Autumn 1996

The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse
Heather Mac Donald EMAIL
 

      If the practical visionaries who established America’s great philanthropic

      foundations could see their legacy today, they might regret their

      generosity. Once an agent of social good, those powerful institutions have

      become a political battering ram targeted at American society. You can

      instantly grasp how profoundly foundations have changed by comparing two

      statements made by presidents of the Carnegie Corporation just a

      generation apart. In 1938 the corporation commissioned a landmark analysis

      of black-white relations from sociologist Gunnar Myrdal; the result, An

      American Dilemma, would help spark the civil rights movement. Yet Carnegie

      president Frederick Keppel was almost apologetic about the foundation’s

      involvement with such a vexed social problem: “Provided the foundation

      limits itself to its proper function,” Keppel wrote in the book’s

      introduction, “namely, to make the facts available and then let them speak

      for themselves, and does not undertake to instruct the public as to what

      to do about them, studies of this kind provide a wholly proper and . . .

      sometimes a highly important use of [its] funds.”

 

      Three decades later, Carnegie president Alan Pifer’s 1968 annual report

      reads like a voice from another planet. Abandoning Keppel’s admirable

      restraint, Pifer exhorts his comrades in the foundation world to help

      shake up “sterile institutional forms and procedures left over from the

      past” by supporting “aggressive new community organizations which . . .

      the comfortable stratum of American life would consider disturbing and

      perhaps even dangerous.” No longer content to provide mainstream knowledge

      dispassionately, America’s most prestigious philanthropies now aspired to

      revolutionize what they believed to be a deeply flawed American society.

 

      The results, from the 1960s onward, have been devastating.

      Foundation-supported poverty advocates fought to make welfare a right—and

      generations have grown up fatherless and dependent. Foundation-funded

      minority advocates fought for racial separatism and a vast system of

      quotas—and American society remains perpetually riven by the issue of

      race. On most campuses today, a foundation-endowed multicultural circus

      has driven out the very idea of a common culture, deriding it as a relic

      of American imperialism. Foundation-backed advocates for various “victim”

      groups use the courts to bend government policy to their will, thwarting

      the democratic process. And poor communities across the country often find

      their traditional values undermined by foundation-sent “community

      activists” bearing the latest fashions in diversity and “enlightened”

      sexuality. The net effect is not a more just but a more divided and

      contentious American society.

 

      Not all foundations adopted the cause of social change, of course; but the

      overwhelmingly “progressive” large foundations set the tone for the entire

      sector—especially such giants as Ford, which got radicalized in the

      sixties, and Rockefeller and Carnegie, which followed suit in the

      seventies. Such foundations wield enormous financial might: a mere 2

      percent of all foundations (or 1,020) provide more than half of the

      approximately $10 billion that foundations now give away each year, and in

      1992 the 50 largest foundations accounted for more than one-quarter of all

      foundation spending. Though some conservative foundations have recently

      risen to prominence, Smith College sociologist Stanley Rothman has found

      that liberal foundations still outnumber conservative ones three to one,

      and that liberal policy groups receive four times as much foundation money

      and four times as many grants as their conservative counterparts. The Ford

      Foundation gave $42 million in grants to education and culture alone in

      1994, while the Olin Foundation, the premier funder of conservative

      scholarship on campus, spent only $13 million on all its programs,

      educational and non-educational. Understanding the impact of foundations

      on American culture so far, therefore, means concentrating on the liberal

      leviathans.

 

      In their early, heroic period, foundations provided a luminous example of

      how private philanthropy can improve the lives of millions around the

      world. Key institutions of modern American life—the research university,

      the professional medical school, the public library—owe their existence to

      the great foundations, which had been created in the modern belief that

      philanthropy should address the causes rather than the effects of poverty.

      There was no more articulate exponent of the new philanthropic philosophy

      than Andrew Carnegie, a self-educated Scot who rose from impoverished

      bobbin boy in a textile mill to head America’s largest coal and steel

      complex. He elaborated his theory of “scientific philanthropy,” a

      capitalist’s response to Marx’s “scientific socialism,” in The Gospel of

      Wealth (1889), an eloquent testament and a stinging rebuke to many a

      contemporary foundation executive.

 

      The growing abyss between the vast industrial fortunes and the income of

      the common laborer, Carnegie argued, was the inevitable result of the most

      beneficial economic system that mankind had ever known. The tycoon,

      however, merely held his fortune in trust for the advancement of the

      common good; moreover, he should give away his wealth during his lifetime,

      using the same acumen that he showed in making it. The scientific

      philanthropist will target his giving to “help those who will help

      themselves,” creating institutions through which those working poor with a

      “divine spark” can better themselves economically and spiritually. The

      “slothful, the drunken, [and] the unworthy” were outside his scheme: “One

      man or woman who succeeds in living comfortably by begging is more

      dangerous to society, and a greater obstacle to the progress of humanity,

      than a score of wordy Socialists,” he pronounced.

