Tangle PREVIEW: SPECIAL EDITION - Ari Weitzman interviews staff writer from The Atlantic Tyler Austin Harper about the Mellon Foundation and higher education.
Mar 10, 2026
Tyler Austin Harper, staff writer at The Atlantic and former college professor, digs into the Mellon Foundation's huge sway over higher education. He traces Mellon's shift toward social justice funding. He explores risks of concentrated private power, debates the role and value of the humanities, and considers paths to broader, more public support for colleges.
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Mellon Remade Humanities Funding
- The Mellon Foundation reshaped humanities funding by narrowing grants to social justice work after hiring Elizabeth Alexander in 2018.
- With an $8 billion endowment and $540M in 2024 grants, Mellon now dwarfs federal NEH funding and steers priorities.
Single Funder Threatens Academic Freedom
- A single dominant private funder can limit intellectual diversity by imposing a narrow ideological bandwidth on research funding.
- Tyler warns this undermines the ideal of freedom of inquiry because Mellon now dictates large swaths of humanities agendas.
NEH Retreat Opened A Private Funding Vacuum
- The NEH was created to avoid a single political control over humanities funding; its retreat created a vacuum filled by private philanthropy.
- Tyler traces this shift to declining federal budgets and a historical blind spot about private rather than governmental domination.