An Award for Scholars Backing Movements Inside and Outside the Academy Walls

When Cathy Cohen learned she had been selected as a Freedom Scholar, she didn’t quite believe it. “I said, ‘are you sure?’ Because you think, ‘well, I could name 10 other people who should also be Freedom Scholars,’” she said. “And also—money comes with it? The award and the recognition alone would be enough.”

Cohen is modest about her notable body of work. She is the David and Mary Winton Green Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She has also conducted path-breaking research about young people and founded the Black Youth Project. Black youth, she believes, are too often overlooked. “My work is meant to center young people, to amplify their voices and preferences, and to support their political activity in terms of voting, but also in terms of movement building and movement participation,” she said.

Cohen is one of six scholars to receive this year’s Freedom Scholars awards, which were created by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and the Group Health Foundation. Each of the Freedom Scholars receives a one-time award of $250,000, which they can use as they see fit. The initiative provides “unrestricted support to emerging leaders in academia whose research can provide critical insight to social justice leaders and whose ideas encourage all of us to imagine how we can radically improve our democracy, economy and society,” according to the announcement.

The Marguerite Casey Foundation (MCF) was established in 2001 by Casey Family Programs, which was built on the fortune of Jim Casey, who founded UPS. MCF is explicit about its progressive mission, supporting “leaders, scholars and initiatives focused on shifting the balance of power in society—building power for communities that continue to be excluded from shaping how society works and from sharing in its rewards and freedoms,” according to its website. MCF supports organizations championing racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, immigration reform and voting rights for people who have served time in prison, among other causes, as IP has reported.

The Freedom Scholars initiative supports this mission by recognizing scholars who are creating bridges between their academic work and the broader social movements they’ve helped create.

Carmen Rojas, MCF’s president and CEO, created the program shortly after she started at the foundation in 2020. Rojas, who has sought to build on MCF’s unapologetically progressive place in the sector, sees the awards as a counterweight to the philanthropic resources routinely heaped on conservative scholars and thinkers. “On the right in this country, there has been a ton of investment in a set of ideas that have become normalized in our democratic institutions and economic practices,” she said.

She ticked off a list of right-wing tenets: “The idea that government should be small, that we should all be individually motivated, that white supremacy is a norm—these are all ideas that have been heavily invested in and the people behind the ideas have been lauded. I didn’t see anybody actively investing in scholars who were putting out counter-ideas: people who were imagining a government that actually works for everybody, a democracy that is truly representative, an economy that is just.”

Partly because of their longtime contention that left-wing ideas dominate academia, conservative funders have spent decades fostering the careers of sympathetic scholars. While major left-leaning funders often have larger grantmaking budgets, they’ve been far less strategic about backing promising academic talent of their own—to the overall detriment of their missions. The aim of the Freedom Scholars initiative is to make a small shift in that imbalance. Indeed, the award’s name itself can be seen as a move to reclaim a term too often monopolized by the right.

Inside and outside the ivory tower

In at least one case, the Freedom Scholar award was a precursor to MacArthur’s “genius” award: 2020 Freedom Scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a writer and historian, was named a MacArthur fellow this year.

But all the Freedom Scholars have prestigious accolades. Cohen has received awards from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and research grants from the Ford Foundation. Lawyer Angélica Cházaro, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, is an organizer for immigrant justice and co-founder of La Resistencia, which works to stop immigrant deportations and detentions. Robin D. G. Kelly, a Guggenhiem fellow and author, focuses on the history of social movements in the U.S. He is professor of history and African-American studies and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair of U.S. History at the University of California Los Angeles. Attorney Amna Akbar, professor of law at Ohio State University, is an organizer and author who has written widely about social movements and their impact. (See the complete list of Freedom Scholars).

“The Freedom Scholar award recognizes people who are doing important work in their fields, but also have a commitment to reimagining the work of the university or the academy,” Cohen said. “They have a commitment to struggling inside the academy, but also to movement groups and activists outside the academy.”

For Cohen, part of the value of the program is the message of validation it sends to younger scholars. “The award says you don’t have to make compromises to have success,” she said. “You can have deep political commitments. You can work across not just departments and disciplines, but also outside the university to support movement work, and there’s an entity that will recognize that work and celebrate it.”

“Investing in our thinkers and leaders”

According to Carmen Rojas, the Marguerite Casey Foundation sees the Freedom Scholars initiative as a long-term commitment. “We’re only in our second year, but we hope that this is a core part of our programming moving forward,” she said.

Rojas hopes more funders will proactively support the work of progressive thinkers, scholars and activists. “The conservative movement in this country is building an ecosystem,” she said. “They are thinking not only about nonprofit organizations and policy think tanks and lobbyists, they’re thinking about academic institutions and the media, and investing there.”

To date, funders with more progressive agendas have been reluctant to do the same. “For whatever reason,” Rojas said, “the donor community—from the center to the left—has chosen to react and respond instead of building up our own, investing in our thinkers and leaders and institutions to create a countervailing force for what feels like the fight for our future.”

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