 

      Starting in 1901, Carnegie threw himself full-time into practicing what he

      preached. He created one of the greatest American institutions for social

      mobility: the free public library, which he built and stocked in nearly

      2,000 communities. He established the Carnegie Institute of Technology

      (now the Carnegie Mellon University); the Carnegie Foundation for the

      Advancement of Teaching, to provide pensions for all college teachers; a

      museum; a scientific research institute; a university trust; Carnegie Hall

      in New York City; the World Court building in the Hague; and a host of

      other major institutions. A Carnegie-commissioned report on medical

      education revolutionized medical training, sparking reforms that would

      give the U.S. the greatest medical schools in the world. Even so, his

      wealth grew faster than he could give it away. Finally “in desperation,”

      according to his biographer, he created the Carnegie Corporation in 1911.

      During the early years of this century, the press kept tabs on a

      remarkable philanthropic rivalry: would Andrew Carnegie or John D.

      Rockefeller give away the most money? Rockefeller created overnight the

      great University of Chicago from a third-rate Baptist college in 1892. He

      established the renowned Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and

      supported the education of Southern blacks. But he, too, could not make

      donations fast enough. So in 1909 he endowed a foundation that, in

      conjunction with the Rockefeller Institute, made medical history—

      eradicating hookworm here and abroad, establishing the first major schools

      of public health, developing the yellow fever vaccine, controlling a new

      strain of malaria, and reducing infant typhus epidemics. In later years

      the Rockefeller Foundation contributed to discoveries in genetics,

      biophysics, biochemistry, and in medical technologies like spectroscopy,

      X-rays, and the use of tracer elements.

 

      But the “scientific philanthropy” articulated by Rockefeller’s personal

      advisor, Frederick Gates, contained a crucial—and ultimately

      destructive—innovation. The value of a foundation, Gates argued, was that

      it moved the disposition of wealth from the control of the donor into the

      hands of “experts”—precisely the opposite of Carnegie’s view that the

      person who made the money would be its wisest administrator. Eventually,

      this transfer of control yielded the paradox of funds made by

      laissez-faire capitalists being used for the advocacy of a welfare state.

      Even during Rockefeller’s lifetime, Gates’s doctrine produced some odd

      moments. In 1919 Rockefeller prophetically wrote to his lawyer: “I could

      wish that the education which some professors furnish was more conducive

      to the most sane and practical and possible views of life rather than

      drifting . . . toward socialism and some forms of Bolshevism.” But

      Rockefeller’s attorney countered that donors should not try to influence

      teaching—or even consider a university’s philosophy in funding it. The

      subsequent history of academia has proved the folly of that injunction,

      which Rockefeller unfortunately obeyed.

 

      When the Ford Foundation flowered into an activist, “socially conscious”

      philanthropy in the 1960s, it sparked the key revolution in the foundation

      worldview: the idea that foundations were to improve the lot of mankind

      not by building lasting institutions but by challenging existing ones.

      Henry Ford and his son Edsel had originally created the foundation in 1936

      not out of any grand philanthropic vision but instead to shelter their

      company’s stock from taxes and to ensure continued family control of the

      business. When the foundation came into its full inheritance of Ford

      stock, it became overnight America’s largest foundation by several

      magnitudes. Its expenditures in 1954 were four times higher than

      second-ranked Rockefeller and ten times higher than third-ranked Carnegie.

      From its start, Ford aimed to be different, eschewing medical research and

      public health in favor of social issues such as First Amendment

      restrictions and undemocratic concentrations of power, economic problems,

      world peace, and social science. Nevertheless, Andrew Carnegie himself

      might have applauded some of Ford’s early efforts, including the “Green

      Revolution” in high-yielding crops and its pioneering program to establish

      theaters, orchestras, and dance and opera companies across the country.

      But by the early 1960s, the trustees started clamoring for a more radical

      vision; according to Richard Magat, a Ford employee, they demanded

      “action-oriented rather than research-oriented” programs that would “test

      the outer edges of advocacy and citizen participation.”

 

      The first such “action-oriented” program, the Gray Areas project, was a

      turning point in foundation history and—because it was a prime mover of

      the ill-starred War on Poverty—a turning point in American history as

      well. Its creator, Paul Ylvisaker, an energetic social theorist from

      Harvard and subsequent icon for the liberal foundation community, had

      concluded that the problems of newly migrated urban blacks and Puerto

      Ricans could not be solved by the “old and fixed ways of doing things.”

      Because existing private and public institutions were unresponsive, he

      argued, the new poverty populations needed a totally new institution—the

      “community action agency”—to coordinate legal, health, and welfare

      services and to give voice to the poor. According to Senator Daniel

      Patrick Moynihan, an early poverty warrior under Presidents Kennedy and

      Johnson, Ford “proposed nothing less than institutional change in the

      operation and control of American cities . . . . [Ford] invented a new

      level of American government: the inner-city community action agency.”

      Ylvisaker proceeded to establish such agencies in Boston, New Haven,

      Philadelphia, and Oakland.

 

      Most significantly, Gray Areas’ ultimate purpose was to spur a similar

      federal effort. Ford was the first—but far from the last—foundation to

      conceive of itself explicitly as a laboratory for the federal welfare

      state. As Ylvisaker later explained, foundations should point out

      “programs and policies, such as social security, income maintenance, and

      educational entitlement that convert isolated and discretionary acts of

      private charity into regularized public remedies that flow as a matter of

      legislated right.” In this vein, the foundation measured the success of

      Gray Areas by the number of federal visitors to the program’s sites, and

      it declared the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which

      opened the War on Poverty and incorporated the Ford-invented community

      action agencies, to be Gray Areas’ “proudest achievement.”

