What $1 Million of Anti-Racist Leadership Training Buys You

Michael S. Roth, the longtime president of Wesleyan University, is an eloquent defender of the liberal arts and open inquiry. He is by turns a realist aware of the need to rebuild public trust in the ivory tower and an idealist who believes that education is “the practice of freedom.” In recent years, he has demonstrated uncommon independence of mind on issues including campus protests and support of affirmative action for conservatives. He has been a champion of open inquiry, assailing the Trump administration’s attempts to deploy what he calls “ideological auditors” on American campuses.

It is precisely because I respect Roth that I was surprised to read his response to my recent article about the Mellon Foundation, the billion-dollar nonprofit that has been using its de facto monopoly on humanities grant-making to push a “scholar-activist” agenda—one that seems to measure the worth of knowledge by its real-world impact on liberal causes. Roth’s letter, which appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, accuses me of peddling “fantasies” about Mellon’s undue influence. He also compares my critiques to the views of the segregationist Senator Jesse Helms, a man who is known primarily not for his views on higher education but for being one of the most openly racist American politicians to have held office this side of the moon landing. Roth’s letter is vaporous, obfuscatory, and symptomatic of the very problems I highlight in the Mellon article that he objects to.

My reporting charts the changes the foundation has undergone since 2018, when Elizabeth Alexander, a noted poet, became its president. The nonprofit has become more and more openly political; in 2020, Alexander declared that Mellon would prioritize “social justice in all of its grantmaking” going forward. Because Mellon is the country’s largest humanities funder by several orders of magnitude, larger even than the federal government, this new direction has forced some academics to choose between letting their research go unfunded and politically contorting it. And it has seemed to encourage colleges and universities, lured by seven-figure donations, to redo their general-education curriculum and make their teaching hyper-progressive.

[Read: The multibillion-dollar foundation that controls the humanities]

Roth’s letter doesn’t really defend Mellon against the charge I levy: that the foundation bends scholars and institutions to its ideological will. “Grant applicants often inflect their application to appeal to a funder,” Roth writes, implicitly conceding what I found in my reporting—that Mellon, through its emphasis on social justice, offers an incentive to scholars to fake an interest in liberal causes in exchange for research money. His claim seems to be that what I view as political coercion is not coercion at all, but rather a form of business as usual in grant-making, which makes it, therefore, unobjectionable.

Of course, all grant-making does create incentive structures that encourage applicants to position their work or projects in a way most likely to win money. But incentive structures can be more or less coercive, funders more or less overbearing. And the point of my article is that Mellon has become uniquely intellectually coercive and politically overbearing under Alexander. I spoke with a number of senior administrators at a variety of colleges and universities who were united in their view that Alexander wields top-down control in a way that prior leaders of the organization did not. This has meant that many Mellon hopefuls may feel that they must either walk Alexander’s line or walk away from the money.

Roth skates past the question of his own incentives in coming to Mellon’s defense. He acknowledges “the foundation’s recent support” for his university, highlighting a prison-education program and a research project on ancient botanicals. He neglects to specify that Mellon has granted Wesleyan nearly $5 million under Alexander’s tenure, part of the more than $13 million in total received since he became president, in 2007. The aforementioned botanicals project rang up a mere $279,000. He does not mention the million-dollar grants that Mellon gave Wesleyan to implement a new social-justice curriculum and for “leadership training” in “antiracism practices” through the school’s arts center. It appears that Roth has less of a problem with “ideological auditors” when they are driving the gravy train on which he is a passenger.

That Roth does not reveal the precise nature and volume of Mellon’s support to his university points to the more glaring problem with his response: It doesn’t defend the foundation’s higher-education funding on the merits. Instead, his letter reads as an exercise in tone policing and deflection. Roth asserts that I am a “former professor” simply trying “to get attention” and scolds me for “mocking” research that is likely to be “unpopular with the general public.” He does not, however, defend scholar-activism in general or the Mellon projects my article draws attention to in particular. The only Mellon initiative that Roth does defend in some detail is the “Monuments and Memory” series, which funds commemorative public artworks—but that initiative is not a higher-education project and therefore has little to do with Mellon’s funding for the humanities at U.S. colleges and universities, the subject at hand.

If Roth wants to say that the way I describe Mellon’s projects is mocking, he’s free to do so. But he is also free to explain why the projects I mention—say, UC Davis’s “Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism,” or the efforts of Portland State University’s gender-studies department to become “ungovernable”—are substantive contributions to intellectual life at their respective universities. He is free, too, to explain what Wesleyan’s Mellon-funded “Embodying Antiracism” initiative has contributed to his own university. But he does not.

[Read: American higher ed never figured out its purpose]

That Roth chooses to attack my character instead of clearly articulating why Mellon’s money has been well spent is telling. That he does not—or perhaps cannot—explain how the foundation’s behavior meaningfully differs from the other ongoing assaults on academic freedom that he rightly decries is also telling. Both Mellon and the federal government are dangling the carrot of millions of dollars given and the stick of millions of dollars withheld as a means to install their preferred ideology on American campuses. I do not know why Roth, who has exhibited argumentative eloquence in the past, came to Mellon’s aid with such a slipshod rebuttal. Maybe it’s a tale as old as time: Money is sweeter than the sting of hypocrisy. Or maybe Mellon really has helped facilitate needed change on his campus.

Because Roth failed to engage these questions substantively, I don’t know whether Wesleyan is benefiting from its Mellon-funded social-justice initiatives. But going off of my own experience as a former professor who taught for five years at a selective college that, like Wesleyan, charges almost $100,000 a year, I am skeptical. I have rarely seen scholar-activism produce material change. I have rarely seen DEI programs make institutions less bigoted, or anyone’s heart more open. These sorts of initiatives tend to be little more than a moral laundromat that bleaches the sins of elite universities—whose overwhelming function in recent years has been not redressing racism but fundraising and reproducing their own donor class.

If this sounds overly cynical, you don’t need to take my word for it. For proof of the inefficacy of these programs, just look at Roth’s response. A million dollars’ worth of Mellon-funded anti-racist “leadership training” was not enough to make Wesleyan’s leader pause and reconsider before telling a Black journalist that he is carrying on “the grand tradition of Senator Jesse Helms.”