Mellon’s Radical LGBTQ Agenda
March 2026
As we know from previous Guardians articles on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s grant-making, Mellon continues to prefer funding the edgy, the fringe, and the spirit of the age, instead of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
In other words, Mellon has abandoned its original devotion to traditional arts and humanities for its championing of Leftist identity politics and activism. And, furthermore, Mellon is extremely coercive and exploitative when it comes to choosing institutions and handing-out grants. It’s Mellon’s way or the highway.
Mellon Foundation officers are determined to cement transgender studies as a bona fide academic discipline.
Two years ago, in 2024, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation committed “$18 million to 95 public college and university programs—across 66 institutions—that boldly advance the study of race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality through its new “Affirming Multivocal Humanities’ initiative” because it sees “a need for nuanced scholarship on the breadth of the human experience through race, ethnic, gender, and sexuality studies.”
The following are some of the institutions that have received “Affirming Multivocal Humanities” (AMH) funds to advance LGBTQ initiatives.
Prior to the series of Affirming Multivocal Humanities grants, Mellon bequeathed millions to other institutions for various LGBTQ programs. The following are some examples.
The Mellon Foundation is even getting in on the act of controlling students’ dissertations. The Dissertation Innovation Fellowship is explicitly “designed to intervene” before a student’s dissertation research direction is finalized, which means that Mellon can take the reins and steer students’ dissertation topic toward its (Mellon’s) preferred areas of inquiry.
Shockingly, The Atlantic magazine, an ally of the left, is questioning the Mellon Foundation’s current path of funding LGBTQ programs for the purpose of activism and its potential consequences. The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper makes several salient points:
“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 founder of “transgender studies,” Susan Stryker, says the quiet part out loud. . . The discipline has “a radical political potential;” it exists in “deep dialogue with processes of decolonization, of racial justice, of anti-global capitalism,” and it is “a part of an overthrowing and reimagining” the goal of higher education.
In other words, the intent of LGBTQ studies, along with the other contrived subjects falling under the umbrella of “multivocal humanities studies,” is part of the grand scheme to “overthrow” and “reimagine,” the role of the university – all with Mellon money.
“Activism is an inextricable tenet of transgender studies,” says John D. Sailer, the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “Higher education reform will only succeed when this unfortunate trend is reversed.”
Institutions that teach the classics are not likely to receive as much support, considering activism seems to be worth more than scholarship these days. As The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper puts it, “Mellon’s funding has amplified a bleak trajectory for the academy.”
The Foundation, under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, shows no sign of slowing down its funding of pernicious initiatives any time soon. But it is, at long-last, facing some scrutiny from its own kind.
March 2026
As we know from previous Guardians articles on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s grant-making, Mellon continues to prefer funding the edgy, the fringe, and the spirit of the age, instead of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
In other words, Mellon has abandoned its original devotion to traditional arts and humanities for its championing of Leftist identity politics and activism. And, furthermore, Mellon is extremely coercive and exploitative when it comes to choosing institutions and handing-out grants. It’s Mellon’s way or the highway.
Mellon Foundation officers are determined to cement transgender studies as a bona fide academic discipline.
Two years ago, in 2024, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation committed “$18 million to 95 public college and university programs—across 66 institutions—that boldly advance the study of race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality through its new “Affirming Multivocal Humanities’ initiative” because it sees “a need for nuanced scholarship on the breadth of the human experience through race, ethnic, gender, and sexuality studies.”
The following are some of the institutions that have received “Affirming Multivocal Humanities” (AMH) funds to advance LGBTQ initiatives.
- San Francisco’s Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society is a beneficiary of AMH funds receiving $1.5 million in 2024 from Mellon to start a program called Transgender Educational Network: Theory in Action for Creativity, Liberation, Empowerment, and Service - aptly known as (TENTACLES). TENTACLES creator, Susan Stryker, a “trans woman,” described its purpose as putting Mellon’s money “in the pockets of people who are doing grassroots, community-based activism.” Two TENTACLES “scholars” in the UC system are Jemma Decristo and Dan Bustillo. Bustillo focuses on trans Latinx activist media, the surveillance of trans bodies, and creative strategies of resistance at UC Riverside. Decristo, a professor at UC Davis, is on the Turning Point USA professor watchlist for making threats against Jewish journalists. She was investigated, but allowed to keep her job by the university this year. Stryker credits the Mellon Foundation and its senior program officer for higher learning, Carolyn Dinshaw, Ph.D.,“for getting the idea of financially supporting trans scholarship off the ground.” Stryker: "Within [Mellon's] funding and higher education, the idea was like, 'Well, what areas of higher education – where there could be a social justice contribution – are we not doing a good job with yet? To which Dinshaw answered, 'I see three things. I see disability studies, I see Indigenous studies, and I see transgender studies.'
- Mellon granted Ohio State University $2 million to fund 10 new faculty positions. Zalika Ibaorimi was one of the professors hired. According to Ohio State’s Department of African American and African Studies, Ibaorimi’s areas of expertise include Black Porn/Sex Work Studies, Black Sexual Logics, Black Queer Theory, Sexual Violence.
- Emory University has received significant funding from the Mellon Foundation to support various initiatives, including those focused on trans studies. At Emory, Mellon Mays fellows study “Ecowomanism,” “Black Trans Studies” and “Racial Colonial Capitalism.”