 

      Unfortunately, because it was so intent on persuading the federal

      government to adopt the program, Ford ignored reports that the community

      action agencies were failures, according to historian Alice O’Connor.

      Reincarnated as federal Community Action Programs (CAPs), Ford’s urban

      cadres soon began tearing up cities. Militancy became the mark of merit

      for federal funders, according to Senator Moynihan. In Newark, the

      director of the local CAP urged blacks to arm themselves before the 1967

      riots; leaflets calling for a demonstration were run off on the CAP’s

      mimeograph machine. The federal government funneled community action money

      to Chicago gangs—posing as neighborhood organizers—who then continued to

      terrorize their neighbors. The Syracuse, New York, CAP published a

      remedial reading manual that declared: “No ends are accomplished without

      the use of force. . . . Squeamishness about force is the mark not of

      idealistic, but moonstruck morals.” Syracuse CAP employees applied $7

      million of their $8 million federal grant to their own salaries.

      Ford created another of the War on Poverty’s most flamboyant

      failures—Mobilization for Youth, a federally funded juvenile delinquency

      agency on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that quickly expanded its sights

      from providing opportunity to minority youth to bringing down the “power

      structure.” Home base for the welfare-rights movement, the Mobilization

      for Youth aimed to put so many people on welfare that the state and city’s

      finances would collapse. Its techniques included dumping dead rats on

      Mayor Robert Wagner’s doorstep and organizing Puerto Rican welfare mothers

      for “conflict confrontations” with local teachers.

 

      These programs were just warm-ups, however. When McGeorge Bundy, former

      White House national security advisor, became Ford’s president in 1966,

      the foundation’s activism switched into high gear. Bundy reallocated

      Ford’s resources from education to minority rights, which in 1960 had

      accounted for 2.5 percent of Ford’s giving but by 1970 would soar to 40

      percent. Under Bundy’s leadership, Ford created a host of new advocacy

      groups, such as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (a

      prime mover behind bilingual education) and the Native American Rights

      Fund, that still wreak havoc on public policy today. Ford’s support for a

      radical Hispanic youth group in San Antonio led even liberal congressman

      Henry B. Gonzales to charge that Ford had fostered the “emergence of

      reverse racism in Texas.”

 

      Incredibly, foundation officers believed that Ford’s radicalization merely

      responded to the popular will. As Francis X. Sutton, a longtime Ford

      staffer, reminisced in 1989: “It took the critical populist upsurge at the

      end of the sixties to weaken faith that the foundation’s prime vocation

      lay in helping government, great universities, and research centers . . .

      . As the sixties wore on, the values of the New Left spread through

      American society and an activistic spirit entered the foundation that

      pulled it away from its original vision of solving the world’s problems

      through scientific knowledge.” The notion that the 1960s represented a

      “populist upsurge,” or that New Left values bubbled up from the American

      grassroots rather than being actively disseminated by precisely such rich,

      elite institutions as the Ford Foundation, could only be a product of

      foundation thinking.

 

      The most notorious Bundy endeavor, the school decentralization experiment

      in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn, changed the course of

      liberalism by fracturing the black-Jewish civil rights coalition and

      souring race relations in New York for years afterward. Bundy had led a

      mayoral panel under John Lindsay that recommended giving “community

      control” over local public school districts to parents. The panel’s

      report, written by a Ford staffer, claimed that New York’s huge

      centralized school system was not sufficiently accountable to minority

      populations. Black and Puerto Rican children could not learn or even

      behave, the report maintained, unless their parents were granted

      “meaningful participation” in their education. Translation: parents should

      hire and fire local teachers and school administrators.

 

      Ford set about turning this theory into reality with utmost clumsiness. It

      chose as the head of its $1.4 million decentralization experiment in three

      Brooklyn school districts a longtime white-hater, Rhody McCoy, who dreamed

      of creating an all-black school system, right up through college, within

      the public schools. McCoy was a moderate, however, compared to the people

      he tapped as deputies. Although the school board blocked his appointment

      of a militant under indictment for conspiracy to murder, he did manage to

      hire Les Campbell, the radical head of the Afro-American Teachers

      Association, who organized his school’s most violent students into an

      anti-Semitic combat force. According to education scholar Diane Ravitch,

      McCoy had an understanding with racist thug Sonny Carson that Carson’s

      “bodyguards” would intimidate white teachers until McCoy would

      diplomatically call them off.

 

      Ford’s experimental school districts soon exploded with anti-Semitic black

      rage, as militants argued that black and Puerto Rican children failed

      because Jewish teachers were waging “mental genocide” on them. The day

      after Martin Luther King’s assassination, students at a junior high school

      rampaged through the halls beating up white teachers, having been urged by

      Les Campbell to “[s]end [whitey] to the graveyard” if he “taps you on the

      shoulder.”

