Liner Note 47. Did The Atlantic’s Anti-Woke Bias Spoil its Analysis of Humanities Funding Death?

 

East Village on October 31, 2022   

Looks like it.  

There’s some good stuff in Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic article, “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities,” but the piece unravels into a tool of the thing people actually hate about the humanities, which is not its implications for social justice but its civil wars. It blames the increasingly desperate struggles of the academic humanities not on right-wing enemies but on liberal humanists—a woke Mellon Foundation and its president Elizabeth Alexander.

I was one of the people that Harper interviewed for this article.  (Here, “Harper” always refers to the author, Tyler Austin Harper). He was fun to talk with, is a serious person, and worked hard on this piece, all of which I respect.  When we spoke, I emphasized our terrible money problems, which I argued tower over our manageable and ordinary methodological debates.  

 

I said that the real issue is our lack of the funding to produce and disseminate our knowledge at the scale that would get the kind of social attention allotted to medicine and computer science. We may think this is intrinsic to their topics and status but it is mainly the result of their vast organizational labor, labor of a kind that the humanities establishment, Mellon included, refuses to try. 

 

Harper cites my Public Humanities piece on funding—“Humanities Decline in Darkness”-- for a statistic in which federal humanities funding rounds to zero. But you have to get to his third-to-last paragraph before he makes his best causal claim about the current situation: 

The humanities are in the mess they’re in because of federal budget cuts, and because of administrators who care more about the football team than about William Faulkner, and because of the toxic pragmatism of an American culture that has a hard time valuing anything that is not immediately, aggressively useful. But the humanities are also in this mess because those of us who care about them have often preferred hunkering down in a defensive crouch . . . 

 

I would have finished that last sentence by writing, “and so we don’t build the data and resource infrastructure that would make our needs visible to politicians and the public.”  But that’s not where Harper goes.

 

Harper’s other most effective moment comes from Phillip Brian Harper, the Mellon program director for higher learning: 

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change. It’s not to serve in perpetuity as the piggy bank for research.” Mellon, he said, was never supposed to be a panacea for the humanities.

 

 

Great, but who will do the shaking of university management? Mellon? Phil Harper says its role is to catalyze. On this topic, it’s not.  

 

He is of course right that the situation is completely appalling. To repeat, even though sociocultural knowledge is essential to solving any of the world’s epic problems, the rich universities listed below spend almost none of their institutional funds for R&D on non-STEM fields.

 

Figure 1. Institutional Expenditues on R&D, Selected Universities

 

SOURCE: NSF Higher Education R&D Survey (HERD) FY2024, Tables 14, 23, 29.

Yes, these figures likely exclude individual faculty research funds via outside grants, named chairs, and other department-managed funds.  But as indicators of institutional investment in humanities infrastructure, they are shocking. Universities’ own refusal to fund humanities research is also one cause of our society’s inability to deal with its core problems.

 

Yet Harper comes not to bury funding failure but to chastise social justice. The fault for him lies not in Trump’s destruction of the National Endowment for the Humanities or 40 years of right-wing culture wars, but in Mellon’s interest in a better society.

 

∞∞∞

 

Harper makes two main claims. The first is that “classical” and “social justice” scholarship aren’t complementary approaches but rivals. They compete bitterly for scarce and dwindling funds. 

 

The solution to this is obviously an alliance between rivals to fight for massively better funding for all, at least ten times more funding than socio-cultural scholarship has today.  

 

But Harper diverts attention from funding with his second argument: “social justice” research is a betrayal of humanities scholarship, a kind of negation of it. This increase in “the decidedly sublunary work of furnishing political propaganda” makes Harper wonder whether the academic humanities are worth saving at all.  And Mellon, he writes, has shifted to funding this political propaganda since the arrival of Elizabeth Alexander as president.

 

Let’s try to understand this claim. Harper’s evidence for a policy shift is a Foundation announcement dated June 30, 2020. Mellon declared a new focus on “just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking where ideas and imagination can thrive.” Board chair Kathryn A. Hall explained that “our reinvigorated mission and strategic direction . . . not only builds on our historic commitment to the arts and humanities, but rightly emphasizes a desire to make the ‘beauty, transcendence, and freedom’ found there accessible and empowering to all members of society.”  

 

The new direction assumes the complementarity of what we might call “basic” and “applied” humanities research, and not that applied research—addressing social questions—debases basic scholarship.  Complementarity—with awareness of different modes, aims, and questions--is assumed in every STEM field and social science of which I’m aware, so Harper has a special burden to show that the humanities are unlike all other forms of academic research in this way.

 

Alexander confirms complementarity in the announcement by adding, “We are a problem-solving foundation looking to address historical inequities in the fields we fund.” This also expresses reflexivity about Mellon’s own role in knowledge creation, which includes a past of supporting the kind of epistemic biases and limits that need constant correction in every field.

 

The new Mellon direction also seemed to aim at the democratization of humanities knowledge—at taking the results of humanities research outside of a small elite while also learning from communities about their existing knowledges and practices.

