and the public) and accelerating the humanities’ collapse. In short, Shakespeare was replaced by jargon-laden prattle about “settler colonialism,” and students took their tuition dollars to more sane, less shrill corners of universities.
But this tale places too much of the blame on humanities professors, overestimating their actual power within institutions. More important, the went-woke-went-broke hypothesis does not account for the ways that economic transformations within higher education have accelerated the trends that conservatives lament. Specifically, the right-wing theory of the case gets the causal arrow wrong. The humanities aren’t broke because they went woke. 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.
[Tyler Austin Harper: The humanities have sown the seeds of their own destruction]
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?
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was established in 1969, when two siblings—Ailsa Mellon Bruce, a socialite and an art collector, and Paul Mellon, an art collector and a racehorse breeder—decided to combine their personal charitable outfits in honor of their late industrialist father. Their new organization would fund American arts and letters, eventually including foreign-language programs, university special collections, tenure-track positions for new humanities professors, graduate fellowships for Ph.D. students, archival research, and more.
Even before its recent pivot, Mellon tended to tilt to the left, perhaps as a kind of compensation for, or a distraction from, the unseemly reality that it is a multibillion-dollar foundation created by the patrician offspring of a robber baron. But although some of its endeavors through the years were expressly social-justice-oriented (such as a 2016 grant for Columbia’s “Facing Whiteness” project, an interdisciplinary study of how white Americans think about their racial identity), others were more traditional (a long-standing relationship with the Folger Shakespeare Library, for example).
In many ways, the role that liberal politics and social justice should play in higher education has been a preoccupation of the country’s colleges and universities since the mid-20th century. Like cicadas, controversies tend to pop up every decade or so. There was William F. Buckley Jr.’s panic about “collectivism” in the Ivy League, documented in his 1951 book, God and Man at Yale. There were the campus free-speech and civil-rights movements of the 1960s, many of which led to the establishment of identity-focused humanities departments. Then came the fights over political correctness, multiculturalism, and the literary canon in the ’80s and ’90s associated with conservative intellectuals such as Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball. Christopher Rufo’s “critical race theory” dissension kicked off the 2020s, giving way to disputes over wokeness and anti-wokeness. Lately, American campuses have been dominated by the debates around decolonial theory and free speech that emerged from the Gaza crisis.
[From the November 1951 issue: A review of William F. Buckley Jr.’s attack on Yale]
The cumulative effect of these skirmishes has been to weaken the humanities’ already vulnerable stock with the public. American culture treats the arts, ideas, and literature as luxury goods that can be cast aside during moments of belt-tightening, and post-2008 austerity measures have hit the humanities hard, resulting in budget cuts, vanished tenure lines, dwindling research funds, and diminished federal dollars. In a 2024 article for an academic journal, the literary scholar Christopher Newfield showed how few resources are allocated to basic humanities research in the United States. “Of the $54 billion or so in research that the federal government funds in U.S. higher education, $69 million goes to the humanities,” he wrote. “That is, the humanities receive 0.13% of the federal total.”
These economic woes have been exacerbated by the fact that, especially after the Great Recession, students and parents have placed even more emphasis on “practical” college majors that offered a strong “return on investment.” Unable to compete with STEM or business-adjacent fields in the hallowed category of “Making a Ton of Money After Graduation,” the humanities gradually settled into a sales pitch to justify the expense of a degree: The English or history or philosophy department will help turn you into A Good Person. The ROI of a humanities degree was not economic, the thinking went, but political and moral. This was the context in which Elizabeth Alexander became Mellon’s president, in 2018.
Alexander’s pedigree made her a natural choice to lead the foundation. Born to Clifford L. Alexander Jr.—a Kennedy-administration official and the first Black secretary of the Army—and Adele Logan Alexander, a noted historian, she has spent a lifetime in elite institutions: Sidwell Friends. Yale. Boston University to study poetry with Derek Walcott. A Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. A stint as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Followed by Smith. Followed by Yale (again). Followed by reciting her own poetry at Barack Obama’s first inauguration (“In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, / any thing can be made, any sentence begun. / On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp”). A stint as the Ford Foundation’s director of creativity and (ironically) free expression after that. Then Mellon.