 

      When the teacher’s union struck to protest the illegal firing of 19

      teachers deemed “hostile” to decentralization, parent groups, mostly

      Ford-funded, responded with hostile boycotts. McCoy refused to reinstate

      the 19 teachers, though ordered by the school board to do so. White

      teachers at one school found an anti-Semitic screed in their mailboxes,

      calling Jews “Blood-sucking Exploiters and Murderers” and alleging that

      “the So-Called Liberal Jewish Friend . . . is Really Our Enemy and He is

      Responsible For the Serious Educational Retardation of Our Black

      Children.” McCoy refused to denounce the pamphlet or the anti-Semitism

      behind it. Nor did Ford publicly denounce such tactics—or take

      responsibility after the fact. McGeorge Bundy later sniffed

      self-righteously: “If private foundations cannot assist experiments, their

      unique role will be impaired, to the detriment of American society.” But

      if the experiment goes awry, the foundation can saunter off, leaving the

      community to pick up the pieces.

 

      Dean Rusk, president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the late 1950s, once

      described Ford’s influence on other foundations: What the “fat boy in the

      canoe does,” he said, “makes a difference to everybody else.” And Ford’s

      influence was never stronger than after it adopted the cause of social

      change. Waldemar Nielsen’s monumental studies of foundations, published in

      1972 and 1985, only strengthened the Ford effect, for Nielsen celebrated

      activist philanthropy and berated those foundations that had not yet

      converted to the cause. “As a result,” recalls Richard Larry, president of

      the Sarah Scaife Foundation, “a number of foundations said: ‘If this is

      what the foundation world is doing and what the experts say is important,

      we should move in that direction, too.’” The Rockefeller Brothers Fund,

      for example, funded the National Welfare Rights Organization—at the same

      time that the organization was demonstrating against Governor Nelson

      Rockefeller of New York. The Carnegie Corporation pumped nearly $20

      million into various left-wing advocacy groups during the 1970s.

 

      Many foundations had turned against the system that had made them

      possible, as Henry Ford II recognized when he quit the Ford Foundation

      board in disgust in 1977. “In effect,” he wrote in his resignation letter,

      “the foundation is a creature of capitalism, a statement that, I’m sure,

      would be shocking to many professional staff people in the field of

      philanthropy. It is hard to discern recognition of this fact in anything

      the foundation does. It is even more difficult to find an understanding of

      this in many of the institutions, particularly the universities, that are

      the beneficiaries of the foundation’s grant programs.”

 

      Did Ford exaggerate? Not according to Robert Schrank, a Ford program

      officer during the 1970s and early 1980s. Schrank, a former Communist,

      recalls the “secret anti-capitalist orientation” of his fellow program

      officers. “People were influenced by the horror stories we Marxists had

      put out about the capitalist system,” he says; “it became their guidance.”

      Naturally, Henry Ford’s resignation had no effect; the doctrine of

      independence from the donor had taken full root. As McGeorge Bundy coolly

      remarked: “He has a right to expect people to read his letter carefully,

      but I don’t think one letter from anyone is going to change the

      foundation’s course.”

 

      Today, the full-blown liberal foundation worldview looks like this:

      First, white racism is the cause of black and Hispanic social problems. In

      1982, for example, Carnegie’s Alan Pifer absurdly accused the country of

      tolerating a return to “legalized segregation of the races.” The same note

      still sounds in Rockefeller president Peter C. Goldmark Jr.’s assertion,

      in his 1995 annual report, that we “urgently need . . . a national

      conversation about race . . . to talk with candor about the implications

      of personal and institutional racism.”

 

      Second, Americans discriminate widely on the basis not just of race but

      also of gender, “sexual orientation,” class, and ethnicity. As a

      consequence, victim groups need financial support to fight the

      petty-mindedness of the majority.

 

      Third, Americans are a selfish lot. Without the creation of court-enforced

      entitlement, the poor will be abused and ignored. Without continuous

      litigation, government will be unresponsive to social needs.

      Fourth, only government can effectively ameliorate social problems. Should

      government cut welfare spending, disaster will follow, which no amount of

      philanthropy can cure.

 

      And finally, as a corollary to tenet four: at heart, most social problems

      are economic ones. In the language of foundations, America has

      “disinvested” in the poor. Only if the welfare state is expanded into “new

      areas of need,” to quote Pifer, will the poor be able to succeed.

      This worldview is particularly noticeable in three key areas of foundation

      funding: the dissemination of diversity ideology, the “collaboratives”

      movement in community development, and public interest litigation and

      advocacy.

 

      A worry for the liberal foundations in the 1970s, “diversity” became an

      all-consuming obsession in the 1980s. Foundation boards and staffs got

      “diversified,” sometimes producing friction and poor performance.

 

      “Foundations were so anxious to show that they, too, had their black and

      Puerto Rican that hiring decisions entailed mediocrity,” says Gerald

      Freund, a former program officer with the Rockefeller and MacArthur

      foundations. Some foundations, led by Ford, started requiring all grant

      applicants to itemize the racial and gender composition of their staff and

      trustees, sometimes to their great bewilderment. One organization

      dedicated to Eastern Europe was told that its funder expected more

      minorities on its board. No problem, replied a charmingly naive European

      ambassador; how about a Kurd or Basque trustee? He soon learned that that

      is not what funders mean by “minorities.” Organizations that already

      represent a minority interest—an Asian organization, say—might be told to

      find an American Indian or a Hispanic board member. “It is stunning to

      me,” laments the executive director of one of Washington’s most liberal

      policy groups, “that it is no longer crucially important whether my

      organization is succeeding; the critical issue is the color complexion of

      my staff.”

