Nonprofit organizations have spent over $19 million pushing radical ethnic studies initiatives at universities across the country since 2020, encouraging educators to teach concepts like “drag pedagogy” and “whiteness as property,” a watchdog organization found.
Organizations like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have spent millions to help universities launch ethnic studies courses, according to a new report from Defending Education shared with The Daily Wire. At least 55 institutions across 19 states now have ethnic studies programs or initiatives, according to the report.
That’s thanks to groups like the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and William T. Grant Foundation, which have each given $1 million since 2020. The Spencer Foundation has given $384,225, and the WK Kellogg Foundation has given $250,000. All told, leftist nonprofits have given $19,289,825 towards ethnic studies programs, the Defending Education study found.
The Mellon Foundation was established in 1969 to “strengthen, promote, and defend the arts and humanities as essential to democratic societies,” while the Hewlett Foundation was founded in 1966 by Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard.
Donations from these organizations have gone to institutions from coast to coast, including many in California, where ethnic studies is set to soon be a graduation requirement for high schoolers.
“It has become increasingly clear that leftwing activists inside the universities, with financial support from nonprofits, are advancing far-left ideologies and social justice activism into K-12 education through ethnic studies,” Defending Education director of research Rhyen Staley told The Daily Wire.
“American youth deserve a top-notch education that verifiably improves mastery of reading and math, not indoctrination and activist training for far-left causes,” he added.
In some cases, these grants have brought entirely new left-wing departments to universities.
For example, the Mellon Foundation gave the City University of New York (CUNY) a $3 million grant in 2020 and a $5 million grant in 2023 for the “development of ethnic studies” across the system. The 2023 grant was used to create New York’s “first dedicated graduate degree program in Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies (BRES).”
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When the program was introduced, then-university Executive Vice Chancellor José Luis Cruz said that the school wanted “to return Ethnic Studies to its radical roots.” Cruz, now the president of Northern Arizona University, was credited by the university with securing the initial funds from the Mellon Foundation.
“The Mellon Foundation’s visionary commitment to Black, Race and Ethnic Studies at CUNY sets a high standard for transformative philanthropy. Without their timely and generous support, the dynamic and innovative work across CUNY’s 25 campuses would not have been possible,” a university handout said.
The program offers a doctoral fellowship supporting research focusing on race, sexuality, intersectionality, decolonial studies, and social justice, and is pushing for the “decolonization” of curriculum across the university system.
“To decolonize the curriculum, empower CUNY faculty, and maintain high intellectual standards, BRESI awarded grants to update existing courses or create new ones, leveraging the extensive curriculum transformation expertise within CUNY,” according to a printout from CUNY.
Projects funded by BRES include “No Justice, No Peace: U.S. Third World Student Movements’ Radical Challenge to Reading for Tolerance,” “Addressing Racism on Campus with Restorative Practices,” “Cripping the Curriculum: A Call for a Paradigm Shift Toward Decolonizing the Public University,” “Accounting Program DEI Accelerator,” and many more along similar lines.
Another university that has benefited from dollars from the Mellon Foundation is the notoriously liberal University of California, Berkeley. In 2023, the school received a $100,000 grant for the Chicanx Latinx Studies Program within its ethnic studies department, and another $100,000 grant for the department as a whole.
Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Department is one of the creators of the UC Berkeley High School Ethnic Studies Initiative, which is developing a curriculum for high schools to use once ethnic studies becomes a required class. The initiative created “a curated collection of materials designed to support students and instructors in preparation for the rollout of California’s high school Ethnic Studies graduation requirement.”
Resources in the hub include things like “Drag Pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood,” the “10 Step Guide for Designing Political Graphics,” “Abolition Feminisms,” “Black Marxism,” and “Whiteness as Property.”
In Massachusetts, Salem State University received $3 million “to support the establishment of a national network of regional comprehensive universities that develop undergraduate-focused digital humanities with an emphasis on ethnic studies and community engagement.”
The money is going toward the creation of a project called the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium to create online courses “to turn public attention to issues such as anti-Black racism, settler colonialism and xenophobia.” A spokesman for the university said that the program is “active and expecting to complete its work soon.”
Cal State University Monterey received a $384,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation, which the university told The Daily Wire “supports curriculum development for high schools in our local community.” The Spencer Foundation is an organization that funds research on education and related topics.
Defending Education warns that this university-wide push for ethnic studies will embed itself at the high school and elementary school level as future teachers are trained in activism and universities provide resources for schools to incorporate left-wing politics into their courses.