Mellon Foundation: Too Insular, Too Rich, Too Dogmatic

With $8 billion in the bank, it does some good but funds too many left-wing manias.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw The Passions of Paul Mellon: Horses, Art, and Philanthropy, a very good exhibition at the Museum of Racing in Saratoga. It hit me there that I hadn’t written about the Mellon Foundation in a while. With an $8 billion pot of cash, Mellon is one of the biggest culture foundations in America and the world.

It was established in 1969 “to strengthen, promote, and defend the arts and humanities as essential to democratic societies.” Paul Mellon and his sister, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, formed it by consolidating their two foundations. Mellon is named for their father, Andrew Mellon, the titan whom Warren Harding called “the financier of the universe.”

What’s the Mellon Foundation up to? Seems like the good, the bad, and the ugly.

First, I looked at Mellon’s tax return for 2022, the most recent one it’s filed, which is on its website. Elizabeth Alexander, Mellon’s president, made $1,161,595, plus a $125,000 expense account. This is in line with pay for other high-flying, behemoth-endowment culture foundations, sad to say. I know I’m parsimonious and a bit of a puritan, but nonprofits shouldn’t be providing their head honchos a flight path to Easy Street.

Mellon’s money is meant to be spent on causes that are worthy and needy. A foundation isn’t a charity, but it supports charities. Foundation bosses should be paid enough to support a comfortable but modest lifestyle, to they keep their perspective aligned with reality. “We won’t be able to recruit the best,” they cry, tears irrigating acres. Hold your horses. People will do it for the power. Million-dollar salaries gut altruism. They’re a one-way ticket to a ride on the high horse of hubris. Since Mellon’s income is tax-exempt, the government ought to cap salaries to, let’s say, $400,000, which is what President Biden makes. I’d throw in a cabana at Rehoboth Beach.

My jaw dropped to the bottom of the Valley of Vermont when I saw what Mellon trustees earn. Lucky for me, it’s not mud season. Yes, they get a salary, which nonprofits have to disclose. “Trustees provide an average of 3–5 hours per week attending meetings and providing services to the foundation in advance of and between meetings,” Mellon’s tax return reports. The board chairwoman, Kathryn Hall, made $63,750 in 2022. The dreadful Heather Gerken, dean of Yale Law School and notorious for gagging right-of-center students, must have been a trustee officer. She made $48,750, a bit less than the average, full-time salary in Bennington County, where I live along with lots of other proles. All the other trustees made $34,166.

Nice work if you can get it. Most of the trustees at Mellon are millionaires already. They’re all on other boards, and they all have lucrative day jobs. Jonathan Holloway, a trustee, is the president of Rutgers. His base salary is $888,000 a year with a ton of freebies on top of it, among them a house. McKay runs a $40 billion investment fund. At Mellon, “pro bono” seems to be about as abstract and irrelevant as Caesar’s “Gallia est omnis divisa in tres partes” — all Gaul is divided into three parts. I know it’s stocking-stuffer money for them, but nonprofit trustees shouldn’t get paid.

I looked at Mellon’s big projects. It gives around $300 million a year, does lots of multiyear grants, and supports many good causes. It’s establishing a $3 million artist-in-residence program, with space within five housing developments — projects — to help beautify New York City Housing Authority apartment complexes.

The NYCHA is possibly the worst-run agency in New York, so the people living in its buildings need a bright spot in their lives. Another $3 million will be spent public-art initiatives in Boston on the theme of gun violence. The artist Hank Willis Thomas is leading the charge. He did The Embrace, the Martin Luther King memorial, which I liked quite a lot, though few seem to agree with me.

Black-on-black murders, mostly gang-related, kill thousands of young people every year. The dozen or so police shootings per year, out of hundreds of millions of police encounters with the public each year, foment riots and, of course, a legion of race pimps and shake-down artists. “Ho-hum,” our righteous nobs yawn at gang violence. I hope Thomas’s project changes this, though Mellon’s money would be best spent in Chicago, where Mellon, instead, is spending $1.8 million for a memorial to police torture.

Mellon is also doing very good and essential work in supporting artists with disabilities. The foundation gave $6.4 million to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York for a five-year research program on Puerto Rican culture. That’s a ton of money, but why CUNY, and why programs for what Mellon calls “race and body politics” and LGBT activism? Didn’t Hurricane Maria flatten the island in 2017? Aren’t there essential bricks-and-mortar projects for libraries, schools, performing-arts spaces, and art museums there?

When I was at the Paul Mellon show at the Racing Museum, I read a floor-to-ceiling list of all of causes he supported. Seminaries, gardens, art museums, health care, Shakespeare, music, veterinary education, bricks-and-mortar, rare-book libraries, horses, and scholarship — the depth and breadth astonish. What I see at the Mellon Foundation today is a narrow, constipated fixation on race, grievance, fringes, and fads. It’s not promoting self-improvement or opportunity or betterment. A lot of it is junk.

I’ll put aside Andrew Mellon, the foundation’s namesake, the last of the Gilded Age potentates and treasury secretary for Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. He might very well be spinning in his grave as fast as an immersion blender.

An $18 million Mellon grant to colleges for race, gender, and sexuality-studies departments is a waste of money. These departments should be dismantled and their courses blended into traditional departments with established standards. More often than not, they’re dumps for mediocre professors, sinecure seekers, and students who can’t cut it in tougher disciplines. Mellon is pushing California’s sweet-talkin’ high-school ethnic-studies mandate. This mandate is pure poison. It teaches young people new grudges and peddles resentment, guilt, and anger.