 

      Universities have proved unswervingly devoted soldiers in the foundations’

      diversity crusade. It was in the sixties that Ford put its money behind

      black studies, setting up a model for academic ghettoization that would be

      repeated endlessly over the next 30 years. Today, many universities recall

      the Jim Crow South, with separate dorms, graduation ceremonies, and

      freshman initiation programs for different ethnic groups, in a gross

      perversion of the liberal tradition. Students in foundation-funded ethnic

      studies courses learn that Western culture (whose transmission is any

      university’s principal reason for existence) is the source of untold evil

      rather than of the “rights” they so vociferously claim.

 

      Lavishly fertilized with foundation money, women’s studies—those campus

      gripe sessions peppered with testimonials to one’s humiliation at the

      hands of the “patriarchy”—debased the curriculum further into divisive

      victimology. From 1972 to 1992, women’s studies received $36 million from

      Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mott, and Mellon, among others.

 

      Foundation-funded research centers on women, such as the Center for

      Research on Women at Wellesley College, established with Carnegie money,

      sprang up on campuses nationwide. The Wellesley Center’s most visible

      accomplishment is the wildly influential—and wholly spurious—report “How

      Schools Shortchange Girls,” which claims that secondary education subjects

      girls to incessant gender bias. Not to be outshone, Ford produced a

      multilingual translation of the report for distribution at the Beijing

      global women’s conference. Rockefeller, taking diversity several steps

      further, funds humanities fellowships at the University of Georgia for

      “womanists”—defined as “black feminists or feminists of color”—and

      supports the City University of New York’s Center for Lesbian and Gay

      Studies.

 

      Not content with setting up separate departments of ethnic and gender

      studies, foundations have poured money into a powerful movement called

      “curriculum transformation,” which seeks to inject race, gender, and

      sexual consciousness into every department and discipline. A class in

      biology, for example, might consider feminine ways of analyzing cellular

      metabolism; a course in music history might study the hidden misogyny in

      Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—actual examples. One accomplishment of the

      curricular transformationists is to distinguish bad, “masculine” forms of

      thinking (logic, mathematics, scientific research) from good, “feminine”

      forms, which subordinate the search for right answers to “inclusiveness”

      and “wholeness.” At the University of Massachusetts, Boston, the recipient

      of a Ford curriculum transformation grant, a course is not culturally

      diverse if it addresses “gender” one week and “social class” the next,

      according to the university’s diversity coordinator. “We’d want the issues

      of diversity addressed every week,” she says. Edgar Beckham, a program

      officer in charge of Ford’s Campus Diversity Initiative, lets his

      imagination run wild in describing the enormous reach of diversity: “Every

      domain of institutional activity might be involved,” he says—”buildings,

      grounds, financial aid.” No domain, in other words, is safe from

      foundation intervention.

 

      The big foundations pursue identity politics and multiculturalism just as

      obsessively in the performing and fine arts. Gone are the days when Ford’s

      W. McNeil Lowry, described by Lincoln Kirstein as “the single most

      influential patron of the performing arts the American democratic system

      has ever produced,” collaborated with such artists as Isaac Stern to find

      new talent. The large foundations now practice what Robert Brustein,

      director of the American Repertory Theater, calls “coercive philanthropy,”

      forcing arts institutions to conform to the foundations’ vision of a

      multicultural paradise—one that, above all else, builds minority

      self-esteem.

 

      Foundations talk a good game of inclusion, but when it comes to artistic

      grant-making, their outlook is color-coded. I asked Robert Curvin, vice

      president for communications at Ford, what would be so wrong about giving

      a black child the tools to appreciate, say, a Schubert song. He replied

      that “all art and expression begins with one’s own culture.”

 

      “Traditionally,” he added, “we did not recognize the tremendous value in

      Congo drums. Now, we can’t easily make these judgments [among different

      artistic forms].” Maybe not. But the view that black children are

      inherently suited for Congo drums seems patronizing and false. Aren’t

      American blacks as much the rightful heirs of the Western artistic

      tradition as other Americans?

 

      Alison Bernstein, director of Ford’s education and culture division,

      crystallized the liberal foundation perspective at the end of my interview

      with her. She had recently attended the New York City Ballet, where the

      audience, she noted, was “all white.” Yet the success among blacks of

      Bring In ‘da Noise, Bring In ‘da Funk, the Tony-winning rap and tap tour

      through the history of black oppression, she said, shows that the

      “minority audience is out there.” Why, she asked, isn’t the New York City

      Ballet commissioning a work from Savion Glover, the tap prodigy behind

      Bring In ‘da Noise? In other words, we can only expect blacks to come to

      the ballet for “black” choreography. In W. McNeil Lowry’s time, her

      question would have been, how can we help minority students enjoy

      classical ballet, which will enrich them as human beings?

      The second focus of the foundations’ liberal zeal, the so-called

      “collaboratives” movement in community development, is emblematic of the

      30-year-long foundation assault on the bourgeois virtues that once kept

      communities and families intact. The idea behind this movement, which

      grows out of the failed community action programs of the 1960s, is that a

      group of “community stakeholders,” assembled and funded by a foundation,

      becomes a “collaborative” to develop and implement a plan for community

      revitalization. That plan should be “comprehensive” and should “integrate”

      separate government services, favorite foundation mantras. To the extent

      this means anything, it sounds innocuous enough, and sometimes is. But as

      with the foundations’ choice of community groups in the 1960s, the

      rhetoric of “community” and local empowerment is often profoundly

      hypocritical.

