When federal humanities funding wobbled in 2025, the Mellon Foundation was ready.
That year, its annual report says it issued more grants “than in any other year in its history.” After federal cuts hit state and jurisdictional humanities councils, Mellon extended a $15 million “lifeline” to council employees and organizations in all 50 states. It also committed more than $26 million for American museums and $12 million for community-based archives.
Mellon is not a minor donor writing cheques from the margins of academic life. It is one of the most influential private funders of the arts and humanities in the United States. No single entity has a stronger claim to fiscal and cultural sway over the arts– subjects like literature, history, art, religion, and philosophy – than the Mellon Foundation. In 2025, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ budget request included $74.4 million for grant programs. Mellon, meanwhile, issued nearly 650 grants totaling about $540 million in 2024, with an endowment of $7.7 billion.
When one private foundation has that much money in a struggling field, its priorities matter.
And the humanities are struggling. By 2024, humanities degrees had fallen to just 8.4 percent of bachelor’s degrees, its lowest share since comprehensive accounting began in 1987. Almost every humanities discipline awarded fewer degrees in 2024 than twelve years earlier. Departments are losing students, fighting for their budgets, and trying to convince administrators they still deserve to exist.
In that environment, the priorities of an institution offering you money start to look a lot less like preferences than directives.
Mellon’s preferences are blatant enough. In 2020, the foundation announced a “major strategic evolution”: social justice would be at the core of all grantmaking decisions moving forward. For six years, Mellon has emphasized “[working] with colleges, universities, and other organizations that embrace equity in higher learning … with a focus on historically underserved populations,” in pursuit of “an informed, culturally diverse, and civically engaged society.” Mellon’s 2025 grantmaking to efforts like the $500 million Monuments Project, writing fellowships for “writers impacted by the U.S. carceral system,” and public art projects highlighting Black and Filipino communities in Alaska show its commitments are not apolitical patronage.
No one at Mellon needs to frogmarch English or History departments into ideological obedience. The majority of professors already lean leftward ideologically. National surveys indicate that approximately 60% of university faculty identify as liberal or far-left, with “greater shares of left-leaning faculty found in the humanities and some social sciences.” A humanities center or university department looking to scrape up money can see what kind of language and work gets rewarded. The grant guidelines just make the incentives clear.
Mellon has played a large role in making politics the price of admission for the humanities. It did not invent the drive for politicization in the humanities and the arts, but it has shown how politicization becomes deeply embedded. At the end of the day, the institution with the money gets to define the terms of survival.
