TAU-Affiliated Columbia University's Historical Mellon Foundation Connection Revisited

In January 2020 the former professor of sociology and “Dean of Social Science” at now Tel Aviv University [TAU]-affiliated Columbia University who succeeded Columbia Provost and 2019-2020 Russell Sage Foundation “Olivia Sage Scholar” Katznelson as the Social Science Research Council’s president, Alondra Nelson, became a trustee of the Manhattan-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.


And, by November 2020, Social Science Research Council President and Mellon Foundation Trustee Nelson was also apparently sitting on the board of trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation (where Columbia Provost Katznelson sat between 1992 and 2002)—next to former Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Dean and former Russell Sage Foundation Board of Trustees Vice-Chair Nicholas Lemann.


Coincidentally, between March 5, 2020 and Dec. 11, 2020, the Columbia University and Teachers College of Columbia University “non-profit” institutions on the Upper West Side received 4 “charitable” grants, totaling over $5.7 million, from the “philanthropic” Mellon Foundation, on whose board of trustees the Social Science Research Council president now sat, according to the Mellon Foundation’s website.


On March 5, 2020, for example, the Mellon Foundation gave a tax-exempt grant of $250,000 to Columbia University “to support a New Directions Fellowship for Rhiann Stephens,” who (according to Columbia University’s website) was an “On Leave Associate Professor of History” during the 2020-2021 academic year.


In addition, on Sept. 18, 2020 the Mellon Foundation gave a “charitable” grant of $500,000 to Teachers College of Columbia University “to support a study on guided transfer pathways in the humanities.” And on Dec. 11, 2020, institutionally racist Columbia University was given a “charitable” grant of 5 million dollars ($5,000,000) by the “non-profit” Mellon Foundation for “Racial Justice and Abolition Democracy: An Action Curriculum for a Just Society.”


According to its website, the Mellon Foundation, whose headquarters is located at 140 East 62nd Street (just two blocks south of the Columbia-linked Russell Sage Foundation’s headquarters building on East 64th Street), “was created in 1969 with $273 million in assets.”


Yet despite purportedly being a “non-profit institution, by 1970 the Mellon Foundation “had assets of $700 million” and “by 1980, the last year the Foundation received a payout from Alisa Mellon Bruce’s estate, its assets had grown to $880 million.” In addition, according to the “non-profit” Mellon Foundation’s website, by the end of 2019 “its endowment” now “totaled approximately $6.9 billion."


At the same time, even 7 years after the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation received its payout from Alisa Mellon Bruce’s estate, “much of the Mellon fortune,” was still “in the hands of the six grandchildren of Richard B. Mellon and the three grandchildren of Andrew W. Mellon,” according to Michael Patrick Allen’s 1987 book "The Founding Fortunes: A New Anatomy of the Super-Rich Families In America."


The “stock in the original Mellon companies” owned by the family nearly 20 years after the Mellon Foundation was created was “now worth $1.1 billion” in the late 1980’s; and “in addition,” the Mellon family’s “proceeds from various stock sales” came to “over $3.2 billion, most of this from their Gulf Oil stock,” as well as “$2.1 billion in dividend income” between 1937 and 1987, “from their stocks in Gulf Oil, Aluminum Company of America [ALCOA] and Mellon National alone.” So that, nearly 20 years after the “philanthropic” Mellon Foundation was created, the Mellons were still “worth at least $6 billion [equal to over $13.8 billion in 2021 dollars]," according to the same book.


Mellon Foundation trustees (like Social Science Research Council President Nelson became in 2020) were being paid $20,000 to $25,000 annually by this foundation in 2015, according to the Mellon Foundation’s Form 990 financial filing for 2015-- for the 3 to 5 hours they purportedly spent each week working for this foundation. And according to the same Form 990 financial filing, the then-Mellon Foundation president, Earl Lewis, was paid a total annual compensation of nearly $1 million in 2015, including an expense account of $150,000.


Coincidentally, a Mellon Foundation president in recent years, Elizabeth Alexander, “was the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University from 2015 until joining the Foundation in 2018,” according to the Mellon Foundation’s website. And, not surprisingly, in 2018 and 2019, the “philanthropic” Mellon Foundation gave “non-profit” Columbia University 12 tax-exempt grants, totaling over $9.6 million.


On March 15, 2018, for example, the Mellon Foundation gave Columbia University a “charitable” grant of $1,123,000 for “Establishing a Fellowship Program for Emerging Displaced Scholars at the Columbia Global Center in Amman;” and on May 31, 2018, the Mellon Foundation gave a “charitable” grant of $900,000 to Columbia University “for Liberal Arts Index."


In addition, on Dec. 13, 2018, the Mellon Foundation gave a “charitable” grant of $800,000 to Columbia University for “The Center for Science and Society, Phase II” and a “charitable” grant of $750,000 to Columbia for “The Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University” to do research “on conflict urbanism.”


But between Jan. 1, 2018 and Dec. 31, 2018, the “non-profit” Mellon Foundation also collected over $23.2 million in net dividends and interest from the corporate stocks and bonds it owned of for-profit corporations that exploit workers and consumers; and it also gained $455 million from the sale of some of its over $6 billion in assets during this period, according to its Form 990 financial filing for 2018, while spending over $7.7 million of the foundation’s revenues on paying for “investment management.”