 

      The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s teen pregnancy initiative called Plain

      Talk is a particularly clear—and painful—example of the moral imperialism

      with which foundations impose their “progressive” values on hapless

      communities. In its early years, the foundation, the product of the United

      Parcel Service fortune, ran its own foster care and adoption agency. But

      when its endowment ballooned in the 1980s, the foundation jumped into the

      already crowded field of “social change.”

 

      Plain Talk set out to reduce unwanted teen pregnancies not by promoting

      abstinence but by “encouraging local adults to engage youth in frank and

      open discussions regarding sexuality,” in the words of the project’s

      evaluation report, and by improving teens’ access to birth control. In

      Casey’s view, the real cause of teen pregnancies is that “adults”—note,

      not “parents”—haven’t fully acknowledged adolescent sex or accepted teens’

      need for condoms.

 

      The only problem was that the values of Plain Talk were deeply abhorrent

      to several of the communities (often immigrant) that Casey targeted.

      Incredibly, Casey regarded this divergence as a “barrier” to, rather than

      a source of, diversity. The evaluation report, prepared by Public/Private

      Ventures, a youth advocacy organization, refers with obvious disgust to

      the “deep-rooted preference for abstinence and the desire to sugarcoat the

      Plain Talk message that resurfaced repeatedly. . . . Stated simply,” the

      report sighs, “the less assimilated, more traditional Latino and Southeast

      Asian cultures regard premarital sex among teenagers as unacceptable. They

      tend to deny that it occurs in their community and do not feel it is

      appropriate to discuss sex openly with their children.”

 

      Foundation-approved diversity is only skin-deep: Asians and Hispanics

      qualify only if they toe the ideological line.

 

      Project leaders were determined to stamp out all public expressions of

      dissent. When members of one collaborative were heard making “judgmental”

      statements about teen sexuality—in other words, that teens should not have

      sex—Casey recommended a “values-clarification workshop” with the Orwellian

      goal of teaching members how to “respect their differences.” Likewise,

      when a young male member of the San Diego collaborative brought a homemade

      banner for a local parade that read “Plain Talk: Say No to Sex,” the

      project manager promptly initiated a two-hour “team discussion” that

      eventually pressured the boy to accept a new banner: “Plain Talk: Say No

      to AIDS.” Chastity isn’t part of the agenda.

 

      In the struggle between a massive colonizing force and small communities

      valiantly trying to hold on to their beliefs, there was never any question

      which side would triumph. Casey had millions of dollars; the communities

      just had their convictions. The evaluation states unapologetically that

      the “struggle” to force residents to accept Plain Talk goals was “long and

      sometimes painful.” But eventually, says the report, people came to

      “recognize that while their personal beliefs are valid and acceptable,

      they must be put aside for the sake of protecting youth.”

 

      Plain Talk’s moral imperialism might be easier to swallow were there any

      evidence that increasing condom availability and legitimating teen sex

      reduced teen pregnancy. But as such evidence does not exist, Casey’s

      condescension toward immigrants’ “deeply-rooted ways of thinking” about

      teen sexuality, ways that for centuries kept illegitimacy at low levels,

      leaves a particularly bad taste.

 

      For all its self-congratulation for having involved residents in planning

      “social change . . . appropriate to the conditions in their particular

      communities,” as the evaluation puts it, Plain Talk gives the lie to the

      central myth of all such community initiatives: that they represent a

      grassroots movement. The San Diego collaborative was led by a woman the

      evaluation report calls an “experienced sexuality educator with a special

      interest in AIDS awareness and prevention, . . . respected within the

      influential circle of community activists and agency representatives.” The

      foundation couldn’t have come up with an occupation more repugnant to the

      local churchgoing, Latino residents. But the “community leaders” favored

      by foundations do not represent the community; they represent the

      activists.

 

      Yet for all its bold embrace of teen sexuality, Plain Talk was curiously

      unable to act on its own premises. At a Plain Talk retreat in Atlanta,

      rumors flew of a “sexual encounter” among teens who apparently had

      absorbed the Plain Talk message far too well. But rather than asking

      non-judgmentally, “Did you use condoms?” or offering to provide condoms

      for the next orgy, the adults tried to squelch the rumors, realizing they

      would be fatal for the reputation of the initiative. They also attempted

      to establish a curfew for the next retreat, igniting weeks of battle from

      the teens. Adolescent “empowerment,” once out of the bottle, is hard to

      put back in.

 

      The collaborative movement suffers from another shortcoming: a foundation

      planning a collaborative doesn’t have the slightest idea what exactly the

      collaborative is supposed to do or what its source of authority will be.

      Take Casey’s inaugural project in social change, called New Futures. The

      astounding theory behind the initiative, echoing Ford’s Gray Areas

      program, was that the greatest problem facing inner-city children is the

      discrete nature of government services such as education and health care.

      Not until all social programs are integrated can we expect children to

      stay in school, learn, and not have babies, reasoned the foundation.

