Columbia University Provost Katznelson's Russell Sage Foundation Connection: Part 9

 

Headquarters at 140 E. 62nd. St. in Manhattan of "non-profit" Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose board of trustees included Russell Sage Foundation trustee and ex-Columbia professor in 2020.

In January 2020 the former Columbia professor of sociology and Columbia “Dean of Social Science” 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 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 estates, 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, the current Mellon Foundation president, 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 essential 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.”

(end of part 9. To be continued) (This article was first posted on the Upper West Side Patch website).