Philanthropy

I was president of Brown University for nine years, at which point I once again took an inventory. The university had just successfully concluded the Campaign for the Rising Generation, a historic milestone for Brown and for Rhode Island in terms of fundraising. In addition, the university's endowment, despite 5½ percent annual withdrawals, had almost trebled during the nine years, passing $1 billion for the first time. More than 15,000 students a year were applying for admission to Brown, the largest number of applications ever received by the university. [110] As far as the university's infrastructure was concerned, several new buildings had gone up, a new dormitory had been built, the campus was wired for the Internet, and numerous other long-overdue improvements had been made, including upgrading the libraries. Plans and fundraising for other new facilities had also been completed. With all this in mind, I concluded that it was time to move on. But I had to be sure where I was going next.

It was my great fortune that, in 1997, the Board of Carnegie Corporation of New York offered me the opportunity to be the Corporation's twelfth president. It was an exciting possibility, but any notion of succeeding to a post once held by Andrew Carnegie [111] was daunting, as well. I did not overlook the irony that, after him, I would be only the second immigrant to head this august institution. I did have something else in common with Andrew Carnegie: as children, we both loved books but because of our poor circumstances, were mostly unable to get them. We also shared a love of libraries and of education.

Becoming president of the Corporation also meant that one was being given the substantial task of building on the record of outstanding leaders who had previously served as president of Carnegie Corporation such as John Gardner, Alan Pifer and David Hamburg. And it meant serving the mission that Andrew Carnegie gave the Corporation, which is "to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding." This was an enormous responsibility, but one I looked forward to because it gave me the opportunity to act as an instrument of Carnegie's legacy and to attempt to meet his expectations that his wealth be used for the public good.

In short, joining Carnegie Corporation presented an extraordinary challenge. When I was at The New York Public Library, I had often pointed to Andrew Carnegie as the guardian angel of libraries and learning, and here I was, metaphorically about to step into his shoes. To top that, the Corporation also happened to be in New York City, which I loved, and where I had spent some nine years. Unless you have lived in and then left New York City, you do not realize what you will be missing. I was delighted to return to a place that was also home to so many great institutions: the UN, some of America's most important colleges and universities, great museums, theaters, corporations, and centers of civic activity. Plus, New York is the natural habitat of the world's diasporas: people from all over the globe settle here and almost everyone is eventually integrated into the life of this remarkable, invigorating, beautiful, impossible city.

As I had led institutions that were dependent on philanthropy, it was intriguing to enter the field "from the other side," especially at a time when interest in philanthropy was blossoming. The challenge of philanthropy is how to contribute to the public good while at the same time assist both the American public and policymakers in understanding the power of philanthropy to effect positive change both in our nation and abroad.

For more than twenty years, like many of my colleagues in higher education, as well as at other nonprofit institutions, I had been a frequent mendicant in the corridors of philanthropy. Indeed, sometimes in different capacities, as dean, provost and later, president, I had come to appreciate the depth, breadth and scope of American philanthropy. I had been privileged to witness the operations of the Vincent Astor Foundation and was a Board member of the Aaron Diamond and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations, the J. Paul Getty Trust, and an advisor to the Annenberg Foundation. In fact, in writing this essay, I realized that, through the years, I had served on the Boards of over three dozen different nonprofit organizations and institutions. These experiences had led me to an understanding of some of the mechanics of grantmaking. I also understood how potential grant recipients translate their ideas into funding proposals and how grantmaking decisions are made on the donor side. Extensive reading about U.S. democracy, particularly such a seminal work as Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, had given me a historical basis for understanding the unique characteristics of Americans, their altruism, and philanthropic impulses. By coincidence, one of the last courses I taught at Brown, which I co-taught with Stephen Graubard, a noted author who for more than 30 years was the editor of Daedalus, was about Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Rereading Tocqueville's description of the American character, I realized that it fit perfectly with the character of Andrew Carnegie, the immigrant, businessman and philanthropist. Carnegie's name was one of a handful of names that I had encountered in Tabriz, Iran, when, as a youngster, I read about the lives of self-made men—not only those who had become rich, but also writers, inventors, and others—from Robert Fulton to Andrew Carnegie. As president of The New York Public Library, where I had inherited Andrew Carnegie's legacy of "Carnegie libraries," [112] it was natural for me to read Carnegie's famous 1889 essay, The Gospel of Wealth, in which he asserted that all personal wealth beyond that required to meet the needs of one's family should be regarded as a trust fund to be administered for the benefit of society.

Throughout my professional career, I had believed, practiced and preached that anyone who joins an institution, especially presidents, should do everything possible to learn about their institution's history, mission, complexities, accomplishments, reach—and limitations. I had read extensively about the University of Pennsylvania, The New York Public Library, and Brown University, so, as a prelude to joining Carnegie Corporation of New York, I extended my readings to include not only Andrew Carnegie himself, but also the mission, work and history of the Corporation. I learned everything I could. I read about my immediate predecessor, David Hamburg, who had already demonstrated to me that Carnegie Corporation was not a rigid, inflexible organization: although the Corporation did not have a formal program focused on support of libraries in the United States, when Dr. Hamburg was president of the Corporation, he made an exception and gave The New York Public Library a $500,000 grant towards its 75th Anniversary Fund. The Ford Foundation, I learned—through its distinguished president and a great friend, Frank Thomas—also made such exceptions in exceptional situations. [113]

In general, the whole concept of philanthropy, and of American philanthropy in particular, interested me deeply. It was a revelation to me, and I'm sure to many others, that people would voluntarily part from their fortunes to give to a cause, not out of pity or charity, but out of a belief in that cause. The concept that these individuals were contributing to building something rather than just providing for immediate charitable needs was compelling, as was the fact that some people in control of great wealth would put societal well-being on a par with their devotion to providing for their own children or grandchildren. This brings to mind an important distinction between charity and philanthropy that has eroded over time, but should be noted because it highlights the different concerns that donors may have: charity, which is derived from the Latin word caritas, meaning dear, has a long religious history; for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, for example, it has meant giving immediate relief to human suffering without passing judgment on those who suffer. Philanthropy has a more secular history and comes from the Greek word philanthropos, meaning love of mankind. The Greek meaning carried over to English and, for the longest time, philanthropy referred only to a caring disposition toward one's fellow man. Now the word is used to describe generosity that promotes human progress in any field.