      Accordingly, Casey gave five cities an average of $10 million each over

      five years to form a collaborative consisting of leaders from business,

      social service agencies, schools, and the community to lead the way toward

      “comprehensive,” integrated services for junior high students.

 

      No one, not even the foundation officers who cooked up the idea, knew what

      such services would look like. Casey’s mysterious pronouncements, such as

      a suggestion to “integrat[e] pregnancy prevention, education, and

      employment strategies,” left the local groups as befuddled as before. The

      “area of greatest difficulty,” concludes the New Futures evaluation report

      in particularly opaque foundationese, “appeared to be translating

      crossagency discourse into tangible operational reform that would improve

      the status of youth”—in other words, the project was meaningless. A Ford

      project for comprehensive collaborative development ran into the same

      difficulty of making sense of its mission. “The notion of ‘integrated,

      comprehensive development’ is a conceptual construct not easily translated

      into active terms,” states the first-year evaluation poignantly.

 

      “Participants have struggled with what, exactly, is meant by the term.” If

      foundation officers thought in concrete realities, not in slogans, they’d

      have no trouble recognizing the silliness of the idea that “categorical

      services” are holding children back, when for centuries schools have

      concentrated solely on education, hospitals solely on health care, and

      employers solely on business, without untoward results for the young.

      Little wonder that New Futures made things worse, not better. The

      project’s “case managers,” who were supposed to coordinate existing

      services for individual children, yanked their young “clients” out of

      class for a 20-minute chat every week or so, sending the clear message

      that the classroom was not important. Students in the program ended up

      with lower reading and writing scores, higher dropout and pregnancy rates,

      and no better employment or college prospects than their peers.

 

      The third significant area of funding, public interest litigation and

      advocacy, embodies the foundations’ longstanding goal of producing “social

      change” by controlling government policy. Foundations bankroll public

      interest law groups that seek to establish in court rights that

      democratically elected legislatures have rejected. Foundations thus help

      sustain judicial activism by supporting one side of the symbiotic

      relationship between activist judges and social-change-seeking lawyers.

      Foundations have used litigation to create and expand the iron trap of

      bilingual education; they have funded the perversion of the Voting Rights

      Act into a costly instrument of apartheid; and they lie behind the

      transformation of due-process rights into an impediment to, rather than a

      guarantor of, justice. Foundation support for such socially disruptive

      litigation makes a mockery of the statutory prohibition on lobbying, since

      foundations can effect policy changes in the courts, under the officially

      approved banner of “public interest litigation,” that are every bit as

      dramatic as those that could be achieved in the legislature.

 

      These days, however, foundation-supported lawyers defend the status quo as

      often as they seek to change it; after all, foundations helped create that

      status quo. Foundation money is beating back efforts to reform welfare,

      through such Washington-based think tanks as the Center for Law and Social

      Policy and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, whose director won

      a MacArthur “genius” award in 1996. The Ford Foundation, the Public

      Welfare Foundation, the Norman Foundation, and others support the Center

      for Social Welfare Policy and Law in New York City, a law firm that

      represented the National Welfare Rights Organization during the 1960s and

      1970s, when that organization was conducting its phenomenally successful

      campaign to legitimate welfare and encourage its spread. Today, the center

      is using Ford money to sue New York City over its long overdue welfare

      anti-fraud program. The suit apocalyptically accuses the city of depriving

      needy people of the “sole means available to them to obtain food,

      clothing, housing and medical assistance,” as if welfare were the world’s

      only conceivable means of support.

 

      Liberal foundations are straining to block popular efforts to change the

      country’s discriminatory racial quota system. The Rockefeller Foundation

      and scores of other like-minded foundations are pumping millions into the

      National Affirmative Action Consortium, a potpourri of left-wing advocacy

      groups including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the

      Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Women’s

      Law Center, and the Women’s Legal Defense Fund. The consortium will

      undertake a “public education campaign” to defeat the California Civil

      Rights Initiative, the groundbreaking ballot measure that would allow

      ordinary people for the first time in history to vote on affirmative

      action. If passed, the measure would return California to the color-blind

      status intended by the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.

 

      The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation is among the staunchest foundation

      supporters of litigation and advocacy. David Hall McConnell, Edna’s

      father, was a traveling book salesman who enticed customers with a free

      bottle of homemade perfume. When the perfume proved more popular than the

      books, the entrepreneurial McConnell started a perfume company in 1886

      that became the world’s largest cosmetic manufacturer, Avon. For its first

      20 years, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation supported such institutions

      as Lincoln Center, Smith College and Cornell University (to which it

      donated science buildings), the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, and the

      Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. But in the 1970s the foundation,

      herded by its new professional managers, joined the stampede into

      activism.

 

      No other foundation has had as dramatic an impact in shaping the debate

      over crime and punishment. Says Frank Hartman, executive director of the

      Kennedy School of Government: “I don’t know what the conversation would be

      like in [Clark’s] absence.” The foundation has bankrolled the wave of

      prisoners’ rights suits that have clogged the courts. But more important,

      Clark has tirelessly sponsored the specious notion that the U.S.

      incarcerates too many harmless criminals. In 1991 the Clark-supported

      Sentencing Project published a comparative study criticizing high U.S.

      incarceration rates, which sociologist Charles Logan likens to an

      “undergraduate term paper—one that was badly done.” Nevertheless, the

      study was on page one of newspapers across the country, fueling editorials

      and congressional speeches about America’s misguided prison policies. As

      Logan remarks, “Foundations are propaganda machines; that is the basis of

      their success.”