[Benjamin Schmidt: The humanities are in crisis]
Alexander reportedly said in her interviews for the role that she planned to pivot the foundation’s attention to social-justice work, and she has kept her word. “There won’t be a penny that is going out the door that is not contributing to a more fair, more just, more beautiful society,” she declared in 2020.
To better understand the impact of Mellon’s agenda, I spoke with about 20 people who have had close dealings with the foundation. Some are professors; others are senior administrators who act as middlemen between their institution and donors and grant-makers. Several have been interacting with Mellon for a decade or more. They are employed at a variety of institutions, some public and some private, some generously endowed and others more threadbare. Most agreed to speak with me on the condition of anonymity. “I don’t think I want to go on the record,” a historian told me, “because Mellon is very powerful.”
One scholar described a relationship with Mellon that was as personal as it was professional. Decades ago, a Mellon fellowship paid for her to pursue a Ph.D. in 19th-century literature. “It changed my life,” she said. Later, when she was a new faculty member, a second Mellon grant enabled her to conduct research for her first book. The sort of work she did was traditional, historically minded, and apolitical, and she noted that she benefited from Mellon’s old approach to funding, in which “classic subjects were the norm.”
When I asked her how she felt about the organization’s turn toward social-justice work, she seemed ambivalent. She was open to Mellon’s new direction, but she also worried that the focus on progressive issues in academia had become “all-encompassing” and made the humanities a target of political criticism. I heard similar concerns from others.
A director responsible for grant administration at a small college said that humanities professors at her institution were distraught by Mellon’s new focus, which they saw as coming at the expense of areas of inquiry without obvious social-justice relevance. She characterized some of the reactions she’s heard: “Are you saying that it’s no longer valuable that I’m doing research on these texts from this time to see what I can learn about them? Is that not valuable anymore to anyone?”
This director described a difficult conversation with a religious-studies professor who was excited about a new project. She told him that it had little chance of getting funding from Mellon, because, as the director put it, “it was purely research. It had nothing to do with community partners or racial justice.” She tried to let him down gently, but said it was like watching the air go out of a balloon.
I became a tenure-track humanities professor in 2020, and I remember Mellon’s shift being greeted with some quiet concern that funding in more traditional research areas would lapse. I saw an example of this several years ago, when a senior academic I know well was seeking research funding for a book project that had nothing to do with social justice. Forced to choose between forgoing an opportunity to win a badly needed grant and twisting his research into a social-justice pretzel, he opted for the pretzel, amending the project to focus on race in an unsuccessful bid to win the foundation’s favor. Another humanities academic I spoke with confessed that, like my acquaintance, he had reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race; he did win a grant. I suspect that this may not be a rare occurrence.
One professor told me that, after he and his colleagues were turned down for various Mellon grants, a representative from the foundation began helping them draft a new proposal that would more likely be approved. “We were pretty tightly coached,” he said. “It certainly felt like we were being told, ‘Do this, this, and this in order for it to work on our end.’ ” Ultimately, he said, a fair amount of social-justice jargon was tacked on to the proposal, “in consultation with, or perhaps at the insistence of, the representative from Mellon.” His team won the grant. (Asked to comment on this, Mellon responded in a statement to The Atlantic, “We firmly support intellectual and academic freedom.” The foundation also said that, “as a private charitable organization, we exercise our freedom to support projects in alignment with our mission.”)
It is hard to see how an incentive structure that pushes scholars to fake or fudge an interest in social justice helps produce a more just academy. If anything, this seems likely to further entrench higher education’s tendency to confuse performative preening with real societal improvement. It also effaces the difference between serious scholarship on race, colonialism, or gender and gaseous buzzword-mongering.
When I was pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative literature in the 2010s, Mellon’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship program provided essential financial support to graduate students finishing their studies. There were no substantive constraints on the subject areas that could be covered; awardees worked on topics as diverse as 15th-century women’s devotional literature, Descartes’ conception of infinity, temporal clauses in linguistics, and hacking culture in contemporary Mexico. In 2022, however, that program was eliminated.
Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice. The fellowship is explicitly “designed to intervene” before a student’s research direction is finalized, which means, in practice, that Mellon can steer students who are just beginning to settle on a dissertation topic toward its preferred areas of inquiry.
In an alternate universe, with ample humanities funding for less politically salient work, one might see the fellowship program as an unalloyed good, providing support to projects that have not historically enjoyed sufficient resources. But in the funding landscape that actually exists, the reality is zero-sum. Every dollar that Mellon spends on this work is a dollar that it cannot spend on “non-applied” humanities research—in other words, scholarship for scholarship’s sake that has no aim except to expand knowledge.
Some may argue that this trade-off is prudent. From my perspective, however, the gift of the humanities is that they liberate us from the tyranny of present opinion and the views of those in power—including those who sit atop multibillion-dollar philanthropies. A version of the humanities that sees its chief mandate as finding solutions to pragmatic problems doesn’t ultimately seem all that different from the accounting department or business school.
I asked multiple times over the course of several months for an interview with Elizabeth Alexander, but through a spokesperson she refused to talk with me, a decision that highlights a broader set of problems within elite academic culture: a disinclination to be accountable to laypeople. A sense that private institutions, regardless of how much they influence the public, are entitled to push whatever ideologies they want. And a belief that it is perfectly natural for higher education to have a liberal slant because everything good and decent has a liberal slant. (Alexander sent along a handful of comments through a spokesperson shortly before this issue went to press. “At Mellon, grantmaking is guided not by ideology,” she wrote, “but by the powerful ideal that the rich fabric of America’s cultural and intellectual contributions must be broadened to convey the full scale of our nation’s histories, surface new ideas, and challenge long-held assumptions.”)
Alexander’s appointment to Mellon also speaks to another trend I’ve observed within wealthy liberal institutions, in which people of color from unusually privileged backgrounds are anointed as standard-bearers for a radical cultural worldview that many working-class minorities do not share—even as the former are ostensibly intended to “represent” the latter. Of course, it is not Alexander’s fault that she is the daughter of illustrious parents. Or that she is a descendant of the Logan family, a famous lineage of highly educated Black elites whose influence stretches back to the 19th century. Or that she is a longtime personal friend of the Obamas, or that her brother served on Barack Obama’s transition team ahead of his first inauguration, where she read her poem “Praise Song for the Day.”
But these facts are also not irrelevant to her elevation at Mellon, by whom she was paid $1.53 million in direct compensation and $672,785 in other compensation in 2024. I have no objection to poets making rookie-NFL-player money—though her 2024 salary is the equivalent of about 16 average tenure-track professors’ annual pay—but it does make all of the social-justice posturing a little more comical.
Various people I spoke with said that Alexander has remade Mellon according to her values, pushing the foundation to become ever more devoted to a narrow conception of progress. A senior official in charge of grant administration at a small private college noted that Alexander has brought a new style of leadership to the foundation, wielding more top-down bureaucratic control and pushing more sweeping changes than past presidents have. Others agreed with this characterization.
This is a significant departure from the nonprofit’s past approach to managing relationships with the institutions it funds, in which Mellon officials would try to balance a college’s or university’s particular—often less political—needs against its own ideological priorities. In 2023, the foundation allotted $1 million to “deepen the ongoing conversation in Transgender Studies” at the University of Kansas—specifically, to “establish a cohort model for scholar-activists” and “create a more trans-liberatory local and regional landscape.” Another $1 million went to classics professors at Princeton and Brown for a project called Racing the Classics, devoted to encouraging early-career scholars to implement “critical race approaches and curricular experimentation.” In 2024, Loyola Marymount University won a three-year, $431,000 grant to “bridge AI practitioners and disability justice scholars and activists.” And MIT received $500,000 for something called Engaging With Music and Musicking Through Engagement, aimed at correcting its curriculum’s “Western European biases.”
Whether or not these programs and projects are serious, significant contributions to humanities scholarship and teaching is somewhat beside the point. Even assuming that the undertakings are all worthwhile, the volume of financial support directed at the “scholar activism” model, at a moment when other, more time-honored varieties of humanities education are withering away, is cause for concern. Majors such as English, philosophy, and theater belong to an ever-shrinking number of fields that are not squarely devoted to job-market preparation or “skill building,” fields that aspire to do something loftier than clearing the brush from students’ career pathways. The merging of humanistic work and activism represents a surrender to the utilitarian logic that measures the worth of knowledge by its direct impact on “the real world.”
