To the Editor:
I am grateful to Michael S. Roth for taking the time to read my work, and for sharing his views on what I’ve written. I have admired much of his recent writing on higher education, particularly his eloquent criticism of the threats posed to academic freedom by the Trump administration. He is right that the government’s efforts to influence American universities in a more favorable ideological direction by withholding federal dollars is a form of soft “extortion.” I am surprised, then, that he is not troubled by the Mellon Foundation’s efforts to exert political pressure on American colleges and universities by offering badly needed humanities grants in exchange for ideological conformity.
I am surprised, too, that Roth is more distressed by what he takes to be my mocking tone than he is by what is detailed in my reporting: that scholars, desperate for funding, have had to politically contort their work in a bid to keep their research afloat, and that the many grant administrators I spoke with, some of whom have worked with Mellon for decades, described near uniform concern about Alexander’s leadership and its deleterious effect on the humanities and their own institutions.
As for the comparison Roth draws between myself, a left-leaning black writer whom he disagrees with on matters of educational policy, and the late Republican Senator Jesse Helms, a notorious anti-black segregationist, I’ll simply note: The Mellon Foundation provided Wesleyan $1 million for “interdisciplinary leadership training” in “antiracism practices” in 2020. I do not believe in these sorts of initiatives myself, but since Roth does, perhaps if any of that money is left over, he can use it on a racial sensitivity consultant.
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more.