The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, one of the most prominent donors to the arts and humanities in higher education, has a new leader.
Elizabeth Alexander, an academic and poet, will take the helm of the foundation. Before joining the Mellon Foundation, she served as a professor at the University of Chicago and an administrator at Smith College, helped rebuild the program in African-American studies at Yale University, and was director of grants in journalism, arts, and culture at the Ford Foundation. Alexander will be the first woman to lead Mellon.
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The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, one of the most prominent donors to the arts and humanities in higher education, has a new leader.
Elizabeth Alexander, an academic and poet, will take the helm of the foundation. Before joining the Mellon Foundation, she served as a professor at the University of Chicago and an administrator at Smith College, helped rebuild the program in African-American studies at Yale University, and was director of grants in journalism, arts, and culture at the Ford Foundation. Alexander will be the first woman to lead Mellon.
Last September the foundation announced that Earl Lewis, the current president, would leave the position in March 2018 after five years at the top of the philanthropic organization.
Advocates for the humanities have been increasingly worried about their role in society. Recent federal budget proposals from the Trump administration have suggested slashing funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities — or cutting the programs altogether.
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The Chronicle spoke with Alexander about her plans, making a traditionally opaque organization more accessible, and how the humanities could help connect people. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. What are some of your goals for continuing momentum and building upon the work that the Mellon Foundation has done in recent years?
A. Well, first, I plan to listen and learn. The program that everybody I know in academia knows very well is the Mellon Mays fellowship, which is the finest program there is for bringing people of color — and people who have not had access to higher education — all the way through the Ph.D. And that was also my primary involvement with Mellon. And while at Ford, I worked on some initiatives with some wonderful arts colleagues. But beyond that, there’s still a lot that I need to learn and to figure out together with the staff, and what it is we want to do, so I’m not laying out a foreign program.
Q. You mentioned the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Will increasing diversity to potentially expand the pool of grantees and amplify minority voices be a primary focus of yours?
A. Earl Lewis, the current president, who is a leader in the academy on diversifying the professoriate — and a legend in that regard — has really brought that focus and concern to his work at Mellon. My own commitments to diversity are lifelong and generation-long. The work of equal access and civil rights is the work of my family for generations. And anybody who knows me knows that that’s what I try to do wherever I go. So it will be exciting to work together and think about ways to further that work from the Mellon point of view.
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Q. One of the historical criticisms of the Mellon Foundation is that it has been opaque in its grant process. What are some of your goals for being more accessible?
A. One of the ways that I operate is by making partnerships. And there is a de facto public aspect about partnership, and the way in which, with wide networks, you find who has common interests and together think about how we might push those goals forward. Some of that work, for example, with the Ford Foundation, was codesigning the Art for Justice Fund, which brought together the arts and criminal-justice reform in order to seriously address the problem of mass incarceration. And we did that on behalf of Agnes Gund, a philanthropist, who wanted some of the good thinking at Ford to help her design that fund.
So bringing wonderful ideas into the light both in the process and then as they become more formalized is the way that we can understand that philanthropy is not just about, you know, sending checks, but it’s also about amplifying ideas.
Q. The Mellon Foundation is one of a few major donors to the humanities. And with proposals constantly in the works to cut funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities, what are some of the ways you hope to pick up the mantle of leadership in the area?
A. Not to say this in a grandiose way, but I think Mellon already considers itself to be the leader in this regard. And so, from that position, what that means is that the responsibility is not just about where the dollars go, but it’s also about convening power. It’s about — I won’t call it moral authority — but, being in a position where you can bring folks together and not only pool their resources, but to pool their brainpower. And in an even more powerful way be the ones who are helping to explain why this humanities and arts and culture are tools for living. Why art can help us feel, know, see, understand, and learn about what it is to be someone else. That the power of art, humanities, and culture is something that should be shared and something that human beings should not have to live without.
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And so it’s in that, I would even call it warrior spirit, that I will lead us forward because it’s exciting to be able to share this power and beauty.
Q. I’ve read your poetry — and one in particular, “Race,” stuck out to me. Particularly because a huge question for people nowadays is how to get people to understand differences and each person’s unique experience as a part of the broader American experience. So my final, big-picture question for you is: How do you hope to use the Mellon Foundation to enhance the American experience through the humanities?
A. Oh wow, that’s a big and wonderful question. One way of describing all of my work, both as a teacher, as a department and community builder, and as a writer and imaginative thinker, is that as an Americanist, I am interested in advancing the most complex ideas of who we are at the point of intersection. Each of us has very, very rich and complex experiences — and certainly for African-Americans, so much of our complexity has been flattened by stereotypes. So it is the deep reading of scholarship and archival work, among other things, that has enabled me to say: Look at all of this there is that is fascinating and rich about these complicated people who sit at the center of the American experience, right?
And what is unique about the humanities is that depth of study, the ability that the humanities gives us to hold complex and sometimes seemingly contradictory ideas, to be able to also know that what’s right in front of you might not be everything that there is to find, that’s a way of living and being in the world. And similarly, with art and with culture, that is one of the ways that we learn about experiences that are not our own is by that power exposing us.
When you take in other people’s complexity and then marry it, if you will, with our own understanding of ourselves and realize that we don’t want to be all one thing, we are many things. And that’s what’s beautiful about the American story.
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The humanities and arts and culture give us the best tools that I know, with my particular angle on the world, of how to enrich our communities.
Adam Harris, a staff writer at The Atlantic, was previously a reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education and covered federal education policy and historically Black colleges and universities. He also worked at ProPublica.