Mellon itself disputes this notion. A spokesperson connected me with Phillip Brian Harper, the foundation’s program director for higher learning, who said, “Social justice is a fuzzy term that people invest with a range of different meanings that don’t necessarily apply to the way we do grant-making.” He argued that Mellon’s focus is on emerging fields that have not received grant money in the past, regardless of their particular political bent. “Now, it does so happen that a lot of historically underfunded fields entail scholarly work that itself has social-justice objectives in mind,” he conceded. “But that’s a separate thing.”
This is quite obviously nonsense. Harper himself published an opinion article in 2022 titled “Studying Humanities Can Prepare the Next Generation of Social Justice Leaders.” “The country’s next generation of leaders is pushing for racial equity, economic equality, disability justice and gender and sexual liberation,” he wrote. “To succeed they will need the observational and analytical skills that can be developed by studying ideas, historical events, aesthetic works and cultural practices”—in other words, by studying the humanities. In this context, it seems clear that “social justice work” does indeed mean “activism.”
Some of Mellon’s recent grants have the potential to remake liberal-arts education entirely. The foundation’s Humanities for All Times project, launched in 2021, is premised on the notion that “today’s humanities undergrads are tomorrow’s social justice leaders.” Over the past several years, the foundation has regularly invited small cohorts of liberal-arts colleges to apply for grants—up to $1.5 million each—that support social-justice-aligned curricular development. The application guidelines note that “submissions oriented toward revising an institution’s entire general education program are especially welcome.” That is to say, college administrators and academics are encouraged to submit proposals for projects that would overhaul their core requirements for all students, in every major, in the service of a progressive political program.
A 2021 Humanities for All Times grant proposal from Colorado College reads like conservative satire: “We recognize the myriad ways in which white supremacy has shaped our institution and have been taking steps to work our way out of its grip,” it confesses near the beginning. The application promises the introduction of “at least 50 new and relevant courses” to “empower students to be changemakers.” Mellon gave the college $1 million to carry out this work.
In the summer of 2023, Colorado College hosted a conference based on this prompt: “How do the humanities contribute to anti-oppressive work, and how can humanities methods—from inquiry and critique to creative production and performance—dismantle systems of oppression, create and sustain community and solidarity, and advance liberation?” It does not seem to occur to those asking such questions that the humanities may not be especially well equipped to “dismantle systems of oppression.” Nor do they seem to consider that what might in fact be most valuable about fields like English, history, and philosophy is that they aspire to stand above the flotsam and jetsam of our immediate circumstances, and instead set their sights on what the classicist Leo Strauss called the “permanent problems” that have troubled human beings from time immemorial.
As easy as it is to point to cartoonishly progressive things that Mellon has funded, it is also true that, under Alexander, the foundation deserves credit for working to create a more economically just landscape within higher education. Before Alexander’s arrival, Mellon tended to disburse lavish funding to institutions that were already rich. Now, as part of Mellon’s commitment to equity, it is making a conscious effort to provide funding to public and less selective institutions. It has also increased funding for university-led prison education programs.
In 2024, Mellon spent $25 million to fund paid internships for undergraduate humanities students at five public colleges and universities. These internships can be in any field, with no particular ideological or social-justice strings attached. Renata Miller, a dean at the City College of New York, was effusive about the $5 million internship grant it received. She told me that the money helps provide support for child care, commuting costs, and other obstacles that can prevent working-class students from taking internships.
Elizabeth Spiller, the arts-and-sciences dean at the University of South Florida, wrote in a press release that she was stunned her school was even asked to apply for a similar program. USF ultimately received a $4.8 million grant, which can fund up to 900 students a year to take otherwise-unpaid internships.
Ironically, programs like this illustrate the bind in which both Mellon and the humanities writ large find themselves. It is hard to argue that the tens of millions of dollars that Mellon is putting toward internships for working-class kids at public colleges and universities would be better spent financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France. But this calculus also says something about the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods—programs for humanities undergrads, resources for Ph.D. students, traditional humanities research, support for emerging fields and endowment-poor universities—against one another.
