At Columbia University, the Racial Justice and Abolition Democracy Project created a curriculum to help college students imagine a “society without jails and prisons.” At Morgan State University, the Black Queer Everything initiative developed “transformative pedagogies” about “racism, inequality, and injustice.” And at UCLA, the Race in the Global Past through Native Lenses program promoted using “tribal critical race theory” to interpret precolonial history.
Beyond their radical bent, these programs have one thing in common: the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funds them. The organization’s namesake made his mark on American politics a century ago as Treasury secretary. Today, his foundation injects identity politics into our universities and bankrolls the career development of activist scholars.
In past City Journal articles, I’ve shown how universities advance identitarian activists into faculty positions. I’ve reported on administrators’ clever recruiting tactics to select ideologically aligned scholars, which raise serious questions about academic freedom. This scholar-activist pipeline, I’ve shown, benefits extensively from federal funds.
But perhaps the key player in this scheme is the Mellon Foundation. Documents I’ve acquired through public records requests reveal the extent of the $8 billion behemoth’s influence on every level of higher education—and its support for the scholar-activist pipeline.
The foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2020, the Mellon Foundation gave the University of California system $15 million to fund the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). The program recruits tenure-track faculty committed to diversity. According to the UC system’s grant proposal, which I acquired through a records request, the gift would enable a “20% increase” in the fellowship program’s size.
The Mellon Foundation considers PPFP a “proof of concept” and a “model for inclusive hiring nationwide.” As I’ve reported, this fellow-to-faculty model—where universities hire postdocs who show a “commitment to diversity,” then give them a leg up for tenure-track jobs—is indeed widely utilized across the country.
“PPFP really is a very powerful engine for transforming the professoriate of the future,” Douglas Haynes, the UC vice provost for academic personnel and programs, told the foundation in an article. A quick glance at the program’s fellows reveals what a fully transformed professoriate might look like.
Cinthya Martinez’s doctoral dissertation, for example, “ICE on Fire: Incinerating Prison/Border Violence through Feminist Abolition Geographies,” uses “a haunting methodology to investigate how gendered and queered migrants inside ICE detention use ‘haunted-ness’ and place-making to unsettle detention.” Yessica Garcia Hernandez’s scholarship includes “The making of fat erotics: the cultural work and pleasures of gordibuena activists,” published in the journal Fat Studies. Both Martinez and Garcia Hernandez received PPFP fellowships and are now tenure-track professors in the UC system.
Mellon money is all over the UC system. In 2020, Mellon gave UCLA $5 million to build the “UCLA Mellon Social Justice Curriculum.” According to a proposal document I obtained, UCLA pledged to set aside $2.4 million to pay PPFP fellows’ salaries as tenure-track professors. In another proposal, for the $1 million Race in the Global Past through Native Lenses project, UCLA promised to hire four former PPFP fellows for tenure-track jobs. UC Santa Cruz’s Visualizing Abolition initiative promised to model its own fellowship after PPFP; Mellon awarded it nearly $8 million.
Some of these initiatives raise legal red flags. In its “Race and the Global Past” proposal, UCLA promised to hire “Native and Indigenous” fellows. If that phrase simply refers to scholars’ tribal membership, then the scheme may pass legal muster. But in a job announcement for one of the fellowships, UCLA notes that the prospective hire will be part of a “cohort composed of Native American, Pacific Islander and/or other Indigenous community scholars-in-residence.” The set-aside for Pacific Islanders, American Civil Rights Project executive director Dan Morenoff said, “appears to straightforwardly violate Title VII’s prohibition on hiring individuals because of their race.” He added: “It’s very hard to imagine how the ‘Race in the Global Past through Native Lenses’ project could be legal.”
The Mellon Foundation has helped extend the fellow-to-faculty model throughout the country. Since 2013, Mellon has given the University of Chicago more than $2 million for its Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 2020, it provided the University of Virginia with $5 million for its Race, Place, and Equity program, which sponsors 30 “postdoctoral-to-faculty fellowships.” In 2022, it gave Wayne State University $6 million for a “cluster hire”—hiring multiple professors at once—of 30 professors as a part of its Black Studies Faculty Enhancement Initiative. Ten of those new professors would come through a fellow-to-faculty program.
Many Mellon gifts for other purposes smuggle in fellow-to-faculty roles. The foundation’s $2 million Rebuilding Black Studies grant to Ohio State University, for example, sponsors three fellow-to-faculty postdocs. That includes a recently advertised position for a scholar who will examine “the intersection of blackness/nativeness, inequality, distributive (in)justice, and colonial/postcolonial histories.”