Being a historian carries its own particular burden: in my case, I could not help but be mindful of the fact that I was assuming the presidency not only as an administrator but also as a steward of Andrew Carnegie's trust, and therefore, that I had a historical and moral, not to mention fiduciary, duty to do justice to Carnegie's vision and legacy. After all, this was a man who had even entered into a prenuptial agreement with his wife-to-be that declared their joint intentions to devote the bulk of his wealth to the public good. [114]

As a historian, I was also aware of the many issues that may arise during times of transition in leadership. One must always be aware of how important transitions are and cognizant of how much work they require. Transitions have to be smooth. They have to be planned. They have to be orchestrated—not simply for the sake of the departing or incoming individual, but for the health of the institution involved. During a time of transition, institutional leadership must take care to see that the public's perception of their institution is not diminished, that it does not seem rattled by change or judged to be floundering in any way. The institution must always be seen to be on the ascendancy; its momentum must not be slowed or checked. Its built-in energy must be tapped to keep it moving forward without hesitancy or doubt. The emphasis must always be on continuities rather than discontinuities, on traditions as well as how to accommodate change.

Nonetheless, installing a new president is, by necessity, always going to be accompanied by a period of adjustment for the institution and its staff. Such transitions, however, can also provide the opportunity for reflection, self-analysis, and renewal because one necessarily takes stock of personal and institutional strengths and weaknesses that will lead to success or, if unrecognized, prove to be stumbling blocks. For my part, as the new president of the Corporation, I was aware that there were pluses and minuses to be tallied. On the positive side, my years at several major American universities had certainly familiarized me with the workings of institutions like Carnegie Corporation that were focused on research and education and other national and international challenges. After all, by their very nature, the educational mission of universities incorporates a focus on the major issues confronting our nation and the world. The Corporation's mandate to help create and disseminate knowledge was a direct parallel to the mission of universities; both met universal needs.

The minuses included the fact that I knew little about the inner workings of a foundation and its staff, the process of decision making at a foundation and setting of priorities. I had no firsthand knowledge of the difficulties involved in what Andrew Carnegie had termed "scientific philanthropy," namely that money is not simply given away; monies are invested in ideas, institutions, organizations, programs and individuals with vision and strong leadership, and with strategic plans in place. But I was as eager to learn as much as I could and so it was, therefore, with both joy and trepidation that I took up my new position, which came with the legacy built on the work of my predecessors.

Carnegie Corporation of New York

As I studied the work and history of the foundation, I began to assess its resources and personnel, not to mention its programmatic priorities, both past and present. In the process, I worked out some basic questions about the Corporation that were in keeping with the kinds of questions I have always asked about institutions I have led, such as, What are we doing? Why are we doing what we're doing? How do we know that what we're doing, we're doing well? Who else does what we do, but does it better?

There are two ways to get answers to such questions. First, rely on consultants to help find answers. Second, devote the time necessary to gathering the information firsthand. I chose to follow the second course, engaging in in-depth conversations with a multitude of scholars, diplomats, university presidents and educators, heads of nonprofit organizations, other foundation leaders, policymakers, present and former Corporation grantees, and many other individuals. In due time, I also interviewed every member of the Corporation's staff. My intent was to gain some real understanding of their experiences at the Corporation and their vision of what our mission entailed in order to acquire as much knowledge as I could about the foundation's work, its grantees and its partners. Furthermore, it was important to avoid discontinuity with work that had already taken place and to maintain continuity. Of particular importance, naturally, were my meetings with my immediate predecessors, David Hamburg [115] and Alan Pifer. [116]

To mark the symbolic continuity of the Corporation's presidential administrations, my first task was to help launch the final report of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, [117] the culmination of three years' work by Dr. Hamburg. He had chaired the Commission, along with Cyrus Vance, and their efforts were aided by a number of other distinguished national and international commissioners and scholars. The Corporation had established the Commission in 1994 to address "the looming threats to world peace of intergroup violence and to advance new ideas for the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict." During the course of its work the Commission produced more than forty scholarly and policy relevant publications covering an astonishing range of issues. [118]

To aid in the transition between administrations, I sought the pro bono services of McKinsey & Company, which had helped me both at the Library and at Brown, to carry out an in-depth study of the organization and structure of Carnegie Corporation and to provide an assessment of the foundation's strengths and weaknesses, as well as its potential. One thing that soon became clear in studying Carnegie Corporation's evolution and its current standing was that while, in the past, the Corporation used to be one of the wealthiest foundations in the United States in terms of endowment, that was no longer the case. [119] Today, the Corporation's reputation far exceeds its resources. The same can be said of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was founded in 1913 and is committed to "fostering knowledge and innovation to enrich and sustain the lives and livelihood of poor and excluded people throughout the world." [120]

In its nearly one hundred years of grantmaking, the Corporation's focus has been on advancing education and knowledge and on international peace, but by necessity, it has also worked in related areas. Andrew Carnegie mandated that the Corporation should benefit the people of the United States, although up to 7.4 percent of the funds could be used for the same purpose in countries that are or have been members of the British Dominions, subsequently, the Commonwealth. In recent years, the "Commonwealth" aspect of the Corporation's funding has focused on sub-Saharan Africa. Carnegie's charge to his foundation was also remarkable in that he did not intend to hold the future hostage to the past, declaring that since, "Conditions upon the erth [sic] inevitably change; hence, no wise man will bind Trustees forever to certain paths, causes or institutions...I give my Trustees full authority to change policy or causes hitherto aided, from time to time, when this, in their opinion, has become necessary or desirable. They shall best conform to my wishes by using their own judgment..." Carnegie's prescient and generous intentions have allowed the Corporation to have an impact in a wide range of areas.

Andrew Carnegie left behind a fascinating history. First and foremost, Carnegie's name is synonymous with libraries. Beginning in 1886, Carnegie, and later Carnegie Corporation, in its early years, collectively spent $56 million to create 1,681 public libraries in nearly as many U.S. communities and 828 libraries in other parts of the world. [121]

But more than that, Andrew Carnegie's personal philanthropy was remarkably wide-ranging. He founded more than 20 different institutions and organizations in the United States and elsewhere, devoted to advancing causes such as international peace, ethics in international affairs, and scientific research as well as to improving teaching and education, supporting Scottish universities, and recognizing heroism. He created Carnegie Hall and funded the establishment of the Peace Palace in The Hague. [122] Perhaps less well known than his dedication to building libraries for the general public was his dedication to the cause of international peace and the prevention of deadly conflict. In Carnegie's view, capitalism provided no moral justification for war. Reason was the source men and women should look to in order to find solutions for conflict, and competition was the best substitute for going to war. As a rationalist, he believed in these principles; as a philanthropist, he thought he could act on them.

