Mellon Foundation Succumbs to Groupthink
August 2025
In our series on The Mellon Foundation, we have explored the ways in which it has used its substantial endowment to fund a wide range of projects and initiatives that are clearly focused and framed within the context of social justice.
We have now examined the Board of Trustees at the Mellon Foundation, to see if there are any members who could question the direction of Mellon’s current funding policies and initiatives. But we ran into a brick wall: the current Trustees are so homogenous in their mindset and ideological predisposition, that it is evident there are no members of the board who could even stomach opposition to Mellon’s leftward tilt, much less bring conservative concerns before the board for a thorough airing. The Mellon Foundation board is not dysfunctional; it functions exactly as it has been cultivated to function, that is as a tribe of like-minded academics and elites, who protect their social justice causes without question. The Mellon Foundation has morphed into a quasi-religious, faith-based High Church of the Social Justice Left. It is no longer a neutral or honest broker of funding for the humanities.
August 2025
In our series on The Mellon Foundation, we have explored the ways in which it has used its substantial endowment to fund a wide range of projects and initiatives that are clearly focused and framed within the context of social justice.
We have now examined the Board of Trustees at the Mellon Foundation, to see if there are any members who could question the direction of Mellon’s current funding policies and initiatives. But we ran into a brick wall: the current Trustees are so homogenous in their mindset and ideological predisposition, that it is evident there are no members of the board who could even stomach opposition to Mellon’s leftward tilt, much less bring conservative concerns before the board for a thorough airing. The Mellon Foundation board is not dysfunctional; it functions exactly as it has been cultivated to function, that is as a tribe of like-minded academics and elites, who protect their social justice causes without question. The Mellon Foundation has morphed into a quasi-religious, faith-based High Church of the Social Justice Left. It is no longer a neutral or honest broker of funding for the humanities.
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How did this come to be? The seeds were there:
During the tenure of William Bowen as President 1988-2006, the Foundation stayed close to its original parameters, the use of grants to further and improve academic research capabilities. During this period the focus of the Foundation was digitalization of academic books and journals, a system known as JSTOR and ARTSTOR a data base giving access to educators of museum images and collections. However, wohile at Mellon, in 2000, Bowen was co-author of The Shape of the River: Long Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions. This book and research was cited for bringing credibility to affirmative action in admissions programs. Another move Left came during Michael Randel’s tenure from 2006 to 2013. Former president of the University of Chicago and a musicologist, Randel as Mellon President continued the focus on higher education, libraries, museums, performing arts but ushered in environmental causes as an area of focus. |
The Mellon Board: Birds of a Feather
This flock flies left:
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It was in 2013 that Mellon began its real transformation into a different organization, with the election of Earl Lewis as Mellon’s sixth president. Lewis had been the first black Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Emory University. “Under his leadership, the Foundation’s emphasis on diversity became a cross-cutting focus of all our programs.” With Lewis, the gender and complexion of the Mellon Trustee board changed. During this time Danielle Allen became the first black and female chair of the Trustee board. Allen, a highly accomplished Harvard professor of political science, went on to endorse and secure for Elizabeth Alexander the position as President of the Mellon Foundation in 2018.
It is during this period from 2013 to 2020 that Mellon Foundation underwent a fundamental change. Whereas the Mellon Foundation had previously saw its role as supporting academia and museum work with its grants and programs, the Mellon Foundation now focused on social justice. All its grants and programs continue to be framed around this concept. So now Mellon when funding academic organizations focuses on race, sexual orientation, and other grievance politics.
Whereas research previously funded was primarily innovations which assisted in the sharing and transfer of information, and within the parameters of the traditional understanding of the humanities - art, literature, music, theology and linguistics - the definition of humanities changed at Mellon and became an all-inclusive hodge-podge of all things human, which is just about everything conceivable. Humanities were redefined to include what was previously the confines of the social sciences, society, politics, and economics. Instead of funding an opera production or ballet, or supporting a novelist or thinker, Mellon began to look at who composed the opera or ballet, what the novelist or thinker wanted to write or think about. And if any of these endeavors were seen as too classicist or “too white”, traditional, or religious, Mellon ceased funding. It can be said without venturing into extremist territory, if a project was not controversial or didn’t poke at racially sensitive areas, Mellon would reject it. Mellon rejected a funding request for an American black Revolutionary War heroes monument in Washington, D.C. Being black wasn’t enough. Given Mellon’s leftward tilt, one may reasonably conclude the monument was rejected because it was aligned with traditional American values and not antithetical to patriotism.
All of this change occurred with the backdrop of “Black Lives Matter” infiltrating the public space after the death of George Floyd in May 2020. It was within 35 days of the Floyd incident that Elizabeth Alexander announced the Mellon Foundation “is reorienting its grant-making program entirely through the lens of social justice, rather than a wholesale shift, I would call it an evolution.” Artnet warned future applicants their grant requests “will be evaluated based on one principal [sic] question, would their proposal help create a more just and fair society.” But who determines what creates a more just and fair society? For example, contrary’ to the Left’s view, a project exploring the effects or legacy of slavery upon modern blacks will not do anything to create a more just society. Instead, it would ignite passions that prove destructive to society.
Because Elizabeth Alexander, controls the purse strings at Mellon, she is the sole authority on societal impact. An enviable position to be in, considering, none of her decisions can be countered while she controls an 8-billion-dollar trust. There are no market or funding pressures to create a change in direction. As long as she is at the helm of the Mellon Foundation, her directives will go unchallenged - especially in light of there being on no one on the Mellon Trustee Board who would ever think to challenge her.
