The Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP) allots teaching posts at the University to early-career academics in efforts to “bring new critical perspectives on their field” through research that “engages subjects or areas less commonly studied in the field.” The program appointed thirty-two scholars in the last ten years, and twenty-four fellows are employed at UChicago today. The fellowship maintains a faculty conversion rate of 75 percent; at peer institutions like Brown, the equivalent program retains faculty at roughly half the rate.

You may be asking yourself, dear reader, why you should give a damn. The Mellon Foundation is the PPFP’s primary sponsor. It is a philanthropic organization that mistakes covert political advocacy for scholarship and abridges the job of a professor. With grants at virtually every stage of higher education—undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral—the Foundation has shaped who gets to become a professor, in turn shaping the University.

The Mellon Foundation’s history, in brief

Philanthropists Alice Mellon Bruce and her brother Paul Mellon established the Foundation in 1969 in their father Andrew W. Mellon’s name, pooling funds from their own philanthropic foundations. From 1969 to 2023, the Foundation awarded $9.1 billion in charitable grants to “strengthen, promote, and defend the arts and humanities as essential to democratic societies.” In 2025, its endowment measured $7.8 billion. In recent years, the Foundation has reaffirmed a commitment to social justice, as emphasized by Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander, a New York Times bestselling author who held professorships at Smith College and Yale and took the reins in 2018.

The Foundation is the largest private entity funding arts and humanities departments in higher education. The Mellon Foundation has enormous financial and political power over academic institutions, effectively acting as the humanities’ bursar. And UChicago is at the top of the ledger.

From 1970 to 2024, UChicago was the primary recipient of 189 Foundation grants. Grants range from $9,350 to $6 million. Among the most significant donations in recent history are two grants to sustain the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) program ($451,000 to the University in 2017, and $7.3 million to the American Council of Learned Societies in 2022, of which UChicago is a member); and two grants totaling $2.2 million—one in 2013, and one in 2016—supporting PPFP and its predecessor for scholars with “diverse backgrounds and experiences,” totaling $2.2 million. While the Foundation’s funding reaches every nook and cranny of the humanities, these two funding streams are of particular interest to the faculty makeup of the University.

The Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Before the PPFP, there was the Provost’s Career Enhancement Postdoctoral Scholarship (PCEP), which, according to the University, was an initial effort to increase faculty diversity. Precipitated by a $1.45 million Mellon Foundation grant in 2016, the University expanded the PCEP’s size and scope, developing the PPFP.

The program’s structure guarantees professorship upon completion, unlike similar programs at peer institutions such as Brown’s Presidential Postdoctoral Research Associate Program or Penn’s Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities. UChicago’s high conversion rate imposes a unique dynamic upon the University and Mellon: the Foundation has an outsized impact on UChicago faculty demographics, academic subfields, and preferred teaching methods. In the midst of my research, the University password-protected the program’s webpage, denying students access to the comprehensive list of fellows.

Of the fellows that remain at the University, twelve belong to the Arts and Humanities Division, while eleven belong to the Social Sciences Division. The remaining four straddle the Biological Sciences Division and the Divinity School.

Of the thirty-two fellows, twenty-five have a close allegiance to Critical Social Justice in their scholarship. The merits of their scholarship aside, all rally around similar ideological themes. This homogeneity of the Mellon Foundation’s financial influence should be worrying, regardless of ideological content.

To take one prominent example of this influence, Eman Abdelhadi is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and a member of the 2019 PPFP cohort. Alarmingly, while fulfilling this role, she mistakes them for those of a political advocate: “[UChicago] is where I need to build power. This is my best possible structural leverage,” she remarked in 2025.

Abdelhadi receives stellar course feedback across her classes. Her course “Sociology of the Future I” reads: “Beginner course, if you are a liberal seeking to explore leftism this is for you (not a diss/neg., love the prof!).” And another student: “I think this course is a good crash course for liberals trying to learn about leftist politics.” Despite the positivity, one student noted that “the week on indigenous futurism, where we read poetry and speech” wasn’t terribly useful, as “the class activity (we had a whole class period talking about Trump’s plan on Palestine) was disconnected from the readings.”

The Kalven Report says it is the individual professor’s responsibility to act as the “instrument of dissent and criticism.” However, I would argue that Abdelhadi is not the dissenter she thinks. In a landscape where the Foundation’s wallet sustains the liberal arts, she has the upper hand of financial and moral authority. Her students’ feedback reflects her approach to teaching, one that mimics the Foundation’s political posture. Of course, not all fellows share identical ideological convictions, nor have the rest of them gone to trial for alleged felonies.  But the case of Abdelhadi demonstrates the institutionalization of political objectives at the University. No matter their slant, when an outside, private organization begins to manipulate faculty hires by financial incentive, the University’s autonomy and ability to protect academic freedom diminish.

The consequence of a private monopoly on humanities funding has been a massive national confusion of political posturing under the guise of scholarship. Institutions seem powerless to stop this posturing, lest they lose millions of dollars in grants that fund $590,000 of graduate student internships; $100,000 of research awards at the Crown School; and $3 million in support of career exploration opportunities for PhD students. The University of Chicago is in no position to refuse a helping hand. The Mellon Foundation has its arm outstretched—but at what cost?