Between Jan. 1, 2018 and Dec. 31, 2018, for example, over $2.4 million was “given” to Silchester International Investors Inc., over $1.8 million was “given” to the General Atlantic Service Company LLC, over $1.3 million was “given” to Wellington Management, over $1.2 million was” given” to JP Morgan Investment Management Inc. and over $880,000 was “given” to Westwood Global Investment LLC, by the Columbia University, Social Science Research Council and Russell Sage Foundation-linked “philanthropic” Mellon Foundation—for “investment management.”


Former Columbia Provost and 2019-2020 Russell Sage Foundation “Olivia Sage Scholar” Ira Katznelson’s successor as Social Science Research Council president, former Columbia Professor of Sociology and “Dean of Social Science” Alondra Nelson, was also “tapped” to sit on the Russell Sage Foundation’s board of trustees (that Columbia Provost Katznelson sat on between 1992 and 2002) in June of 2020—less than 5 months after she was “tapped” to sit on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s board of trustees in late January 2020.


In addition, besides then sitting next to Hall Capital Partners LLC Founder and Co-Chair Kathryn A. Hall, former Tishman Speyer Senior Managing Director Katherine G. Farley, Canyon Partners LLC Co-Founder, Co-Chairman and Co-CEO Joshua S. Friedman and Lone Pine Capital Managing Director and Portfolio Manager Kelly Grant on the Mellon Foundation’s board of trustees, former Columbia Provost Katznelson’s successor as Social Science Research Council president also then sat next to Duke University President Emeritus Richard H. Brodhead and then-Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway on the Mellon Foundation’s board.


And, coincidentally, like institutionally racist and classist Columbia University, both “non-profit” Duke University and “non-profit” Rutgers University were given “charitable” grants in recent years by the “philanthropic” Mellon Foundation—whose board then included a Duke University president emeritus and the then-president of Rutgers University.

Between March 15, 2018 and March 12, 2021, for example, the university that Mellon Foundation Trustee Brodhead was president emeritus of, institutionally racist and classist Duke University, was given 7 grants by the Mellon Foundation, totaling over $5.2 million, including: a “charitable” grant of $698,000 on March 15, 2018 for “Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement;” another “charitable” grant of $3 million ($3,000,000) on March 15, 2018 “to support the Humanities Unbounded Institute;” a “charitable” grant of $630,000 on March 12,, 2021 “to support an intergenerational project archiving and documenting contemporary activism;” and another “charitable” grant of $300,000 on March 12, 2021 “to support a New Directions Fellowship for Tsitsi Jaji” (a then-Duke University Associate Professor of English), according to the Mellon Foundation’s website.


And, after 2018, the university that Mellon Foundation Trustee Holloway was then president of, institutionally racist and classist Rutgers University, was given over $21.2 million by the “philanthropic” Mellon Foundation, including: a “charitable” grant of $300,000 on March 6, 2019 “to support a New Directions Fellowship for Susanna Schellenberg,” a then-Rutgers University professor of philosophy and cognitive science; and a “charitable grant of $15 million ($15,000,000) on Sept. 18, 2020, “to support the establishment of an institute for the advanced study of race and social justice”--which, according to the institutionally racist and classist Mellon Foundation’s then-president, former Columbia University Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities Elizabeth Alexander, purportedly “seeks to resolve global racism and injustice through the power of humanistic inquiry,” rather than through systematic revolutionary institutional change.


But, as a Sept. 24, 2020 Rutgers University press release indicated, this $15 million “charitable” grant from the Mellon Foundation “will support and amplify the scholarship of researchers who are based in the humanities” and “will provide opportunities for Rutgers faculty” at a university whose then-president was then, coincidentally, a member of the “philanthropic” Mellon Foundation board of trustees.


The Manhattan-based “non-profit” Mellon Foundation which, like the Upper West Side-based Columbia University (which is still institutionally affiliated with an Israeli university, Tel Aviv University [TAU], that performs weapons development research for the IDF), still failed to pay a fair share of NYC, state and federal taxes in 2021, also paid total annual compensations to its executives in 2018 that were a lot more than the total annual compensations most essential workers in NYC and the San Francisco/Oakland Bay area were paid in 2018.


According to its Form 990 financial filing for 2018, for example, between Jan. 1, 2018 and Dec. 31, 2018 the “non-profit” Mellon Foundation paid Mellon Foundation Senior Portfolio Manager Monica C. Spencer a total annual compensation of over $993,000 and paid Mellon Foundation Senior Portfolio Manager Karen Grieb Inal a total annual compensation of over $713,000.


In addition, Mellon Foundation Portfolio Manager Abigail Archibald was paid a total annual compensation of over $581,000 and Mellon Foundation CFO Thomas J. Sanders was paid a total annual compensation of over $539,000 in 2018 by the Mellon Foundation. And Mellon Foundation Senior Program Officer Diane S. Harris was paid a total annual compensation of over $500,000 (including a $60,000 annual expense account) during this same period, by the “non-profit” Mellon Foundation.


But although the Mellon Foundation claims to be a “philanthropic” organization, much of the money it utilizes to give “charitable” grants to Columbia, Duke and Rutgers and pay generous salaries to its own executives is obtained from the interest and dividends it receives each year from owning corporate stocks or corporate bonds in corporations that exploit essential workers and consumers.


In 2019, for example, over $3.5 million worth of Wal-Mart corporate stock was owned by the Mellon Foundation—on whose board of trustees former Columbia Provost and 2019-2020 Russell Sage “Olivia Sage Scholar” Katznelson’s successor as Social Science Research Council president, as well as a Russell Sage Foundation trustee in 2020, also sat, historically, in 2020.