In 2020, Mellon committed $250 million — a hefty chunk of dough — to create “a commemorative landscape that venerates and reflects the vast, rich complexity of the American experience.” What stimulated the appropriation, the biggest in Mellon’s history, were to-dos over Confederate monuments. Part of the money funded Monument Lab, a nonprofit public-art, history, and design studio in Philadelphia whose goal is to purge monuments that “reinforce systems of injustice, haunt our present, and impact our individual and collective futures.” Monument Lab was charged with inventorying and, I imagine, targeting unwoke monuments.

At the time, I wrote that this isn’t a bad idea, though there were many more worthwhile ways that arts groups could spend $250 million. Undazzled by my 24-carat gold advice, Mellon’s board late last year doubled it to $500 million. That’s an abuse of philanthropy, especially since monument hysteria, like most fads, seems to have faded.

What has this money funded so far? A few months ago, I reviewed Kerry James Marshall’s new and Mellon-funded stained-glass windows at the National Cathedral and found them insipid. In a show of mind-blowing chutzpah and self-flattery, one of Alexander’s poems — recall that she is the president of the Mellon Foundation — is carved into the wall beneath them. Last year, Mellon spent $5 million to move a 28-ton red quartzite boulder of religious significance to the Kaw Nation, an Oklahoma and Kansas tribe with about 4,000 members. That’s a lot of money to move a rock.

There’s a monument to Emmett Till in the works and another about Japanese-American incarceration during World War II. Mellon spent $4.5 million for temporary, pop-up memorial artworks on the Washington Mall. I saw some of them. They were colorful. One was artsy playground equipment. Another was a bell-ringing sculpture. I liked Vanessa German’s Marian Anderson sculpture, made of steel, resin, bottles, lilies, and photographic murals. They were ephemera, and I doubt many visitors got the point, much less developed a reflective state of mind.

My own humble opinion is that we Americans have too many monuments. Many evolve into perches for incontinent pigeons. We’re a very “now” people. The Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial and the Cenotaph in London still move the head and heart. Few other monuments do. Time obliterates old memories as it enthrones shiny new ones, leaving old memorials as background noise or, worse, as moral cogs.

Paul Farber, Monument Lab’s director, is a new Mellon trustee. I asked the foundation whether or not Monument Lab is still getting Mellon checks. No response, which I take to mean “yes.” If so, isn’t this a conflict of interest? The option to recuse might very well exist, but the problem, regardless of Mellon’s ethics policy, is that Farber is on the payroll. Monument Lab is entwined with a $500 million grant. He’s captured.

Who else is a Mellon trustee, aside from Farber, Hall, who is the chairwoman, the odious Gerken, and the president of Rutgers? There’s Maryana Iskander, former COO of Planned Parenthood and head of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Melissa Gilliam, the new president of Boston University. Thelma Golden, whom I like, is the director of the Studio Museum. Sherrilyn Ifill was once the head of the NAACP legal-defense fund. Hall is deeply involved in “climate solutions.” She’s the co-chair of Galvanize Climate Solutions, an investment firm based on the ESG — environmental, social, and governance — framework. There are billions to be made from throttling our industrial economy and impoverishing working-class Americans, all in pursuit of fake science.

Half the board is black. I couldn’t care less, but we’re dealing with people who see race as talismanic. Most are nonprofit executives and Alexander cronies, which means an enfeebled check on the hired help. Years ago, Gregory Long, director of the New York Botanical Garden, was renowned for stacking his board with the of-a-certain-age wives of corporate moguls. He was an expert schmoozer, his trustees weren’t the Einsteins of Carnegie Hill, Chappaqua, and Darien, and their husbands were happy to keep them busy with the azaleas. Museum directors I’ve known put a premium on trustees they knew from college or far-flung trustees who didn’t follow things too closely. At Mellon, paying trustees a bundle also helps keep things in a state of quiescence.

The Mellon board seems very narrow and blinkered, all with boutique, pseudo-Trot beliefs, most enriched by nonprofit work, all with Washington connections, and many, like Alexander, with a Yale background. Her father was the secretary of the Army during the Carter era. She’s a very good poet who chaired Yale’s African-American studies department. I’d suggest a broadening of the board to include three or four longtime National Review subscribers.

The foundation has too much money, though it’s barely in the top 30 richest foundations. Henry VIII, Napoleon, and the Bolsheviks solved their version of this problem by emptying ecclesiastical bank accounts. One day, the federal government will desperately need money and do the same to the foundations. In the meantime, changes in our tax laws can cut them down to size. No one ever envisioned foundations like Soros’s, the Gates’, or the Ford or Lilly Foundations having so much money and so much power.

Much as the Ford Foundation needs to move back to Detroit, Mellon needs to head back to Pittsburgh, a down-to-earth place unlike East 62nd Street in Manhattan, which is, to Mellon’s credit, chic but not a palace. Or, for the epiphany Mellon needs, I’d suggest not Pittsburgh but anywhere else in the same county — Armstrong County, where, in 2020, Donald Trump got 76 percent of the vote. Mountain breezes, open space, commonsense values. It’s inexpensive, too. Its economy, but not its spirit, was devastated by elite indifference, if not contempt. Oh, the teachable moments!