Carnegie became a tireless promoter of ways to further the cause of peace. In a 1907 speech, ultimately translated into 13 languages, he argued that war might be eliminated if a global organization, which he later proposed calling a "league of nations," was established with authority to settle international disputes through arbitration and the use of economic sanctions. After World War I, President Woodrow Wilson's proposal for the League of Nations had much in common with Carnegie's ideas, as did subsequent proposals for the United Nations. It is therefore no surprise that Andrew Carnegie's interest in the pursuit of peace has informed the Corporation's work throughout the past century and into the present day. For example, since the advent of the Cold War, and now in the post-Soviet era, the Corporation has maintained a focus on efforts to reduce the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons. The relationship between the United States and Russia is a current concern, now further complicated by the emerging importance of post-Soviet Eurasia and the threat to global stability of states at risk. Similar concerns led the Corporation to create its Scholars Program in 1999 to give individual scholars the ability to explore their vision of issues relating to the Corporation's work, including international peace and security, with a current focus on Islam. It is our hope that Carnegie Scholars will increase our understanding of the fact that Islam is not a monolithic religion but one that is nuanced in how it is practiced and interpreted, and that scholarship can also help bring about a deeper understanding of how Islam has influenced—and has been affected by—the current process of globalization.

Over the decades, the work that Andrew Carnegie began has led to landmark efforts that continue to influence the progress of society. Let me sketch some of them for you: in 1917, with capital and initial subsidies from the Corporation, [123] Andrew Carnegie established the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA). The story of how TIAA originated is actually one that points out the extraordinary effect that Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy has had on the quality of American higher education. While serving as a Trustee at Cornell University, Carnegie was shocked to discover that teachers, "one of the highest professions," in his words, earned less than his clerks and lacked retirement benefits. In 1905, he established the Carnegie Teachers Pension Fund—which later received a national charter by Act of Congress and became The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching [124] —with a $10 million endowment to provide free pensions to college and university teachers. But there were strings attached, and one requirement was that participating institutions had to have the highest academic admission standards of the day. As a result, colleges and universities across the nation raised their academic standards in order to join the pension system. Carnegie's biographer, Joseph Frazier Wall wrote, "With his pension plan, [he] had done more in a year to advance the standards of higher education within the United States than probably any carefully conceived program to accomplish that goal could ever have done." However, Carnegie eventually realized that even his personal wealth could not support the pension system's growth. Therefore, through Carnegie Corporation of New York, he made a $1 million gift to establish TIAA. [125] The association managed the retirement accounts that were jointly funded by teachers and their employers. In his recent book, The Foundation: A Great American Secret, [126] Joel L. Fleishman, the former president of the Atlantic Philanthropies, notes that, "Today, we can recognize the instinctive genius that lay behind Carnegie's scheme [to create TIAA]. At the time, it was not so obvious. Frederick T. Gates, the philanthropic advisor to John D. Rockefeller, Sr. remarked, ´Carnegie is putting his ten millions into a pension fund for teachers. I think this an extraordinary act of folly. Of all people, teachers should be an example of thrift.'" [127]

Now called TIAA-CREF, it is one of the world's largest insurance companies, with over $300 billion in assets. Raising the standards of excellence for America's institutions of higher education exemplifies how the Corporation's funding acted as a lever of social change, since inherent in the creation of TIAA was the idea that Americans were entitled to a secure income in their retirement, a concept that has been carried through in the creation of the Social Security system.

In the decade following the initial funding of TIAA (specifically, between 1920 and 1924), the Carnegie Americanization Study [128] was published by Harper & Brothers Publishers. [129] The ten-volume study grew out of the Corporation's concern with understanding the role of Carnegie libraries involved in social work with immigrants. [130] It is not surprising, then, to note that today, in the midst of raging debate about acculturation and assimilation both in the United States and Europe, the Corporation continues to be focused on immigrant civic integration through its Strengthening U.S. Democracy Program.

Reading through the Corporation's history is like being an archeologist who keeps finding more and more fascinating episodes that demonstrate how Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy made a real difference in a surprising variety of realms. For instance, in 1923, the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of insulin was awarded to Drs. Frederick Banting and J.J.R. Macleod, who conducted their groundbreaking experiments in a Corporation-funded laboratory at the University of Toronto. A decade later, in the 1930s, the Corporation enlisted Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to undertake a study of the "The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy." The resulting book, An American Dilemma, was published in 1944 and is still cited as a groundbreaking report on race relations in the U.S., one that raised the nation's consciousness about its race problem and was noted in the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to prohibit segregation in the nation's public schools. In the 1940s, Corporation funding helped to create the Educational Testing Service (ETS), a nonprofit organization aiming to "advance quality and equity in education by providing fair and valid student assessments." In 1956, the Corporation created the Foundation Center to support and improve philanthropy by promoting public understanding of the field and helping grantseekers to succeed.

In the 1960s, the Corporation began an era of working, in part, through commissions and task forces. One example is the creation, in 1964, of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, which studied the role of noncommercial educational television in society. In 1967, the Commission published a celebrated report, Public Television: A Program for Action; its recommendations were adopted in the Public Broadcasting Act, which created the public broadcasting system. Another such entity—the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education—was established in 1967 under the leadership of Clark Kerr. Financed by the Corporation and sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, it produced over 150 seminal reports and books and led to the formation of the Federal Pell Grants program, which has awarded more than $100 billion in grants to an estimated 30 million postsecondary students.

In 1965, Head Start was founded as a result of, among other factors, the Corporation's multi-year support of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation's work on early childhood cognitive development. Also in the 1960s, Carnegie Corporation support contributed to the creation of Sesame Street and the Children's Television Workshop, ushering in an era of quality educational television for youngsters.

In the 1970s, after a long hiatus, the Corporation returned to grantmaking in South Africa, supporting the formation of "public interest law" projects that challenged apartheid policies in the courts. In the 1980s, the Corporation initiated a major study of poverty in South Africa, which was known as "the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa." The first study, issued in 1932 and known as the "Carnegie Poor White Study," had been intended to document the plight of poverty-stricken Afrikaners, but had the unfortunate and completely unintended effect of being used, in later years, to help justify apartheid. The new poverty commission was a way to close the books on the original study and create a document that revealed what life under apartheid really meant. Despite a hostile reception from the ruling National Party, the findings of the report were disseminated widely throughout the South African press and internationally. Francis Wilson, a respected economist at the University of Cape Town and director of the South Africa Labour and Development Research Unit at the university who also coordinated the poverty commission, said, "The report [131] helped to inform the policymakers of the 1990s. Many people involved in the inquiry went on to assume leadership positions in the current government. It created a climate of informed opinion about poverty in South Africa and when the African National Congress came to power, they made the point that eradication of poverty was part of their agenda."

