by Frank Holmes, reporter
Although President Donald Trump wants to root left-wing ideology out of the nation’s universities, college campuses are more Woke than ever. If you want to know who’s to blame for the anti-American, anti-Western, pro-“diversity” propaganda in your child’s college curriculum, thank the Obamas’ best friend.
One of the Obama family’s chums has taken over a tax-exempt foundation that hands out more than half a billion dollars a year in grants, forcing colleges that want its money to inject left-wing ideology into their “entire general education program.”
A nearly 6,000-word essay for The Atlantic, written by a liberal former environmental studies professor named Tyler Austin Harper, records the hijacking of the foundation through interviews with 20 people.
It began in March 2018, when the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation named Elizabeth Alexander its new president. Alexander is the daughter of a former secretary of the Army who grew up in elite institutions and became a close friend of Barack and Michelle Obama. The Obamas named Alexander the “poet laureate” whose poem “Praise Song for the Day”—which she recited at Obama’s first inauguration in 2009—told America to “love with no need to pre-empt grievance,” that is, keep on hating America out of “love.” Her brother, Mark Alexander, served on Obama’s first transition team.
As soon as she took over the Mellon Foundation, Harper writes, Elizabeth Alexander immediately “remade Mellon according to her values” by “wielding more top-down bureaucratic control” and “pushing the foundation to become ever more devoted to a narrow conception of progress.”
Like other tax-exempt foundations, Mellon—founded by the children of industrial magnate Andrew Mellon, a conservative Republican—was already Woke. In 2016, it funded Columbia University’s “Facing Whiteness” project. But once the Obamas’ buddy took the reins, she put it into overdrive.
In June 2020, Alexander announced the foundation would undergo “a major strategic evolution” and begin “prioritizing social justice in all of its grantmaking.” From now on, “There won’t be a penny that is going out the door that is not contributing to” her left-wing vision, she said.
The list of grants Alexander approved “reads like conservative satire,” wrote Harper.
That includes $1 million for the University of Kansas to promote transgenderism and “create a more trans-liberatory local and regional landscape.”
A Mellon grant to the University of California at Davis’ Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies went to create a working group on “Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism.”
Mellon awarded Portland State University’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department money to become “ungovernable” and create a “queer and feminist resistance.”
Another million asks Princeton and Brown academics to use “critical race approaches” to teach the classics.
MIT received half a million dollars to remove “Western European biases” from classical music, a Western European form of music.
Alexander wants to turn students into social justice warriors—and not just in the humanities. The Obamas’ friend aims to radicalize every student, in every major, on every campus in America.
Mellon’s Humanities for All Times project states that “today’s humanities undergrads are tomorrow’s social justice leaders.” And it encourages colleges seeking its funds to begin “revising an institution’s entire general education program.” That is, every course, for every area of study, has to teach CRT, transgenderism, anti-Americanism, the 1619 Project, and more.
Mellon gave $1 million to Colorado College after it promised to recognize “the myriad ways in which white supremacy has shaped our institution” by founding “at least 50 new and relevant courses” to “empower students to be changemakers.”
The college held a conference to look into how “humanities contribute to anti-oppressive work,” “dismantle systems of oppression,” and “advance liberation.”
Mellon also replaced a more typical humanities fellowship with its Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, so people raised in “historically underrepresented” minority groups “can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.”
Like her friends and mentors, the Obamas, Alexander has made out like a bandit. Alexander’s salary at Mellon totals $1,528,343 in direct compensation and $672,785 in other compensation. “I have no objection to poets making rookie-NFL-player money,” wrote Harper, “but it does make all of the social-justice posturing a little more comical.”
“Alexander’s appointment to Mellon also speaks to another trend I’ve observed within wealthy liberal institutions, in which people of color from unusually privileged backgrounds are anointed as standard-bearers for a radical cultural worldview that many working-class minorities do not share—even as the former are ostensibly intended to ‘represent’ the latter,” added Harper.
She’s also surrounded herself with a whole team that thinks the same way. Phillip Brian Harper, the foundation’s program director for higher learning, wrote an editorial in 2022 titled “Studying Humanities Can Prepare the Next Generation of Social Justice Leaders.”
They’ve remade academic funding so completely that professors told Harper they have started throwing left-wing, equity-focused “social justice” concepts into their grant proposals as bait.
Alexander probably didn’t have to push colleges too far to display full-blown, far-Left bias.
Almost every dollar Ivy League professors give to politicians—96 percent—go to Democrats, according to The College Fix.
More than 80 percent of Harvard faculty identify as “liberal” or “very liberal,” according to a survey conducted by the college newspaper, The Crimson.
Democrats outnumber Republicans on Yale University’s faculty 28 to 1.
But Alexander doesn’t intend to stick with just academia.
Just before the 2020 riots, Alexander had Mellon launch a five-year project to lay the groundwork for tearing down America’s historical monuments. The $250 million-plus Monument Project aimed to target, in Alexander’s words, “all the white men in acts of war on horseback, disproportionately littering the environment.”
In the Summer of George Floyd, rioters did her anti-American dirty work for her.
Alexander has also hoped American leaders will go soft on crime. “Why do we lock up so many people? Why do we lock up more people than anywhere on the planet? Why do we think we are a fully human and humane society, when we do that?” asked Alexander during a 2020 Duke University speech.
Maybe the better question is: Who does Alexander think she is to hope Soros-funded prosecutors will let muggers, rapists, and murderers back out on the streets?
Who do the Obamas think they are to whoop up crowds hellbent on tear down the monuments of American legends—heroes who did more to build this country than all the Marxist professors and feminist lecturers Mellon ever funded combined?
Who do these three leftists think they are to force American kids to spit out the racist, transy, left-wing radicalism that Americans voted out of office in 2024?
There is a real threat to democracy, but it doesn’t come from President Donald Trump. It comes from the Obamas and their well-funded friends.