About Andrew W. Mellon
Andrew William Mellon was born in Pittsburgh on March 24, 1855, and died on August 26, 1937. In the years between, he built great American industries, served eleven years as Secretary of the Treasury, and gave the United States its national art museum. He asked that none of it bear his name.
Mellon learned banking at his father's side and turned the family house, T. Mellon & Sons, into one of the country's strongest banks. He did not chase quick returns. He backed able men and new technology, and he held for the long term. He financed the process that became the Aluminum Company of America. He helped found Gulf Oil. He put capital behind Koppers, Carborundum, Union Steel, and more. Where others saw risk, Mellon saw the machinery of a rising nation, and he funded it.
He believed in that machinery as a matter of principle. To Mellon, lightly taxed and freely invested capital was not a privilege for the few. It was the engine that lifted wages, built cities, and paid for everything else. He made that case not as a slogan but as a practitioner who had built the thing he defended.
The Treasury. From 1921 to 1932, Mellon served as Secretary of the Treasury under three presidents: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The wits of the day said that three presidents had served under him. His program, the Mellon Plan, rested on three pillars: reduce the debt, reduce tax rates, and balance the budget. He cut the top income tax rate from 73 percent to 25 percent. He paid down roughly a third of the national debt. Revenue rose rather than fell, and the wealthy paid a larger share of it, not a smaller one. Admirers called him the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton. In 1932 he closed his public service as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's.
His integrity, tested. In 1934, political opponents in the Roosevelt administration pursued Mellon for tax evasion. A grand jury refused to indict him. The matter was carried to the Board of Tax Appeals, which ruled months after his death that he had committed no fraud. He was cleared. What is easy to forget is what he was doing while the government hounded him: quietly preparing the largest private gift the American people had ever received.
The National Gallery of Art. On December 22, 1936, Mellon wrote to President Roosevelt and offered the nation his art collection, the money to build a gallery for it on the Mall, and an endowment to sustain it. He attached one condition. In his own words, the building "shall not bear my name, but shall be known as 'The National Gallery of Art.'" His reasoning was deliberate. A gallery named for one man would be one man's monument, and other great collectors would keep their treasures at home rather than add them to a rival's shrine. A gallery named for the nation would belong to the nation, and others would give. He was right. Kress, Widener, Dale, and more followed his lead, and the Gallery became what he intended: not a Mellon monument, but a national one.
He did not live to see it open. Andrew W. Mellon died in August 1937. The National Gallery of Art opened its doors on March 17, 1941. It still does not carry his name, because he asked that it never would.
That refusal is the heart of this website. Mellon trusted institutions to outlast the people who built them, and he trusted the country to steward what he gave it. The sections that follow ask whether the institution now carrying his name has honored that trust.
The Harm Done in His Name
First, the history. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was not created by Andrew W. Mellon, and he never directed a dollar of it. It was formed in 1969, thirty-two years after his death, when his children, Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce, merged their two personal charities, the Old Dominion Foundation and the Avalon Foundation, and named the result in honor of their father. Its charge was to strengthen the arts and the humanities. For decades, it did exactly that, funding libraries, languages, archives, tenure lines, and graduate study, and building JSTOR, the research database that scholars everywhere now rely on. It largely avoided controversy.
Then the mission changed. In 2018, Elizabeth Alexander became the Foundation's president. She announced that the Foundation would judge every grant through the lens of "social justice." In June 2020, it made this its whole purpose, calling the shift "a major strategic evolution" and pledging to prioritize "social justice in all of its grantmaking." In her own words: "There won't be a penny that is going out the door that is not contributing to a more fair, more just, more beautiful society." Today the Foundation gives roughly half a billion dollars a year and is the largest single funder of the humanities in the United States, larger than the federal government's National Endowment for the Humanities.
Andrew W. Mellon believed in the free enterprise that built America and in institutions that rise above the politics of the moment. The list below is a record, drawn entirely from public reporting and the Foundation's own words, of what is now funded under his name. Readers may judge for themselves whether he would recognize it, or want his name upon it. We hold that he would not.
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It rewrote its mission around one political creed.
A foundation built to defend the arts and humanities as ends in themselves now treats them as instruments of a single, contested political program. Its president has said plainly that not "a penny" leaves the door without advancing that vision, and that every grant is weighed through the lens of "social justice." Scholarship for its own sake, the very thing the humanities exist to protect, is no longer the point.
Sources: Mellon Foundation; Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic, March 2026; John D. Sailer, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 6, 2026.