More recently, in the 1990s, the Corporation created The Carnegie Task Force on Meeting the Needs of Young Children. Its 1994 report, Starting Points, was hailed as critical to raising the national consciousness about the need to focus on the healthy development of children—and support for their families—during the first three years of life. The aforementioned Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict also did its work in this decade as did the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, which, with support from the Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation, published What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future, a 1996 report that provided a framework and agenda for teacher education reform across the country.

On occasion, the Corporation has been asked to administer grants on behalf of a benefactor or two. For example, since 2001, we have been able to grant a total of $85 million to small- and medium-sized, New York City-based arts, cultural and social service organizations because of the generosity of an anonymous donor who has chosen the Corporation to make the grants on the donor's behalf.

As can be imagined, the efforts outlined above are only a fragment of the thousands of projects, programs and initiatives in which the Corporation, with its long and distinguished history, has played an instrumental role. Naturally, anyone joining the Corporation would bask in the light of its accomplishments and want to dwell on its record of achievement. For me, however, while proud of the foundation's successes, I also wanted to understand where it might have weaknesses, and in retrospect, to be clear about which grants really had been successful and which had not.

I was surprised to learn how many foundations, organizations, institutions and individuals wanted—and still do want—to be affiliated with the Corporation and how many different sectors of our society expected something from Carnegie Corporation. Because of the foundation's nearly century-long record of innovative and forward-thinking work and its genuine interest in the progress and advancement of its grantees, the Corporation was continually being asked to fund model projects, seek solutions to innumerable problems, carry out research, provide guidance and in general, do just about anything that needed doing. The temptation to try to lead in many different fields was strong, but we knew we should do so only in those areas in which we had the requisite strengths and expertise. Before I even officially joined the Corporation, I thought long and hard about how to focus the foundation's resources most effectively.

In transitions involving institutional leadership, the central point is always how to manage expectations about a new administration and what it will do—or not do. Where is the balance among those expectations, available resources, and any outstanding long- or short-term commitments? A foundation, even with a reasonable endowment, simply cannot address just any problem that falls within the scope of its mission. It is important not to over-promise or to dare flying without ensuring a safe landing. It is equally important to realize very early on that a foundation is primarily a source of funding in a given field and it should not be confused with—or confuse itself with—its grantees. The grantees are the real agents of change, and a foundation must empower them without usurping their missions, accomplishments, and identity. Perhaps most important of all, foundation leaders have to come to grips with the fact that their institution cannot do everything, that there are other more-than-capable foundations and organizations that can step in when necessary. This should not be a cause for dismay because working cooperatively with other foundations and organizations with complementary agendas always engenders greater benefits and provides greater impact. In addition, cooperation also helps to build networks and promotes action. From my point of view, if you are dedicated to every good cause, then in essence, you are for none. Total commitment to all good causes equates with total apathy because it leaves no room for action. Thus, setting priorities and honing one's focus are essential in order to achieve measurable results.

Other issues occupying my thoughts included setting a course that would be supportive of vital programs and projects but at the same time allow for bucking trends; that would encourage a diversity of approaches and airing of competing views about solutions to problems while also promoting independent thinking. Solid scholarship and objective evaluation must inform such efforts in order to invest in projects that will stand the test of time.

Incoming presidents, especially those who come from struggling institutions, as I did, should be prepared for a culture shock when they move from the realms of academe or libraries, where scarcity is the norm and where the impact of every dollar counts, to the world of foundations, where it seems that money, for the most part, is not a problem. During my decades at Brown, The New York Public Library, and before that, at the University of Pennsylvania, a large percentage of my time was given over to fundraising necessitated by cultures of scarcity. The choices I could make were probably determined as much by frugality as by merit. This long-lived mindset traveled with me to the Corporation, where, until I recognized what was happening, it probably constituted an obstacle to making grants as expeditiously as possible.

When a president takes on a new organization and management structure and is steering a new course, naturally, each one will draw inspiration from different experiences and role models. My role model as a philanthropic leader was the late Jack Sawyer, who headed the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 1975 to 1987. Sawyer always made it clear that he was a steward of Mellon's resources, not their owner, and that his obligation was to uphold the foundation's traditions and standards and use its funds for the greatest impact and the greatest good. I remember being very impressed by how, at the Mellon Foundation, you did not apply for a grant, you were invited to apply, a policy they still, by and large, follow today. I also distinctly remember how, when The New York Public Library received a large and generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, I said to Jack Sawyer that I would do my best to ensure that the money was used as effectively as possible, and was impressed by his reply, which was that he knew I'd do a good job because if I didn't, I wouldn't be invited to ask the Mellon Foundation for any additional funding. Whether one received a grant from the Mellon Foundation or not, Jack Sawyer always treated people with respect. He tried to understand potential grantees' objectives and priorities. He did not pontificate. He was a good listener. And clearly, being a good listener is an important skill for foundation leaders as well as university heads, not to mention program officers and deans.

Some Preliminary Thoughts

I am not a great fan of the philosopher Michel Foucault, but one of his sayings has always stuck in my mind. At first, I thought it was merely clever verbal gymnastics, but the time came when I realized that it was, in fact, substantive—namely, "People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what they do does." [132] With that idea to spur me on, I wrote my first essay for the Corporation's 1997 annual report—a tradition for Carnegie Corporation presidents—and called it Some Preliminary Thoughts. The essay was based on the gist of Foucault's questions, which I applied to the work and mission of Carnegie Corporation, such as: "Does the Corporation perceive itself as an incubator of ideas or as a sustainer of institutions that play that role? How do we combat the age-old problem of scatteration in our grantmaking, while retaining the flexibility to respond to a tantalizing idea or a target of opportunity?" I also wondered, "What are some important new issues facing our nation and the world that we should deal with? Where is our comparative leadership advantage? How do we achieve the right balance between continuity and change?" That last question was crucial, because I did not—and do not—believe we should engage in change for change's sake. As we considered initiatives, I believed that we would probably reaffirm the importance of some of the paths already taken, only adjusting the emphasis somewhat.

The fundamental reason that I wrote Some Preliminary Thoughts was to set out the general context of my agenda for the foundation, but also to try to make clear that I had come to Carnegie Corporation with an open mind, not a ready-made recipe for change. It was important to assure the staff that what changes would be made over time would be thoughtful and deliberate, and certainly not arbitrary. In fact, I could not act until I understood as much as I could about the foundation's work and its nearly century-long role in American society, in order to do justice to the legacy of Andrew Carnegie. Among the first steps I took was to meet, individually, with all the Corporation's program officers and also with a great many of its grantees. As in any transition, both the staff of the foundation and its grantees were going through a period of anxiety about what would happen under a new president. There were some concerns about my management philosophy and my priorities. Would I bring in a hierarchical, academic model? Notwithstanding my assurances, did I have a "secret plan" or vision to impose upon the foundation? Did I have a ready-made team to move to Carnegie Corporation from the University of Pennsylvania, the Library or Brown? Similar questions were natural, both from the staff and from grantees.