Mellon Foundation funding shapes every rung of the higher education ladder, not just academic hiring. Dozens of universities—including Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton—host a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. The plan gives a stipend and academic mentoring to undergraduates interested in social-justice issues. The goal is to prepare them for graduate school.
By the program’s own metrics, Mellon Mays is a success. More than 850 recipients are now college professors or instructors. “A critical mass of MMUF PhDs is now transforming teaching and scholarship in the humanities and social sciences,” its website boasts.
These fellows are often interested in “intersectionality.” One current Mellon Mays fellow at UT Austin chose to study “anti-colonial workings of thought, revolution, and behavior” in part because of “his experiences in a mixed-ethnic neuroqueercrip body,” according to the program’s webpage.
The Mellon Foundation also bankrolls a range of leadership development initiatives, some with explicitly racial goals. One example is Breaking the M.O.L.D. (Maryland Opportunities for Leadership Development) for Arts and Humanities Faculty, a $3 million Mellon-funded project at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The initiative awards fellowships to accelerate recipients’ “path to senior leadership” and is specifically designed for “faculty members of color and women from the Arts and Humanities as well as others with a proven record of promoting diversity within the academy,” according to the proposal.
The cumulative result of the Mellon Foundation’s efforts is an interconnected network within academia—students, faculty, and administrators—who share affinities and often seem to know one another.
Keith Claybrook, a California State University, Long Beach professor, participates in the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education’s Academy for Leaders in the Humanities. Mellon funds the program. Claybrook’s scholarship includes “Becoming an Africana Activist Scholar: David C. Turner, III and Black Graduate Student Activism as Professional Development, A Case Study.” This paper documents the activism of UCLA professor David Turner, who, as I’ve reported, also participated in PPFP.
Mellon funding can follow scholar-activists through their careers. Consider LaVelle Ridley, an Ohio State professor. Ridley’s research, as one speaker bio put it, “focuses on the radical cultural politics of black transgender women . . . and advances an anti-capitalist, prison abolitionist agenda.” That agenda is Mellon-funded. As an undergraduate, Ridley was a Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Fellow. After graduate school, Ridley became a fellow at UC Berkeley through the Mellon-backed PPFP, researching the topic of “black trans insurgency.” In 2024, Ridley began as a professor of queer and transgender studies at Ohio State, a faculty role created as a part of a series of cluster hires focused on “race, inclusion, and social equity.” That year, Ridley’s department received a grant from the Mellon Foundation and promised to “prioritize feminist leadership while supporting the critical study of race, gender and sexuality.”
As a professor at Ohio’s flagship university, Ridley continues to participate in, and benefit from, the Mellon Foundation’s extensive network of activist-inflected, career-advancing programs. Take Mellon’s work on gender. In 2024, Mellon gave the University of Kansas $1 million for its Trans Studies at the Commons project. The grant proposal, which I acquired and previously reported on, states applicants’ intention to “galvanize efforts aimed at . . . social justice today.” Specifically, program administrators promised to fight laws restricting “gender affirming care.”
One key goal of Trans Studies at the Commons is to expand transgender studies. To that end, it created a virtual fellowship that would dole out small research grants to “scholar-activists” throughout the country. Ridley was selected as one of the program’s first fellows.
Another beneficiary of Mellon dollars was San Francisco’s Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society. The group received $1.5 million to administer a program called Transgender Educational Network: Theory in Action for Creativity, Liberation, Empowerment, and Service, or—fittingly—TENTACLES. In an interview for the Bay Area Reporter, TENTACLES creator Susan Stryker described its purpose as “tak[ing] some of the Mellon Foundation’s largesse and put[ting] as much of that money as possible in the pockets of people who are doing really grassroots, community-based activism.” Administrators chose Ridley, who did not respond to a request for comment, as one of five steering committee members to select projects to fund.
The Mellon connection goes further still. Of the 21 initial TENTACLES grant recipients that Ridley helped select, two are PPFP fellows. One is Dan Bustillo, a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Riverside who conducts research on “trans Latinx activist media.” The other is Jemma Decristo, a professor at UC Davis. As of January, DeCristo was still under investigation by UC Davis for posting threats against “zionist” journalists.
After I made several requests to universities for records related to the TENTACLES initiative, the program took its webpage offline.
Mellon money, and the network of scholar-activists that it funds, has contributed to higher education’s radical left-wing bent. University students, faculty, and administrators act like tenured activists in part because they’re recruited and funded to do just that. Arising from a decades-long personnel building project, the problem defies simple solutions. As I’ll outline when this series concludes, it calls for a decades-long program of institutional renewal.
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