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It spent a half-billion dollars to reinterpret the nation's monuments.
The Foundation's flagship "Monuments Project" launched in 2020 at $250 million and was later doubled to $500 million, to "reimagine" what America chooses to memorialize. A man who gave his country a national gallery and asked for no monument to himself now has his name on a program built to relitigate the monuments the country already has.
Sources: Mellon Foundation; NPR; Capital Research Center.
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It pays universities to hire by identity.
The Foundation has poured money into faculty-hiring schemes tied explicitly to race and identity. A $5 million grant to the University of Virginia backed a proposal to "double the number of faculty of color at UVA by 2030." It gave $6 million to Wayne State and $15 million to the University of California system to hire faculty. A University of Oregon program promised a pipeline for "Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the professoriate," and reported that "all interviewees identified as" such. Legal scholars quoted in the reporting call these practices a straightforward violation of civil-rights law.
Source: John D. Sailer, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 6, 2026; City Journal.
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It funded the professorship at the center of a research-integrity scandal.
In 2019 the Foundation gave Tufts University $1.5 million to build a new Department of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Its first hire through that grant, with the official title Mellon Associate Professor, was the historian Kerri Greenidge. Her 2022 book The Grimkes was named one of the ten best books of the year by Publishers Weekly, and then unraveled. Several historians pointed to what they described as outright fabrications. An external review commissioned by Tufts found the book contained "multiple errors of fact" and had "failed to give appropriate credit to the work of another." Her publisher pulled the book from sale, the American Historical Association removed her name from its Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, and the New York Times reported that Tufts appears to have dismissed a tenured professor following allegations of research fraud.
Sources: John D. Sailer, UnHerd, July 16, 2026; The Tufts Daily; The New York Times.
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It bankrolled one ideological program across sixteen universities at once.
In January 2021 the Foundation launched its "Just Futures Initiative," giving $72 million to sixteen universities, up to $5 million each. The funded project titles tell the story: Columbia's "Racial Justice and Abolition Democracy," the University of California, Berkeley's "Black Studies Collaboratory," the University of Texas at San Antonio's "Democratizing Racial Justice," Penn's "Dispossessions in the Americas." The Foundation described the aim as "solutions-based work that contributes to public understanding of the nation's racist past." This is not a scattering of small grants. It is a coordinated attempt to set the direction of the humanities at sixteen institutions in a single stroke.
Sources: Mellon Foundation; Philanthropy New York.
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It funds activism and calls it scholarship.
The grants speak for themselves. $8 million to a "Visualizing Abolition" project that argues for eliminating prisons. $5 million to a University of Texas at San Antonio program whose fellows described their aim as to "decolonize education" and dismantle "capitalism and heteronormativity." A grant to help a Portland State department become more "ungovernable." Grants for "Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism," for correcting a music curriculum's "Western European biases," and for a Colorado College overhaul that opened by confessing "the myriad ways in which white supremacy has shaped our institution." These are the Foundation's own funded descriptions, not a critic's paraphrase.
Sources: Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic, March 2026; John D. Sailer, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 6, 2026; City Journal.
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It funds a rewriting of the American story.
The Foundation's "National Monument Audit" faulted the nation's monuments for including too few "U.S.-born Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, or self-identified LGBTQ+" figures, and its grantmaking follows that lens: $15 million to Rutgers to establish an institute for the study of "race and social justice," and $7.5 million to a national African American cultural-heritage fund. Critics argue this trades a common American history for one told through the single frame of identity. Andrew W. Mellon gave the country a gallery meant to hold the whole of Western civilization's achievement. His name now funds an audit of the nation's memory.
Source: Brenda Hafera, The Heritage Foundation, Feb. 26, 2025.
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It funds a campaign against academic freedom, in the name of academic freedom.
In 2024 the Foundation granted $1.5 million to the American Association of University Professors to create a "Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom." Its director stated the aim in his own words: to "strategically map who these [expletive] are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out." The targets are the new civics and classical-education centers at public universities, including the University of Florida's Hamilton School and the University of Texas at Austin's School of Civic Leadership. Reporting indicates a further $10 million was under consideration. A foundation that once built JSTOR now funds efforts to dismantle the scholars it disagrees with.
The pattern runs both ways. In November 2023 the Foundation gave $100,000 to the University of California, Berkeley's Department of African American Studies for a "Banned Scholars Project," a "refuge" that recasts state higher-education reforms as "persecution, censorship, intimidation, and silencing." The Foundation funds one side of the campus fight while calling its own side neutral defense.