 

Harper presumably approves of problem-solving, and he definitely opposes the perpetuation of historical inequities which he agrees exist.  He sounds fine with humanities for the people, which is the official policy of the state humanities councils and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) whose origin story he affirms. He writes,

[U]nder Alexander, the foundation deserves credit for working to create a more economically just landscape within higher education. Before Alexander’s arrival, Mellon tended to disburse lavish funding to institutions that were already rich. Now, as part of Mellon’s commitment to equity, it is making a conscious effort to provide funding to public and less selective institutions. It has also increased funding for university-led prison education programs

 

All true, good, and important.  So what is so bad about Mellon’s new direction?  

 

Nothing, actually. (Its inaction on overall funding is a separate question to which I’ll return)  But to save what must have been the original idea for the story, Harper spends most of the piece making the false argument that “applied” humanities scholarship (not his term) is political propaganda.

 

How does he show this?  First there’s his prior, the false legacy dualism in criticism and some related humanities fields in which the criticism of texts and historical materials (basic) is denatured and corrupted by engaging in criticism of society (applied). It’s this dualism that turns “social justice” into “political propaganda” that ruins scholarship. 

 

This dualism may encourage him to search his anecdotes for polarity. For example, he spoke with a scholar who “confessed that . . .he had reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race; he did win a grant. I suspect that this may not be a rare occurrence.”  Harper’s assumed incompatibility between the first and more race-focused version of this scholar’s work makes this a problem rather than progress. 

 

Second is Harper’s assumption that it’s bad to get steered or shaped by a call’s language or a program officers. There seems to be a tacit idealization of “classical” humanities scholarship as pre-social and not in any good way developed by thinking about problems it might solve, or by being asked to change emphases in a proposal by an agency official.  

 

I see this as a humanities provincialism about sponsored research, which always involves calls, program officers, public pressures, institutional forces and so on.  This is not epistemically less valid than idealized autonomous scholarship. Remember actor-network theory and dozens of related ways of discussing the collaborative nature of thinking.  So the scholar who “reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race” likely improved his project. Program officers at NIH, NSF, and other STEM agencies do this advising routinely.  Agency shaping can be good or bad. 

Harper doesn’t have the evidence to rule out good shaping in that more-race-oriented project or the others. (Gabriella Coleman’s valuable commentary on Harper, “The Exposé that Wasn’t,” is really good on this point.)

 

So it’s not that “social justice” aims are inherently anti-intellectual and ruin scholarship. Better knowledge in many areas can come from working like Pasteur rather than like Einstein, to reference a classic study of the (complicated) relation between basic and applied research.  And it’s also not true that agency shaping is bad per se.   

 

So Harper falls back on a third way of making his claim that woke Mellon is ruining the humanities. That is to scorn sample program language as self-evidently non-scholarly.

Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice.

I assume Harper means this program, run by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).  Awarded titles include the following: 

 

·      The Dam, the Road, the Port: The Transformation of the Brazilian Northeast during the Long Twentieth-Century

·      State of Mine(Mind): Affective Geographies of California's Rural North

·      Urban Tropics: Dwelling under South and Southeast Asian Urban Microclimates

·      Uneasy Intimacies: Seeing Irei and Aesthetic Ambiguity Through Fukunosuke Kusumi's Art

·      Black Anti-settler Placemaking: Cooperation Jackson's Eco-villages from Mississippi to Vermont

·      Fiber Optics: Henequén Classification and its Consequences

·      Troubled Waters : Natural Disaster, Space, and the State in Precolonial Panjab (1707-1849)

 

Check these and the others out for yourself.  They all analyze major issues and strike me as likely to make original contributions to knowledge.  I don’t at all see Harper’s justification for assimilating all the projects to “identity” and “justice” studies. To do this, he needs to stereotype everyone on the basis of the appearance of words like “settler,” “queer,” “colonial” etc. I don’t even see how they’re all applied rather than basic research. He offers no evidence (just the legacy assumption) that these are not intensely scholarly, deeply intellectual projects.

 

At breakfast before drafting this post, I read an interesting review of The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture by Susanna Berger (Princeton University Press, 2025).  “Central to The Deformation,” the reviewer writes, “is the question of how religious elites wielded anamorphosis as a means of gatekeeping the divine.”  I love this kind of stuff. But is a book about the relations among perspective in drawing, theology, and institutional power in 17^th century Europe clearly epistemically “classical”—pure, basic research-- and thus intellectually superior to work on “Affective Geographies of California's Rural North”?  The answer is no. Mellon / ACLS funded research simply cannot and should not be delegitimated with superficial separating of the sheep from the goats.

 

The same goes for Harper’s disdain for a grant to Colorado College.

In the summer of 2023, Colorado College hosted a conference based on this prompt: “How do the humanities contribute to anti-oppressive work, and how can humanities methods—from inquiry and critique to creative production and performance—dismantle systems of oppression, create and sustain community and solidarity, and advance liberation?” It does not seem to occur to those asking such questions that the humanities may not be especially well equipped to “dismantle systems of oppression.” Nor do they seem to consider that what might in fact be most valuable about fields like English, history, and philosophy is that they aspire to stand above the flotsam and jetsam of our immediate circumstances, and instead set their sights on what the classicist Leo Strauss called the “permanent problems” that have troubled human beings from time immemorial.