There was particular anxiety among those individuals and organizations who, over the years, had been the beneficiaries of Corporation support. They were concerned about the change in administration because they worried they might have no way of effectively communicating with the new leadership, either individually or collectively. Beyond that, because I was an educator, they worried that I might not be aware of the political, scientific, economic, cultural, ecological, and ethnic challenges facing our society. To allay these anxieties, I followed much the same course as I had at The New York Public Library. That meant letting people know that I was indeed in the learning and education business, meaning also in the information and knowledge business. Many aspects of the world of philanthropy were not at all alien to me.

Still, I had many questions of my own. I did not know about all the "moving parts" of a foundation. How, for example, does one become a program officer at a foundation? Do you study a certain subject in school or need a degree in a certain field? Or do you join a foundation, perhaps in an administrative capacity and then eventually get the job of program officer or work up to the position in some other way? In my autobiography, The Road to Home, I wrote about Dorothy E. Soderlund, the program assistant in charge of the administration of the Ford Foundation's Training Research Fellowships in 1960 when I was nominated for a Ford Foreign Area Training Fellowship. Ms. Soderlund, who was extremely intelligent and efficient, did not have a college degree but was in charge of a major foundation program and did a superb job. Could I infer anything from the way foundations operated from that situation?

In general, I wondered, how do foundation presidents recruit personnel? Is the search only within the academy? Does it include the ranks of municipal or public agencies? Other foundations? What kind of experience or training do foundation personnel need to have? If not formal schooling in their field, then what kind of exposure would be most relevant or helpful? Do foundation program staff tend to be insular, protected from knowing all they need to know about a field by the very nature of their work, where grantseekers may put up with a foundation staff member's whims or even their ignorance because the grantseeker is in the position of a supplicant? In that connection, how does one avoid the foundation-grantee version of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex"? With its counterpart, the "philanthropy" version—the "grantor, grantee, and consultant complex"—the relationship can be colored by a culture of dependence, where grantees expect ongoing, long-term support and therefore, are averse to taking risks.

How does the president establish one or more new directions for the foundation? If a foundation's charter allows for some latitude as, for example, ours does, is one confined to fields in which foundation personnel are already experts or can new staff be recruited? Can existing program officers recast themselves as experts in new fields? Should program officers be specialists, or generalists who can manage any program area? Are they like Foreign Service officers who stay on and continue to do their work under different administrations, year after year? If new directions are indicated, and existing staff is not suited to the new work, what legal, moral and ethical obligations are there to them? What if new blood is need for "unclogging the arteries"? Some foundations had unchanging programs over many decades and staff that had also been fixtures at the foundation for the same long periods of time. Others offered only short-term contracts to program officers so they always had the opportunity to replenish the ranks, if that was appropriate or necessary. Would either of these pathways, or some combination of the two, be best for Carnegie Corporation in the years ahead?

That wasn't all I wondered about. There was the issue of consultants, which many foundations—as well as other institutions—often rely on. How are decisions on their efficacy arrived at? How often should consultants be changed and new individuals or consulting organizations be brought into a project? I have always been cautious about the use of consultants; they are quick to take credit for success but scatter to the wind like dandelions gone to seed when problems loom on the horizon. As the adage says, "Success has many parents but failure is an orphan." I think an institution should not rely on the same individuals or organizations all the time because new ideas and fresh perspectives may not be forthcoming. Consultants do not always give independent judgments; they may simply try to justify what an institution is already doing. Their advice is often what they think institutional leaders want to hear, so that their services will be called upon again.

Many other questions intrigued me. How do foundations sort through and judge the value of the many ideas presented to the program staff? Some certainly stem from the foundation's ongoing projects and long-standing interests, but what is the process for evaluating those that come from other sources, by other routes? How does a foundation president keep abreast of trends and developments in society and in the wide variety of scientific, cultural, political and academic fields while at the same time coping with the day-to-day administrative needs and demands of a foundation, its meetings, visitors, committees, budgets, personnel issues, etc.? I was reminded of the danger of losing touch with the world of knowledge, ideas and informed opinions by some who told me that, as the president of a foundation, all I'd hear from then on would be what people thought I wanted to hear. This would be true especially at the beginning of my tenure, because many would fear that jobs and grants were at risk. (Many grant recipients, of course, do not see it that way. At a university, if tenure or promotion were denied a faculty member, for example, you had earned an enemy for life. Foundation culture is more "salutary" than that: when those looking for support are turned down, they know there will be other days and other grant applications.)

When a professional cynic congratulated me on my appointment, he reminded me that, as a foundation president, I would never hear an honest sentence or even eat a bad meal. Another individual, a friend of mine who is also a foundation president, sent me a cactus as a gift with a note that said foundations are often intellectually barren places and I would therefore need to keep myself constantly "watered," so I wouldn't become isolated from what was going on in the world or lose touch with ideas. The cactus was meant to remind me of that.

So it was with the cactus ensconced in my office that I set about working with the foundation's staff and officers to begin formulating our agenda for the months and years ahead.

Next Steps

I earlier wrote that as far back as my years as dean and provost of the University of Pennsylvania, I thought it should be normal for institutions, to serve the public interest and for self-interest, as well, to cooperate, to complement each other and work together. Collaborating in such areas as coordinating library acquisitions or the bulk purchasing of everyday items in order to save money or, at the other end of the spectrum, investing in sophisticated and expensive scientific equipment such as electron microscopes seemed to be common-sense propositions. In a similar vein, it seemed to make sense for foundations to collaborate in order to invest wisely, increase their impact, plan further ahead, and reduce the tendency of both staff and institutions themselves to operate in silos.

One of my first priorities at the Corporation became building alliances with other philanthropies—a strategy that built on the Corporation's history of forming alliances to support good causes. I thought that we should all be less interested in who, or which institution, got credit for a particular program or project than in advancing good ideas in whatever way would serve them best. Foundations with mutual program interests should not replicate each other's efforts because doing so is wasteful. Supporting a project just to be able to say "we are also involved" is equally improvident. I may have a particular aversion to that kind of inefficiency because of the lessons I've learned about institutional frugality. After all, I come from a culture that hates waste—that in fact, cannot afford it.