Sources: City Journal; Mellon Foundation.
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It steers the next generation before they choose.
In 2022 the Foundation ended its Dissertation Completion Fellowship, which had funded scholars across every field with no political test. It replaced it with a "Dissertation Innovation Fellowship" designed, in its own guidelines, "to intervene" early in a student's path. By one count, all forty-five of the 2025 awardees work on identity, social, or environmental justice. When a single funder this large decides which questions may be asked, the humanities do not broaden. They narrow.
Source: Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic, March 2026.
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Confronted with all of it, the Foundation says it sees nothing wrong.
None of this is an oversight the trustees can quietly correct. Asked directly, the Foundation defends every part of it. In August 2026 its own program director for higher learning wrote that Mellon "stand[s] solidly behind" this work "as social justice endeavors," and dismissed those who call it activism as trying "to undermine the work." That is the whole reason this letter exists. An institution that sees no fault in what it has done will not reform itself. It has to be asked, in public and by name, to stop, or to take Andrew W. Mellon's name off the door.
Source: Phillip Brian Harper, Program Director for Higher Learning, Mellon Foundation, Inside Higher Ed, Aug. 3, 2026.
Full source list
- Tyler Austin Harper, "The Plot Against the Humanities," The Atlantic, March 2026. Link
- John D. Sailer, "The Mellon Foundation's Idea of 'Social Justice,'" The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 6, 2026. Link
- Multiple reports, City Journal (scholar-activist pipeline; humanities and social justice; UT San Antonio; civics in schools). Link
- "A Conversation with John D. Sailer," The Giving Review. Link
- "The Mellon Foundation's Monumental Metamorphosis," Capital Research Center. Link
- Brenda Hafera, "The Mellon Foundation's Assault on American History," The Heritage Foundation, Feb. 26, 2025. Link
- John D. Sailer, "Sacked Tufts Professor Was Funded by Mellon Foundation," UnHerd, July 16, 2026; "Tufts students react to the departure...," The Tufts Daily, Sept. 2026; and reporting in The New York Times on Kerri Greenidge and The Grimkes. Link
- "Mellon Commits a Half Billion Dollars to the Monuments Project," "History and Founders," "Just Futures Initiative," and "Creating a Refuge for Banned Scholars," Mellon Foundation. Link
- "Mellon Awards More Than $72 Million... to Ensure 'Just Futures,'" Philanthropy New York. Link
- Phillip Brian Harper, "With Humanities at Risk, How Mellon Sees Its Role," Inside Higher Ed, Aug. 3, 2026. Link
- Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury (1921–1932), U.S. Department of the Treasury. Link
- Letters on the Gift of an Art Gallery, Dec. 22, 1936, The American Presidency Project. Link
- Portrait: Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress (public domain).
The Appeal
To Kathryn A. Hall, Chair of the Board; to Elizabeth Alexander, President; and to the Trustees of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Margaret Anadu, Paul Farber, Patrick Gaspard, Melissa Gilliam, Thelma Golden, Kelly Granat, Sherrilyn Ifill, Rashid Johnson, Gaurav Kapadia, and Nabiha Syed:
You are the stewards of a great man's name. Andrew W. Mellon built American industry, defended the free enterprise that made the country prosperous, and gave the United States its national gallery on the single condition that it never carry his name, because he believed in the institution above the man.
The Foundation you govern now uses his name for work he would not recognize and, we believe, would find horrifying: the funding of a narrow political creed, of hiring by identity, of activism dressed as scholarship, and of campaigns against the very freedom of inquiry the humanities exist to protect. It is not for us to ask you to abandon your personal convictions. We simply ask you to stop attaching your own beliefs to his good name.
We therefore call on you to do one of two things.
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Reconstitute the board and restore the mission.
Reconstitute the Foundation's board and restructure its mission to align with Andrew W. Mellon's own vision: the disinterested advancement of the arts and humanities as ends in themselves, free of any single political program, and the defense, not the erosion, of open inquiry. Steward his name as he stewarded the nation's gift.
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If you will not, then remove his name.
If you disagree, and intend to continue this work, then change the name of the Foundation so that Andrew W. Mellon's good name is no longer bound to it. By his own actions, he would not have wanted his name attached to any foundation. Call it what it is. Let your vision of your mission stand on its own, without borrowing the authority of a man who would have refused it.
A name is a trust. Honor it, or return it.