Harper doesn’t actually know what the conference organizers did and did not consider, but in any case, “how to dismantle systems of oppression” is one of the ‘permanent problems” of human beings. It is also a running theme of literature, history, and philosophy for thousands of years.  One might find the Colorado College formulations a bit plodding and yet not try to discredit the program through a false distinction between intellectual work and its social contributions.

 

I can imagine Harper doing a different kind of research that leads to a different article about the humanities.  He would go to Colorado College, interview the students, staff, and faculty involved in the program, and sit in on its courses for a few weeks while also visiting classes that aren’t part of the program.  He could then compare and contrast and identify the actual cognitive and other effects of the program on the participants. We would all learn something about what actually happens through humanities funding on college campuses to (and by) students and their teachers—for better and worse.  This is the real void in public understanding, and Harper’s dismissal of a program on the basis of its terminology doesn’t help fill it in.

 

So, Mellon’s new direction is less elitist. It puts greater emphasis on “applied” over “basic” research (“Pasteur’s Quadrant”) while insisting on their complementarity (and equal intellectuality). It funds some research on white supremacy and overcoming it--along with funding many other things, and really this funding is a drop in the bucket of overall social need for knowledge about racial nationalism, the authoritarian personality, etc.  Mellon program directors shape applications, as they always have.  They may now fund a higher proportion of outreach and communication programs compared to applied or basic research, but Harper doesn’t get into this important issue.  Finally, Mellon is the last big national funder in research-starved humanities field.  Only the last of these strikes me as a scandal.

 

∞∞∞

 

Daylight does appear when Harper takes the other side of his own argument. 

It is hard to argue that the tens of millions of dollars that Mellon is putting toward internships for working-class kids at public colleges and universities would be better spent financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France. But this calculus also says something about the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods—programs for humanities undergrads, resources for Ph.D. students, traditional humanities research, support for emerging fields and endowment-poor universities—against one another.

Yes, absolutely: we must address with the intent of solving “the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods against one another.”  We must at the same time argue for “financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France.” But it isn’t Elizabeth Alexander or Mellon that set up the zero-sum game. This happens when critics pit different kinds of humanities scholarship against each other.  

 

Mellon et al. didn’t set up the zero-sum funding game.  But what are they doing about fixing it? 

 

I’d trace some of Harper’s completely valid distress about the system to having grown up in this barren funding world where one’s work is always losing out to someone else’s.  The real issue with the humanities’ national leadership isn’t that they politicize scholarship, but that they don’t fight openly and systematically to fund a great deal more of it.  

 

This gets us back to Phil Harper’s statement: 

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change.”

 

But Mellon is not doing that. 

 

I can find reports galore about the crisis in STEM funding—everything from the cuts to indirect cost recovery to the losses of whole areas of research (like racial disparity in public health outcomes that NIH had funded for years) and of scientific personnel. I can find nothing from the humanities associations about their research funding problems.  

 

NEH has been gutted, yet MLA, which did indeed help sue the government over NEH, has joined NHA, AHA, APA et al. in neither collecting data to show the funding problem nor developing a systematic plan for building such funding. 

 

Similarly, the ACLS’s Strategic Framework 2025-2030 doesn’t have a sentence about tracking humanities research funding or expanding it. I see all these great scholars on the board. What are they doing?  What are we actually doing?  Why isn’t something like Figure 1 above on Mellon’s website as part of a large, structural analysis, rather than on the blog of an obscure professor? Universities need to be “taken by the collar.” But who will take the humanities agencies by the collar?

 

None of the solutions are really so abstract anymore.  People here and there have sketched out plans. I outlined one version in a long discussion paper for the MLA Executive Council in 2022, and ended my presidential address in January 2023 with a sketch of the steps we need to take, somewhat expanded in the print version (“Criticism After This Crisis”).  Also in 2022, a sub-committee of the Executive Council developed a reporting structure on cuts (or growth) across the country, planning to use the Association’s large, elected Delegate Assembly to feed information to headquarters for analysis and reporting. The Association never set this up. 

 

Two years went by, and the MLA then set up a panel explicitly about funding at the Convention in January 2025. 

 

Figure 2. MLA Convention Program 2023, Panel 139

 

The panel was an excellent (re)start on the topic, and the panelists had a good planning meeting afterwards.  We outlined NEH, Mellon, MLA, ACLS working together on research data, reporting, development. Then Trump took office and started his attacks. My colleagues bailed on the plan, which as far as I know, is dead.

 

With some discipline, we can replace our historic humanities pastime, discrediting each other’s research, with the project of building a material base for all of it.  If we can’t show basic mutual respect for divergent (and radical) research within the profession, then we are doomed.  But actually we can do this, and many, many of us already are.

 

I again invite both Harpers and everyone else into the effort of building the material base.