 

      The foundation also promotes the theme that American justice is profoundly

      racist. It supports the Equal Justice Institute in Alabama, which sues on

      behalf of prisoners claiming victimization by race. The Clark-funded

      Sentencing Project promotes the proposed federal Racial Justice Act, which

      would impose racial ceilings on sentencing. By injecting race into the

      debate over crime, McConnell Clark is doing a great public disservice. In

      an era of jury nullification on the basis of racial sympathy, white racism

      hardly seems the criminal justice system’s major problem. [See “My Black

      Crime Problem, and Ours,” City Journal, Spring 1996.] Moreover, the first

      thing you will hear in any inner-city neighborhood is “Get the dealers off

      the streets,” not “The penalties for dealing crack are discriminatory.”

 

      The McConnell Clark Foundation has one spectacular success to show for its

      effort to change government policies: it has helped make New York City’s

      homeless policies the most irrational in the nation. The foundation has

      been the most generous funder of the Legal Aid Society’s Homeless Family

      Rights Project, which has been suing the city for over a decade to require

      immediate housing of families claiming homelessness in a private apartment

      with cooking facilities. Should the city fail to place every family that

      shows up at its doorstep within 24 hours (a requirement without parallel

      in any other city in the U.S.), Legal Aid sues for contempt, penalties,

      and—of course—legal fees, on top of the $200,000 McConnell Clark gives it

      each year.

 

      The Clark-bankrolled project has found an eager partner in the presiding

      judge, Helen Freedman, who has hit the city with over $6 million in fines.

      She has ordered the city to pay every allegedly homeless family that has

      to stay more than 24 hours in a city intake office between $150 and $250 a

      night—an extraordinary windfall. James Capoziello, former deputy general

      counsel in the city’s Human Resources Administration, calls the litigation

      “one of the most asinine instances of judicial misconduct and misuses of

      the judiciary” he has ever seen. Says one homeless provider in the city:

      “It is a crime to spend scarce resources for having to sleep on the floor.

      With $1 million in fines you could run a 50-unit facility for a year.”

      There is considerable irony to Clark’s support for homelessness

      litigation, since it helped create the problem. According to Waldemar

      Nielsen, Clark funded one of the lawsuits that led to the

      deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, a primary cause of

      homelessness today. Moreover, Clark bankrolls an array of advocacy groups

      responsible in large part for New York’s tight housing market—groups like

      New York State Tenant and Neighborhood Information Services, the most

      powerful advocate for rent regulation in the state. Thanks to such groups,

      New York is the only city in the country to have maintained rent control

      continuously since the end of World War II, leading to one of the lowest

      rates of new housing construction and highest rates of abandonment in the

      nation.

      McConnell Clark also supports organizations that campaign against the

      city’s effort to sell its huge portfolio of tax-defaulted housing, which

      it operates at an enormous loss. Jay Small, director of one such

      organization, the Association of Neighborhood Housing Developers, believes

      that once the city takes title to housing, the property should never

      revert to private ownership but should become “socially owned.” Years

      after the Soviet collapse, the notion that the city should become a

      bastion of socialized housing is hardly forward-looking.

      For some of the groups McConnell Clark supports, housing is just the

      opening wedge to a broader transformation of society. “Ultimately, the

      solution to the housing crisis is to change property relations,” argues

      Small. He explains that he is using “a code word for socialism.” Rima

      McCoy, co-director of the Clark-funded Action for Community Empowerment,

      also takes an expansive view of social relations. She was asked in 1995

      whether housing was a right. The question astounded her: “That anyone

      could even ask that kind of question—do people have an inalienable right

      to housing?—is just a product of our current climate,” she replied, “which

      would have the middle class believe that the poor are the source of the

      current problems in the U.S.”

      Of course, even within the large liberal foundations, even within so

      seemingly monolithic a place as the Ford Foundation, there have always

      been pockets of sanity, where a commonsense approach to helping people and

      promoting stable communities has reigned. And there are some signs of more

      recent countercurrents to the prevailing “progressive” ethic—the Ford and

      Casey foundations, for example, both trumpet their fatherhood initiatives.

      Yet the impulse toward the activism that over the past 30 years has led

      the great liberal foundations to do much more harm than good remains

      overwhelming. In a pathetic statement of aimlessness, the president of a

      once great foundation recently called up a former Ford poverty fighter to

      ask plaintively where all the social movements had gone.

      The mega-foundations should repress their yearning for activism once and

      for all. The glories of early twentieth-century philanthropy were produced

      by working within accepted notions of social improvement, not against

      them. Building libraries was not a radical act; it envisioned no

      transformation of property relations or redistribution of power. Andrew

      Carnegie merely sought to make available to a wider audience the same

      values and intellectual resources that had allowed him to succeed. Yes,

      the world has changed since Carnegie’s time, but the recipe for successful

      philanthropy has not.

        Philanthropic foundations once used their vast might to cure

            disease, promote art, and advance education. In the sixties, they

            decided to reform society. Result: catastrophe.