Liberal Foundations Funnel $19 Million Into Radical Ethnic Studies Programs

While America’s students fall behind in reading, math, and history, a new report reveals that left-wing nonprofits are pouring tens of millions into universities to push radical ethnic studies programs and the consequences are about to hit K-12 schools.

According to watchdog group Defending Education, since 2020, nonprofit organizations like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the WK Kellogg Foundation have funneled over $19 million into colleges and universities across the U.S. to support courses and departments centered around identity politics, anti-capitalist rhetoric, and Marxist race theory.

This isn’t about education. It’s about indoctrination, and it’s spreading like wildfire.

“American youth deserve a top-notch education that verifiably improves mastery of reading and math, not activist training for far-left causes,” said Rhyen Staley, director of research at Defending Education.

Among the most shocking findings in the report:

• City University of New York (CUNY) received $8 million from the Mellon Foundation to build out its “Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies” graduate program, which aims to “return Ethnic Studies to its radical roots.”

• UC Berkeley, a long-time hub of leftist academia, was given $200,000 to expand its Chicanx Latinx Studies Program and develop a high school curriculum to support California’s new ethnic studies graduation mandate.

• Salem State University in Massachusetts received $3 million to launch the “Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium,” an initiative designed to promote “anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and xenophobia” awareness through digital coursework.

At the core of these programs are materials and course titles that sound more like ideological manifestos than academic instruction:

• “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood”

• “Whiteness as Property”

• “Cripping the Curriculum: A Paradigm Shift Toward Decolonizing the Public University”

• “Abolition Feminisms”

• “10 Step Guide for Designing Political Graphics”

The Mellon Foundation alone has spent millions transforming public universities into training centers for left-wing activism. Their funding has helped create departments, redesign entire curricula, and bankroll political fellowships focused on intersectionality, decolonization, and social justice.

And what begins at the university level won’t stay there.

As the report warns, many of these programs are explicitly designed to trickle down into K-12 schools, as future teachers are trained in radical ideology and curriculum development grants are handed to high schools and districts.

In California, where ethnic studies will soon be required for high school graduation, universities like Berkeley and Cal State Monterey are developing the curriculum. Translation: taxpayer-funded high schools will soon be teaching kids that property ownership is racist, America is built on white supremacy, and gender is a colonial construct.

To put a fine point on it, this isn't philanthropy it's cultural engineering, bankrolled by elites who want to remake American society from the classroom up.

Instead of raising achievement, they’re lowering the bar, teaching students how to protest, deconstruct, and tear down rather than build, create, and achieve.

At a time when U.S. literacy and math scores are plummeting, these universities underwritten by liberal foundations are pushing students to major in grievance studies and minor in gender theory. The result? A generation that knows how to chant slogans but can’t balance a checkbook.

The American people never voted for this but thanks to deep-pocketed foundations and university administrators eager to “decolonize” everything, it’s being forced into our education system anyway.

This is a warning to every parent, taxpayer, and citizen who still believes education should be about truth, excellence, and opportunity not Marxism in makeup.

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