- Portland State University received $100K from Mellon to revitalize its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department become more “ungovernable,” creating “spaces where activism is encouraged” and “queer and feminist resistance” takes place.
- California State University, CSU, received $1.5 million, to help increase the number of credit-bearing programs that link ethnic studies concepts to gender and sexuality studies.
- The City University of New York, CUNY, got a whopping $5 million from Mellon in 2024 to expand their Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative which includes LGBTQ studies. The program offers a doctoral fellowship supporting research focusing on race, sexuality, intersectionality, decolonial studies, and social justice, and is pushing for the “decolonization” of curriculum across the university system.
- The University of Hawaii at Manoa was awarded $1.4 million in support for their LGBTQ studies and related programs.
- The University Maryland, Baltimore County’s Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies (GWST) department received a $100,000 grant in from the Mellon Foundation to implement its Advancing Gender and Sexuality Studies in Community project.
- Mellon’s gift to DePaul University of $750K was used to fund an “Experiential Humanities Collaborative,” which is a set of project-based courses. One of the courses was especially disturbing - Do Say Gay: Banned Books and LGBTQ+ Freedoms. It teaches that it is a ‘threat to democracy’ to keep pornographic books out of libraries where children have access. One of the designers of the Do Say Gay course, Heather Montes-Ireland, said “To read literature that celebrates queer and trans existence is to affirm our lives — and it is also a powerful way to resist social and political exclusion.” The course requires students to create exhibits based on four themes highlighted in the course:
SAVE OUR CHILDREN: Queer Young Adult & Kid Lit,
OPEN BOOKS, OPEN MINDS: Libraries, Rights, & Political Action,
SILENCE=DEATH: Aids Activism, Literature, & Art, and
WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN BANNED: Banned Sexualities & Genders.
Attendees at one of the Do Say Gay interactive exhibits celebrated by “eating a banned book,” as one student baked a cake featuring a two-page spread from the graphic memoir Gender Queer. The program concluded with a drag king reading of LGBTQ+ children’s books to members of the community which included children. For the record, DePaul University is a Catholic Institution.
- Another recipient of AMH money was Penn State University. Professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, Hil Malatino, received a Mellon grant of $500,000 to unlock a “vast trove of archival documents devoted to trans history that has yet to be unearthed” called “Widening the Arc of Trans History.”
Prior to the series of Affirming Multivocal Humanities grants, Mellon bequeathed millions to other institutions for various LGBTQ programs. The following are some examples.
- Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD, received a Mellon grant of $500,000 to launch “Black Queer…Everything.” “Black Queer…Everything invests in the next generation of humanities scholars and social justice activists working towards black liberation.” “…we strive to elevate queer voices as leaders in social and cultural transformation,” declared Anika Simpson, Ph.D., BQE’s principal investigator.
- The notoriously liberal University of California, Berkeley received $200,000 in grant money from the Mellon Foundation for its Ethnic Studies Department. That Department is one of the creators of the UC Berkeley High School Ethnic Studies Initiative, which is developing a curriculum for high schools to use once ethnic studies becomes a required class.
It gets worse. Resources in the hub include things like “Drag Pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood,” etc., that will be disseminated to teachers in K-12.
- “Trans Studies at the Commons,” a University of Kansas $1 million initiative, allows KU students to study “questions of trans life, trans theorizing, and trans materiality across epistemological and ontological bounds.”
- A project at the University of Utah, supported by a Mellon grant, focuses on workshops related to transgender and queer of color critique.
- The University of Virginia launched a five million-dollar hiring spree in 2020, thanks to Mellon, aimed at recruiting postdoctoral fellows specializing in various aspects of gender studies, including transgender topics. One current fellow’s specialties include “transfeminisms” and “genderqueer life writing.”
The Mellon Foundation is even getting in on the act of controlling students’ dissertations. The Dissertation Innovation Fellowship is explicitly “designed to intervene” before a student’s dissertation research direction is finalized, which means that Mellon can take the reins and steer students’ dissertation topic toward its (Mellon’s) preferred areas of inquiry.
Shockingly, The Atlantic magazine, an ally of the left, is questioning the Mellon Foundation’s current path of funding LGBTQ programs for the purpose of activism and its potential consequences. The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper makes several salient points:
“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 founder of “transgender studies,” Susan Stryker, says the quiet part out loud. . . The discipline has “a radical political potential;” it exists in “deep dialogue with processes of decolonization, of racial justice, of anti-global capitalism,” and it is “a part of an overthrowing and reimagining” the goal of higher education.
In other words, the intent of LGBTQ studies, along with the other contrived subjects falling under the umbrella of “multivocal humanities studies,” is part of the grand scheme to “overthrow” and “reimagine,” the role of the university – all with Mellon money.
“Activism is an inextricable tenet of transgender studies,” says John D. Sailer, the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “Higher education reform will only succeed when this unfortunate trend is reversed.”
Institutions that teach the classics are not likely to receive as much support, considering activism seems to be worth more than scholarship these days. As The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper puts it, “Mellon’s funding has amplified a bleak trajectory for the academy.”
The Foundation, under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, shows no sign of slowing down its funding of pernicious initiatives any time soon. But it is, at long-last, facing some scrutiny from its own kind.