[Read: If the University of Chicago won’t defend the humanities, who will?]
When I asked Harper how he feels about Mellon’s role as the country’s preeminent humanities funder, and the difficult choices that necessitates, he took issue with my characterization. “Serving in this way, that is not Mellon’s role,” he said. “Given the situation that we’re in, Mellon is accidentally in the position of being the primary large funder.” His point was that safeguarding the health of the humanities was not the foundation’s raison d’être, even if the decisions it makes affect that health directly.
This distinction helps shed light on the implicit question that underlies the entire debate about Mellon’s new focus. Namely, should the foundation be blamed for damaging the humanities by directing nearly half a billion dollars a year toward a social-justice-ified vision of American arts and letters, or should universities, the federal government, and other donors instead be blamed for not providing a healthier funding ecosystem to begin with, to say nothing of the anti-woke conservative billionaires who complain endlessly about the humanities and champion “the classics” without ever spending a single penny to support them?
“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves,” Harper said, growing animated. “The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change. It’s not to serve in perpetuity as the piggy bank for research.” Mellon, he said, was never supposed to be a panacea for the humanities.
But with the academic humanities in their death throes, Harper’s distinction between role and position may be largely beside the point. No, it is not Mellon’s job to be the humanities’ piggy bank. Yes, Mellon is the humanities’ piggy bank. The resulting situation is dismal, and the Trump administration’s funding cuts will only make things worse.
Yet the president’s attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities and the canceling of federal humanities grants might not have the effect that conservatives hope for. Howard Husock, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently warned that gutting the NEH would simply expand the power vacuum for Mellon, and is likely to give the progressive organization even more sway over American arts and letters.
Some will no doubt feel that it is irresponsible to criticize Mellon at a moment when higher education is under assault from the federal government. That point of view is fair enough, I suppose, though I think it’s also misguided. The humanities’ problems began well before Donald Trump ever ran for office. The fantasy that we can put off these uncomfortable discussions—about Mellon, about the humanities, about the relationship between scholarship and activism—until some imagined time when higher education is in a healthier place strikes me as just that: a fantasy.
[Read: American higher ed never figured out its purpose]
The humanities are in the mess they’re in because of federal budget cuts, and because of administrators who care more about the football team than about William Faulkner, and because of the toxic pragmatism of an American culture that has a hard time valuing anything that is not immediately, aggressively useful. But the humanities are also in this mess because those of us who care about them have often preferred hunkering down in a defensive crouch, rattling our donation jars and begging for scraps, to serious soul-searching about the real purpose of American arts and letters. We have been too reluctant, or perhaps too ashamed, to consider whether we have betrayed the humanities’ very spirit in our mad, ever more futile quest to keep them financially solvent.
I often wonder what, exactly, we think we’re saving. Are the humanities as they are currently instantiated in the American university system actually worth the Faustian bargains we are forced to make to keep them? At their best, the humanities remind us that our problems are petty not because they are small, but because they are born of the same questions that have plagued all humans since our species lowered itself down from the trees and traded monkey chatter for wisdom-seeking: How to live virtuously? How to exist together peaceably? How to die with grace?
The humanities predate the modern university by millennia, and they will surely outlast it. But a higher-education system that can no longer keep them safe from the vulgarities of the market, the siren song of cultural warfare, or the decidedly sublunary work of furnishing political propaganda is one that has not just failed the humanities, but failed entirely.
* Lead image sources: Eric Gaba / Wikimedia; University of Michigan Library Online Exhibits; National Photo Company Collection / Library of Congress; EvgeniyBobrov / Adobe Stock; Martin Juen / Getty; Jonas / Adobe Stock
† Image sources: Jemal Countess / Getty; Harold M. Lambert / Getty; EvgeniyBobrov / Adobe Stock; dule964 / Adobe Stock; National Endowment for the Humanities; University of Michigan Library Online Exhibits
This article appears in the March 2026 print edition with the headline “The Plot Against the Humanities.”