Upon my assumption of the presidency of the Corporation, I was gratified to find likeminded leaders at our sister foundations, such as Susan Berresford, president of the Ford Foundation; Jonathan Fanton, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Patty Stonesifer, chief executive officer of the Gates Foundation Gail Levin, executive director of the Annenberg Foundation; Aryeh Neier president of the Open Society Institute; Joel L. Fleishman, former president of the Atlantic Philanthropies and his successor, John R. Healy; Hodding Carter, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, who was succeeded by Alberto Ibargéen; as well as Gordon Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and now his successor, Judith Rodin. Some examples of the Corporation's collaborative efforts include our support for higher education in Africa, where we formed a funding alliance with the Ford, Rockefeller and MacArthur foundations that is now called the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa. It has recently been joined by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, under the direction of its president Paul Brest, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, under the direction of president William G. Bowen (Don Michael Randel, former president of the University of Chicago, was recently named the new head of the Mellon Foundation), and the Kresge Foundation, under president Rip Rapson. Launched in 2000 as a five-year effort, in 2005 it was renewed for five more years. To date, the funding partners have contributed over $150 million to strengthen African universities in Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and, more recently, Egypt and Madagascar. An additional $200 million has been pledged by the Partnership, a mechanism by which the participating foundations provide both joint and individual support.

Our work on higher education in Russia is also supported by a partnership focused on a joint strategy of reinvigorating a post-Communist Russian university system that had, for the most part, abandoned regional intellectuals and scholars to the free-market uncertainties of modern life. In developing Centers For Advanced Study and Education (CASEs), which empowered universities to create academic hubs for scholars in the social sciences and the humanities and become vibrant intellectual communities for established and emerging scholars, the Corporation has worked with both the MacArthur Foundation and the Russian Ministry of Education. (The Open Society Institute was also involved in the initial CASEs funding.) To date, nine CASEs have been established in Russia and four more in the post-Soviet states.

The Corporation's efforts to improve both teacher education and urban high schools are framed around collaborative efforts. Teachers for a New Era (TNE) was designed by the Corporation to strengthen K-12 teaching by developing state-of-the-art programs at schools of education. It is also being supported by the Ford and Annenberg foundations, while a comprehensive evaluation of the initiative is being undertaken with primary funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and additional support from the Ford and Nellie Mae Education foundations. Schools for a New Society, a Corporation initiative aimed at improving urban high schools—which has school district reform as its core component—was also supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In the area of improving journalism education, the Corporation partners with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education.

In another example of collaboration, an area that the Corporation's Board thought it was important to support was income inequality. We did not have the capacity to undertake the research and evaluation ourselves. Hence, in 2000, we made a grant of $1,500,000 to the Russell Sage Foundation to analyze the implications of the widened income gap in the United States. Russell Sage was the most appropriate institution to take on this project as it is not only devoted solely to research in the social sciences, but also publishes research findings under its own imprint. The result of our grants and Russell Sage's research efforts was a report, published in 2004, called Social Inequality, that presented the conclusions of forty-eight social scientists on how recent increases in economic inequality have exacerbated social inequities of the kind that might make the widening gap between rich and poor Americans difficult to reverse.

Naturally, we also collaborated among Carnegie's family of organizations. Since 2001, for example, the Corporation has worked with its sister Carnegie institutions [133] on launching and awarding the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, which is given every two years to one or more individuals or families who, like Andrew Carnegie, have dedicated their private wealth to the public good and who have a sustained an impressive career in philanthropy. The Medal has also helped to fulfill the wish of the Carnegie organizations to work together for a common purpose, and to once again prove the maxim that charity does indeed begin at home. In that connection, it should be noted that over the years, the Corporation has made numerous grants to its sister Carnegie institutions for projects and programs that have intersected with our priorities. The Corporation, for example, has provided funding to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs; The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; Carnegie-Mellon University; The Carnegie Institution of Washington and the Carnegie Foundation of the Netherlands/Peace Palace.

Establishing these partnerships was a rewarding experience, but in the meantime, the Corporation still had to deal with the crucial and difficult issues involving some of the Corporation's long-standing relationships with a number of major nonprofit organizations. These had come to expect ongoing, general support from the Corporation. Many of them had built this expectation into their budgets. The impetus for this change was our decision to expand the diversity of our grantmaking and base our work on a competition of ideas rather than of needs. This is a particularly important issue because my belief is that what foundations can and must do is invest in ideas and the projects that are enriched by them. Needs are constant, and foundations cannot satisfy the needs of individuals, groups, communities or even nations on a long-term basis—but what they can do is invest in ideas about how to cope with and meet those needs.

Therefore, at the Corporation, we began to bring to a close some of our ongoing general institutional support, which had included the funding of a number of well-known organizations. We did make final grants to these groups, intending them as bridge grants to help support the organizations while they explored other avenues for funding. In this way, we moved from a kind of "block grants" approach to more project-centered funding, which was still centered on Andrew Carnegie's core concerns, namely education and international peace, but with emphases that addressed the most pressing national and global concerns. Some of the questions we began to focus on included the plight of urban high schools. Is their seemingly endless decline reversible? If so, how can we create improvements: one school at a time or city by city? What about the need to upgrade the status of schools of education on university campuses as well as their curriculum and the quality of the training they provide to teachers? Is there anything we can do to contribute to strengthening our democracy in terms of breaking down barriers to citizenship and to promote immigrant civic integration? There was still a great deal the Corporation could contribute, we felt, in terms of continuing our work on nuclear nonproliferation, and in helping to stabilize the relationship between the United States and Russia through efforts to assist Russia's intelligentsia in a period of national transition, when they were caught between hope and hopelessness—between the allure of democracy and the pressures of both their own financial survival and of the national security needs of the newly minted Russian Federation. In Africa, our concern was to work with nations where stability, democracy, and reform were central to their development and to contribute to their progress by strengthening their universities, which will produce the African leaders of tomorrow, both women and men.

In terms of decisions about staff, even though the Corporation is an at-will institution, I wanted it to be clear that we did not have a university-type "tenure" system. Hence, we instituted two-year, renewable terms for all program officers and program chairs. We also tested several models of new personnel evaluation systems, eventually settling on one that seemed the most efficacious, providing incentives not only for work well done but also for extraordinary merit. These moves were all carried out with an eye to the future. I say that because it's important to bear in mind that the work of a foundation is not an abstraction, but a true reflection of the excellence, expertise, and dedication of its staff. It is also necessary to keep in mind that foundations do change direction from time to time and must have the flexibility to bring in new people with new visions of how program goals can be realized. This view of a foundation's work is also beneficial to the staff, because it discourages them from seeing the foundation either as a kind of permanent parking place for their careers or a dead end. The same way a foundation invests in its grantees is the same way it should invest in the professional and career development of its staff members at every level.