Elizabeth Alexander was championed as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2022. From our point of view, she is one of the 100 most dangerous people in the world. With her new social justice framework and her big bankroll backing it up, Alexander is influencing society in multiple ways. A May 2025 article tells the disturbing story of how Mellon is shaping the composition of thought leaders on the university level through ‘inclusive hiring’, which makes Mellon the backdoor funder of DEI initiatives on the University level. Colleges and Universities unwilling to commit to DEI standards need not apply for Mellon grants or funding. In the article, the writer tells how universities such as the University of California system have been captured by Mellon and how these schools are now bent toward producing radical activist scholars.
Mellon’s impact at presidential homes is still shown through their grants to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which targets principally Montpelier, to prop up a commitment to “slave descendant co-stewardship of Montpelier”. And throughout the country in the guise of its Monument’s project, Mellon is leading the charge to have ‘socially repugnant’ statues toppled and replaced by ‘more harmonious society-bettering statuary.’ If you Google completed monument projects funded by Mellon Foundation, you will find a whole list of completed projects that begs the question “Does this really better society?” In most cases it is more evident that Mellon is funding one societal group over another, while erasing history that is not colorful enough.
Mellon’s Leftist activism makes one wonder whether philanthropic foundations are a good thing. Mellon is evidence of how a foundation can be captured and taken over by individuals or groups with missions antithetical to the ideas and life of the organization’s founders.
The most alarming thing about Foundations and their capture is, as long as foundations rely upon academics and activists to fill their board rooms, present trends prevailing, we are doomed to have foundations funding invariably Left-wing causes and work. Conservatives need to play catch-up and form foundations and pipelines for conservative board members. Money talks and money has influence but that doesn’t mean what it says or what it influences will be good. Conservatives have to take a page from the liberal playbook and use money and influence for their own causes.
Whereas research previously funded was primarily innovations which assisted in the sharing and transfer of information, and within the parameters of the traditional understanding of the humanities - art, literature, music, theology and linguistics - the definition of humanities changed at Mellon and became an all-inclusive hodge-podge of all things human, which is just about everything conceivable. Humanities were redefined to include what was previously the confines of the social sciences, society, politics, and economics. Instead of funding an opera production or ballet, or supporting a novelist or thinker, Mellon began to look at who composed the opera or ballet, what the novelist or thinker wanted to write or think about. And if any of these endeavors were seen as too classicist or “too white”, traditional, or religious, Mellon ceased funding. It can be said without venturing into extremist territory, if a project was not controversial or didn’t poke at racially sensitive areas, Mellon would reject it. Mellon rejected a funding request for an American black Revolutionary War heroes monument in Washington, D.C. Being black wasn’t enough. Given Mellon’s leftward tilt, one may reasonably conclude the monument was rejected because it was aligned with traditional American values and not antithetical to patriotism.
All of this change occurred with the backdrop of “Black Lives Matter” infiltrating the public space after the death of George Floyd in May 2020. It was within 35 days of the Floyd incident that Elizabeth Alexander announced the Mellon Foundation “is reorienting its grant-making program entirely through the lens of social justice, rather than a wholesale shift, I would call it an evolution.” Artnet warned future applicants their grant requests “will be evaluated based on one principal [sic] question, would their proposal help create a more just and fair society.” But who determines what creates a more just and fair society? For example, contrary’ to the Left’s view, a project exploring the effects or legacy of slavery upon modern blacks will not do anything to create a more just society. Instead, it would ignite passions that prove destructive to society.
Because Elizabeth Alexander, controls the purse strings at Mellon, she is the sole authority on societal impact. An enviable position to be in, considering, none of her decisions can be countered while she controls an 8-billion-dollar trust. There are no market or funding pressures to create a change in direction. As long as she is at the helm of the Mellon Foundation, her directives will go unchallenged - especially in light of there being on no one on the Mellon Trustee Board who would ever think to challenge her.
Elizabeth Alexander was championed as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2022. From our point of view, she is one of the 100 most dangerous people in the world. With her new social justice framework and her big bankroll backing it up, Alexander is influencing society in multiple ways. A May 2025 article tells the disturbing story of how Mellon is shaping the composition of thought leaders on the university level through ‘inclusive hiring’, which makes Mellon the backdoor funder of DEI initiatives on the University level. Colleges and Universities unwilling to commit to DEI standards need not apply for Mellon grants or funding. In the article, the writer tells how universities such as the University of California system have been captured by Mellon and how these schools are now bent toward producing radical activist scholars.
Mellon’s impact at presidential homes is still shown through their grants to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which targets principally Montpelier, to prop up a commitment to “slave descendant co-stewardship of Montpelier”. And throughout the country in the guise of its Monument’s project, Mellon is leading the charge to have ‘socially repugnant’ statues toppled and replaced by ‘more harmonious society-bettering statuary.’ If you Google completed monument projects funded by Mellon Foundation, you will find a whole list of completed projects that begs the question “Does this really better society?” In most cases it is more evident that Mellon is funding one societal group over another, while erasing history that is not colorful enough.
Mellon’s Leftist activism makes one wonder whether philanthropic foundations are a good thing. Mellon is evidence of how a foundation can be captured and taken over by individuals or groups with missions antithetical to the ideas and life of the organization’s founders.
The most alarming thing about Foundations and their capture is, as long as foundations rely upon academics and activists to fill their board rooms, present trends prevailing, we are doomed to have foundations funding invariably Left-wing causes and work. Conservatives need to play catch-up and form foundations and pipelines for conservative board members. Money talks and money has influence but that doesn’t mean what it says or what it influences will be good. Conservatives have to take a page from the liberal playbook and use money and influence for their own causes.