The University of Virginia launched a hiring spree in 2020 as it pledged to become “a racial-equity-focused university.” A special initiative promised to recruit 30 postdoctoral fellows and “open the gateway” for them to fill tenure-track jobs. One current fellow’s specialties include “transfeminisms” and “genderqueer life writing.” Another researches how Filipino nurses resist “racial capitalism.”
The program owes its existence to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funded it to the tune of $5 million. With a $7.7 billion endowment, the Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Its annual giving has long dwarfed that of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In recent years, it has been refashioned as a tool for advancing an identitarian vision of social justice. For academia, the consequences are far-reaching.
…..
Students who specialize in intersectional neologisms will be well prepared for Mellon-funded faculty jobs. In 2023, Ohio State put out a job ad for an “Assistant Professor of Black Sexualities,” noting a recent $2 million Mellon Foundation gift that funded 10 new faculty positions. Zalika Ibaorimi, the professor hired for the job, lists “Black Porn” and “Black Sexual Logics” among her areas of expertise.
Mellon has bankrolled many professors notorious for their activism. At the Socialism 2025 conference, Assistant Prof. Eman Abdelhadi referred to her employer, the University of Chicago, as “evil” and a “colonial landlord,” but conceded that working there was useful for political organizing. Ms. Abdelhadi came up through the University of Chicago’s Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, a longstanding Mellon-funded hiring program. A few months after the conference, she was arrested at an anti-ICE protest and charged with two counts of aggravated battery to a police officer. She has pleaded not guilty.
Mellon’s funding has amplified a bleak trajectory for the academy. Today, a young person drawn to traditional fields like military history or classics should think twice before entering academia. A young scholar who “advances an anti-capitalist, prison abolitionist agenda,” as one Ohio State professor puts it, can find abundant support, especially from the Mellon Foundation. Higher education reform will only succeed when this unfortunate trend is reversed.
Dominic Pino tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
Contrary to the popular narrative about the “globalist” Americans and Europeans, it has consistently been the U.S. and the EU that have opposed trade liberalization in agriculture, while Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South American countries have supported it.
The Trump administration has a problem when it comes to the Second Amendment. A large part of its base consists of people who firmly believe in the right to keep and bear arms. But that right, as protected by the Second Amendment, empowers the individual and stands as a challenge to the authority of the state.
This creates an awkward situation for a president and his coterie who don’t like being challenged or even criticized. That’s why we see administration officials arguing in favor of self-defense rights one moment while challenging the right to keep and bear arms at another.
Economist Jagdish Bhagwati has made fundamental contributions to the studies of international trade, tariffs and quotas, and of industrial development. One of his most important contributions on tariffs was to show that when markets suffer from distortions or government policies cause distortions in a domestic economy, tariffs are never the best solution; for any given distortion there is always a domestic policy that is more efficient than tariffs in correcting the distortion. Another important contribution was to show that tariffs and quotas on imports are equivalent only under restrictive assumptions. Bhagwati has written numerous thoughtful defenses of free trade and critiques of protectionist policies. He wrote the entry titled “Protectionism” for this Encyclopedia.
…..
Bhagwati often identified arguments for restricting trade that could be misused by advocates of protectionism. For instance, in discussing economist Laura Tyson’s claim that the U.S. government should protect industries that produced positive externalities, Bhagwati wrote, “But the problem with this is that it is very hard for policymakers, and very easy for lobbyists, to decide which industries have the externalities.” Bhagwati quoted Robert Solow’s statement that although he knew there many industries where there were four dollars’ worth of social output to one dollar’s worth of private output, he didn’t know which ones they were.