Foundations should provide educational opportunities for their staff, encouraging the evolution of their skills and intellect and helping them find the resources to do so. After all, the more educated, trained and cultured a staff member is, the better equipped he or she will be as a grantmaker. This investment in staff members is particularly valued at the Corporation, because just about everything we do involves a focus on education—and we feel that we can't invest in others through our grantmaking without also investing in our own staff. The Corporation, therefore, pays the full tuition for courses contributing to a staff member's first undergraduate degree, job-related graduate courses, job-related certificate programs, executive training and other job-related courses that directly apply to responsibilities at the Corporation. [134]

It might be said that this emphasis on staff development contributes to staff departures because, as individuals gain both work experience and education, they may move on to other positions. But I see departures as a natural part of the growth process of both staff members and organizations, and a stepping stone for individuals' upward mobility. In fact, when staff take positions at other organizations that involve more responsibility, it means we've done our job as incubators of learning and development of staff goals, their skills, and their leadership potential. They are ready to take the next step in their careers.

We also encourage staff to become involved in the community and in the work of other groups and organizations, in part to carry on Andrew Carnegie's tradition of investing in others, but also in order to help keep them from becoming isolated from "the real world," and to gain wider experience and deeper understanding of the operations and challenges of a wide variety of organizations. This also serves to balance any perceptions of foundation staff as simply "armchair" dispensers of money. Naturally, creating such an environment may also lead to staff departures as individuals broaden their horizons and as their skills, experience and knowledge become apparent to others with new opportunities to offer, but if that is the case, so be it. To be known as a school for training leadership as well as an employer is a wonderful legacy for any institution.

Some of the directions that Carnegie Corporation has embarked on in recent years were based on the premise that changing times demand new solutions to problems. For example, foundation collaborations, such as those I highlighted earlier, while not usual in the past, have become a necessity in order to multiply the strength and impact of our grantmaking. The Corporation's Board Chairs, Trustees and I have paid close attention to the makeup of our Board of Trustees in order to select leaders from different segments of society to assist us as we go forward.

Indeed, the Corporation has always had exceptional Boards of Trustees. During my tenure, it has been a great privilege for the Corporation staff and for me to have benefited from the wisdom of several university presidents, former governors (including one who also served as U.S. Secretary of Education), former international cabinet ministers, the president of a major newspaper company, a senator, the former editor-in-chief of a national media corporation, a former U.S. ambassador, a former senator, and an admiral, along with distinguished business, education, philanthropy, government and science leaders. The Corporation—and I, personally—have also gained immeasurably from the guidance and wise counsel of two extraordinary Board Chairs. Thomas H. Kean, former governor of New Jersey, former president of Drew University and co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, was first elected to the Board of Trustees in 1990. He served as Chair from 1997-2002. I am delighted that he will once again be serving as Chair in 2007, thus providing continuity for the Corporation as well as invaluable leadership. Helene L. Kaplan, Of Counsel, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, whose distinguished leadership in both the nonprofit and corporate worlds is quite remarkable, has served on the Corporation's Board of Trustees for more than two decades, including two ten-year terms as Trustee, two terms as Vice-Chair, and two terms as Chair of the Board, from 1985-1990 and from 2002 until 2007. Helene was also the first woman to serve as Chair of the Board. Her emphasis on governance and her contributions in helping to shape the scope and direction of the work of the Corporation have been immeasurable

The time and dedication that our Board members have devoted to the Corporation over the years makes an important point about American philanthropy: its strength is not rooted in money alone. One of its most notable features is volunteerism. Individuals who comprise outstanding Boards such as ours contribute their time and expertise out of a deep sense of civic duty and a commitment to the public good. Carnegie Corporation of New York is extremely fortunate that such exceptional leaders have joined with us in carrying on the legacy of Andrew Carnegie.

Investing in Ideas

Many of those reading this essay may be familiar with Andrew Carnegie's opinion that, "There is nothing inherently valuable in mere money...unless it is to be administered as a sacred trust for the good of others." To be the steward of such a trust doesn't mean simply writing checks; the utmost effort must be extended to ensure that philanthropic dollars are used wisely and effectively so as to have the most impact. Perhaps that is why I find myself drawn again and again to Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth, and to his cautionary reminder that, "Of every thousand dollars spent in so-called charity today, it is probable that nine hundred and fifty dollars is unwisely spent."

That's not to say that most of our grantees—in fact, the vast majority of grantees of most foundations'don't do vital, even indispensable work, or don't have important missions that are designed to advance the public good. What it does mean is that foundations should have clarity about their purpose and mission and be able to convey these values to the public, their staff and to grantees. Foundation staff and leadership should also be committed to respecting the spirit as well as the letter, of the donor's vision for the foundation and its work.

Safeguarding a foundation's mission is not only the task of the president and the Board, but must also be part of the very culture of the institution. Program officers must regard the foundation as an integrated, organic community of interests serving one overall mission, not as a collection of individual fiefdoms. That also means that leadership and program staff must be careful to weigh their personal or institutional aspirations against a realistic assessment of the limits of what they can accomplish in order to keep both in balance.

If all the elements of leadership, clarity of mission and staff focus are in place, then there are many opportunities for grantmaking to effect change. For example, grantmaking can support basic research, which can expand the parameters of knowledge in almost any given field, though its potential impact may take place over a long period of time. Grants can also support the implementation of evidence-based, time-and-scientifically tested findings in order to advance policy in social, scientific, cultural, educational or other realms. Along with implementation, grantmaking can promote the dissemination of a treasurehouse of ideas grounded in solid research that might have been neglected or overlooked. This is particularly important in an era of specialization, when new facts and knowledge can help to create synthesis among seemingly disparate ideas and help to unify different groups, individuals and organizations who find newly discovered common ground. Grantmaking may seem distant from actual research or direct involvement in the development or implementation of programs, projects and policies that can benefit society, but it is a very powerful tool.

The catalysts for change, the incubators of ideas and major investors in change are still the grantee organizations. Foundations can certainly take pride in the wisdom of their investments in various organizations but they should not be tempted to usurp the recognition that is due to their grantees. Most of the time, foundations provide funding for worthwhile projects—but funding itself is not excellence; it supports excellence. In that context, leaders must take care not to stifle creativity or interfere with the activities of grantees by trying to micromanage their work. The foundation's investment in a grantee is a way of activating and advancing its own priorities—but it is still the grantee who has the responsibility of actually carrying out the work.

