As a teacher and sometime scholar of the Humanities and a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), I found myself interested and agitated by Tyler Harper’s article in The Atlantic that questions the current state of funding for research in the Humanities because of the philosophy of its biggest funder (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/mellon-foundation-humanities-research-funding/685733/). He offers several controversial and inadequately-argued perspectives.
The status and funding problems of the Humanities are sadly not new concerns, and the article starts off discussing an influential 1964 Humanities report documenting what it called at that time a crisis. On the one hand, it called for a publicly funded national foundation; but at the same time, it raised concerns about the risk such a fund would have in being influenced by political winds. It thus also called for a safeguard of supplemental funding by non-governmental, ideologically diverse donors. In the year after the report the NEH was established; and in subsequent years multiple foundations supplemented these government funds.
Alas, however, the Humanities situation has only gotten worse. NEH influence and government funding have greatly decreased over the years, and now the only major non-governmental group that funds the Humanities is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. That gives title to the article in The Atlantic: “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities.” The thrust of the article is not about the appalling deficiency of funding for the humanities, but rather about the power wielded by the Mellon Foundation being a danger to the Humanities because of its funding guidelines.
According to the article, up to about five or so years ago, this foundation provided funds for the strengthening of Humanities programs and a broad range of research. But then it took a different turn to social-justice work. As the then new director said, “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.”
The author sees this turn of events as very pernicious. His take is that it is a woke agenda. He debunks the partisan idea that the Humanities has gone broke because it went woke: it became woke, he argues, to avoid going broke, taking advantage of the financial lifeline offered by the Mellon Foundation. His bottom line, though, is his assumption that a focus on social justice equates to a woke focus. He does reference some bizarre funding examples that would support such a generalization, but the generalization itself is just asserted and not defended.
The question that screams for attention now becomes, Does a social justice agenda necessarily support advocacy rather than pure research that leads to truth and new knowledge?
But this is an important issue. The author takes a derogatory term invented by right-wing MAGAs, who sometimes seem to operate as though the ordinary exercise of compassion and the golden rule are woke, to bring suspicion, in effect, to any research project undertaken with Mellon funds.
But his real target is not wokeism itself. It’s the fact that wokeism to him equates to advocacy versus wisdom. He further adds, “the humanities are seen not as having intrinsic worth, but as valuable only insofar as they can be of service to a cause.” Thus, research projects funded by the foundation are of questionable worth from the political and intellectual perspective.
The question that screams for attention now becomes, Does a social justice agenda necessarily support advocacy rather than pure research that leads to truth and new knowledge? Such a generalization is insupportable. It does occur when advocacy replaces the search for truth and careful scholarship. However, nothing in a research project that tackles some form of social justice requires one to abandon the norms of scholarship.
If the Mellon Foundation is allowing research to be corrupted in this way, that is a serious breach; but the author makes no attempt to prove such a position. He would be on more solid ground if he made a more pedestrian argument: The funding for the Humanities is grossly deficient, and the fact that most of it comes from one foundation which is looking to fund research in a particular area of the humanities is unfortunate because there no significant funding for research in other areas of the humanities. Although social justice is a broad term that, depending on definition, can encompass a great deal, it by no means encompasses the whole of humanities. And I do think the humanities would be benefited by more eclectic approaches.
In any case, what the author does do in his piece is to create doubt about the intellectual integrity of the Mellon Foundation. For that we need full documentation and more specificity in definitions of terms. As it stands, the article is an unfortunate and misleading exercise in unethical reputational damage.