{"id":376292,"date":"2026-07-17T01:42:33","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T01:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/376292\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T01:42:33","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T01:42:33","slug":"how-a-mellon-grant-fueled-fringe-scholar-activism-in-texas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/376292\/","title":{"rendered":"How a Mellon Grant Fueled Fringe Scholar-Activism in Texas"},"content":{"rendered":"

In May 2023, a group of San Antonio-based activists traveled to Austin, Texas, to lobby<\/a> against legislation that, they claimed, \u201cundermined civil rights.\u201d The group, called Escuelita de Paz y Justicia (or Escuelita), was created by professional organizers to train<\/a> San Antonio residents\u2014including high schoolers, single mothers, and first-generation college students\u2014in topics like \u201clocal organizing against neoliberalism\u201d and \u201cLatinx and Chicanx feminisms.\u201d Its goal was to foster<\/a> \u201csocial change from below.\u201d<\/p>\n

Escuelita racked up various expenses, providing<\/a> stipends, food, transportation, and childcare. The money to cover those costs did not come \u201cfrom below.\u201d It was bankrolled<\/a> by the \u201cDemocratizing Racial Justice<\/a>\u201d project at the University of Texas at San Antonio, itself funded by a $5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.<\/p>\n

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Through public records requests, I\u2019ve obtained progress reports<\/a> for Democratizing Racial Justice, which operated at UT San Antonio from 2021 to late 2024. The records tell a familiar story<\/a>: the Mellon Foundation uses its $8 billion endowment to boost the careers of self-avowed scholar-activists. But the records also show how such grantmaking can become a political weapon, empowering a scholar-activism that spreads beyond the academy, including by using the university as a pass-through to fund on-the-ground organizing.<\/p>\n

Democratizing Racial Justice promises to embody<\/a> \u201cantiracist and decolonial pedagogies.\u201d Its faculty fit the mold. C. Alejandra Elenes<\/a>, who became the program\u2019s principal investigator shortly after it launched, employs \u201cChicana feminist epistemologies.\u201d Sonya Alem\u00e1n<\/a>, one of the program\u2019s faculty fellows, \u201cdraws on critical race theory and Chicana feminism to inform both her scholarship and pedagogy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Armed with $5 million\u2014a hefty sum for any humanities grant\u2014this UT San Antonio team was keenly aware that its work was at odds with Texas leadership. \u201c[W]e are four scholars engaged in a grant-funded campus-community partnership aimed at cultivating racial justice using ethnic studies pedagogies in Texas,\u201d wrote a group of Democratizing Racial Justice fellows in an article<\/a> for Ethnic Studies Pedagogies. They described Texas as \u201ca state actively entrenching white supremacist and neoliberal ideologies through legislation that attacks ethnic studies curricula, discredits race-based epistemologies and histories and diminishes labor protections.\u201d<\/p>\n

Per the progress reports<\/a>, one of the project\u2019s main activities was its \u201cEthnic Studies Educators\u2019 Academy,\u201d an annual gathering of higher education faculty to \u201cengage with our racialized past and present, and envision racially just futures.\u201d The academy was action-oriented. One participant, quoted in the progress report<\/a>, praised it for \u201cmodeling scholar activism.\u201d Another said that the takeaway<\/a> was that teachers must \u201cdecoloniz[e] education\u201d and dismantle the logic of racism, capitalism, and \u201cheteronormativity.\u201d<\/p>\n

True to this aim, the academy\u2019s main output\u2014an annually published teaching guide\u2014openly embraced a political label. As the Democratizing Racial Justice fellows put it in their summary of the project, \u201cthe progressive politics of ethnic studies pedagogies have long challenged the white Eurocentric and colonial curriculum power structures of U.S. mainstream schooling.\u201d Perhaps unsurprisingly, their teaching guide notes that \u201cheteropatriarchy,\u201d racism, and white supremacy lie \u201cat the foundation of U.S. society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through its lessons and assignments, the teaching guides aim to inculcate overtly identitarian themes. One unit teaches that health disparities<\/a> are driven by \u201ccolonization and Eurocentric ideologies\u201d and aims to have students recognize the importance of \u201chealing practices outside of Western-based medicine in communities of color.\u201d For another assignment<\/a>, almost half of the grade that students earn depends on whether they \u201cshow awareness that they are building on Black\/Chicanx feminist thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such teaching flows directly from the project\u2019s vision for higher education, which is explicitly political. In their 2024 article<\/a>, the Democratizing Social Justice fellows said that their work \u201cposition[s] scholar activism as central to the role of the university.\u201d And scholar-activists, they argue, \u201chave long understood that universities are neither neutral nor outside the larger political arena and recognize themselves as agents of change in complex political processes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other main component of the Mellon grant, the \u201cPeople\u2019s Academy,\u201d put ethnic studies theory into practice. The People\u2019s Academy created Escuelita, which, as a progress report<\/a> states, planned \u201ccollective lobbying action in the State legislature in Austin to prevent the passing of a number of anti-rights bills.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the project was outwardly focused, it nevertheless bolstered academic careers. \u201cThe People\u2019s Academy has had a tangible impact in higher education by strengthening and empowering Chicana\/a\/x or Latina\/o\/x junior and senior scholars,\u201d the Ethnic Studies Pedagogies article said. \u201cTwo postdoctoral fellows on our team secured tenure track jobs at Hispanic Serving Institutions and in academic programs with a strong social justice component.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus, as with other Mellon grants<\/a>, Democratizing Racial Justice served as a career accelerator for fringe scholars. That includes Olga Estrada<\/a>, who was a teaching fellow while pursuing her doctorate. Estrada describes her dissertation<\/a> as an \u201cautohxstoria-teor\u00eda\u201d\u2014which is a work of \u201c(de)colonial methodology\u201d that \u201cmerges story, theory, memory, spirit, and embodiment\u201d\u2014aimed at critiquing the \u201canti-erotic neoliberal academy.\u201d While conducting this unique form of inquiry, she coined the term \u201cTlazolteotl Cycle\u201d: \u201ca queer eco-erotic process of filth, digestion, and transformation that reimagines how shame, rupture, and sacred mess become sites of rebirth and queer conocimiento.\u201d<\/p>\n

In its ideological goals, Democratizing Racial Justice was as clear as could be. For the professors who ran the program, and the activists who benefitted from it, the university was a tool for a progressive political vision, one that fit well with the mission of the Mellon Foundation. Texas\u2019s universities should take care not to repeat the mistake\u2014no matter how large the grant.<\/p>\n

John D. Sailer<\/a> is the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.<\/p>\n

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