Perhaps it seems evident, but foundations are not, at any given time, a grantor's institution; they don't carry the grantor's name, but the name of the founder. What foundation staff and leadership are doing is fulfilling the mandate of a donor who endowed a foundation to carry out work in certain areas, or with specific aims. Indeed, donor intent is the key element of foundation work. There are a number of different types of foundations, each of which should follow the dictates of the individual or family that created them. For example, operating foundations generally are not grantmaking institutions. They operate facilities or institutions devoted to a specific charitable activity spelled out in their charters. Some operating foundations may use their endowment to conduct research while others may have been created to provide such direct services as managing museums, historical sites, providing assistance to the handicapped, etc. Other foundations, such as the Aaron Diamond Foundation, the Vincent Astor Foundation, The Atlantic Philanthropies and the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Foundation focus on spending their entire endowment—often within a particular time span—in the service of particular ideas or causes, and then close their doors. Family foundations often have a twofold purpose: to make grants but also to maintain the foundation as a kind of laboratory to train future generations of the family and promote the art of giving as part of the family culture. Private grantmaking foundations, such as Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller, Ford, MacArthur, Mellon and other foundations, were created by their donors to carry out philanthropic efforts in perpetuity.

It is our good fortune that Andrew Carnegie, an extraordinary and prescient man who was both financially and intellectually generous, understood that the interpretation of his philanthropic intentions might have to take a different form at different times, especially in view of the fact that he specifically endowed the foundation to carry out his grantmaking in perpetuity. In his 1911 letter of gift to the Corporation, Carnegie wrote, "My desire is that the work which I hav [sic] [135] been carrying on, or similar beneficial work, shall continue during this and future generations."

In upholding Carnegie's traditions, we are the facilitators, and it is often our role to help mobilize other players around a central idea and help smooth the way for them to work together. Being a funder does give you the leverage, even the obligation, to use what influence you have, including convening power and access to other foundations and philanthropies, to ensure that promising programs and projects are able to attract all the resources they need in order to be carried out most effectively.

Notwithstanding all this, there are times when a foundation itself must, out of necessity, take center stage. That happens when a certain issue or problem must be addressed but no nonprofit organization seems to have that particular concern on their agenda. When such a situation arises, foundation staff and leadership may come to the conclusion that the only way to focus public attention on the issue is if they mobilize their private resources to advance action or explore proposed responses and solutions.

Many foundations have taken that path, and the Corporation is one of them. Among the commissions and initiatives we supported in the past were the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television; the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting; the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education; the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict; the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government; the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development; the Carnegie Task Force on Learning in the Primary Grades; and the Carnegie Task Force on Meeting the Needs of Young Children. During the past decade we launched a number of initiatives (some of which I have also alluded to earlier), such as Schools for a New Society, dedicated to urban high school reform in seven cities across the United States; Teachers for a New Era, focused on improving teacher education and training through the development of excellent schools of education; the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa; the Carnegie Advisory Council on Advancing Literacy to examine both research and reading policies and make recommendations for implementation strategies; and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, which grew out of discussions with the deans of leading journalism schools at four of America's top research universities—Berkeley, Columbia, Northwestern and the University of Southern California, along with the director of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University—and centers on laying a foundation for developing a vision of what a journalism school can be at an exemplary institution of higher education. [136]

In all of these cases, Carnegie Corporation did not dictate what the work of the commission, task force, council or initiative should be. The focus was instead on channeling the efforts of experts, educators, policymakers, scholars, and others, under the leadership of those who were dedicated, as was the foundation, to finding real, workable solutions to problems, and to developing substantive evidence and data to support the conclusions that were reached. There is no value to fulfilling preconceived notions about how particular issues should be addressed. Foundations must be neutral in outlook in order to create an environment in which exploration of all relevant areas of learning and knowledge and intellectual insight are encouraged in an atmosphere of intellectual rigor. The Carnegie Scholars Program, which I referred to earlier, does not have templates for how scholars should conduct their work or what their findings should be.

The freedom and ability to explore issues and problems that have not been fully addressed—or addressed at all—by private organizations or government agencies is one of the reasons that American foundations are critical to our society: it's a rare instance in which governments, whether local, state or national, are able to move with alacrity or offer innovative solutions to civic problems, or even develop models to demonstrate how proposed solutions may work in a real-world environment. Foundations can operate that way, and the fact that they often do, serving as incubators for progressive, even pioneering ideas, provides the public with program and policy alternatives they might otherwise never even know about or have the opportunity to consider. Indeed, perhaps one of the most important attributes of foundations is this very capacity to be flexible, a characteristic that can be of incalculable value in a complex society such as ours, which has so many checks and balances. Institutions can be highly bureaucratized—in fact, one of the ways they protect themselves is by armoring themselves with an elaborate bureaucracy and complicated processes for getting things done. That foundations are able to proceed more quickly, and with wider latitude, to provide model solutions to problems, and to help put important issues on the nation's front burner, highlights the lasting contributions that American foundations make to our nation.

Worth the Risk?

Every foundation claims that it's in the business of investing in innovation and new, important ideas and therefore, is taking risks. It's hard to identify risk in supporting projects or leaders who have a 99.9 percent chance of success, which is, unfortunately, often closer to the truth about the kinds of undertakings that receive foundation funding. Foundations should be in the risk business a lot more than they are because ideas need to be tested. This is particularly important in the policy realm because "solutions" have to be tested, too. Government agencies generally can't present policies to the public with the caveat that they are "risky," but foundations can do just that. They can take a chance on a promising policy, project or idea that may, in the end, turn out to be a failure, because analyzing failure is how to discover what works. This is the time-honored process of scientific research, in which failures are as important as successes. Each failure helps to narrow down the direction to be followed to achieve a successful result. While foundations claim to be in the risk business, many of their staff have a hard time coping with failure because the notion of risk is actually not built into the environment in which they work. With any hint of "failure," foundation staff will worry for their reputations, and grantees may fear that their grants will not be renewed.

It has always surprised me that the social sciences, which are patterned after the basic sciences, appear to be so risk averse. In my observation, social scientists will sometimes make extravagant claims about what they aim to accomplish, but don't always subject their explorations to a rigorous critique if a particular theory or method failed. Such analyses would boost the standing of the social sciences and promote confidence about future claims. Our competitive culture, where individuals vie for the same federal and corporate dollars, seems to discourage researchers from doing this.

This is the same phenomenon I touched on earlier, when I discussed the tension at research universities between basic research and the need to conduct research with immediate, commercial applications. This tension also exists in the field of philanthropy, not only in regard to research but also in terms of programmatic and project results. It exists on both sides of the donor-grantee relationship. Funders are expected, by the public and by government regulators, to achieve results that can be quickly and succinctly charted, quantified, measured by hard data and reduced to spread-sheet equations. For potential grantees, the competition today for government and philanthropic funding is so intense that the pressure to guarantee a "good outcome" often leads to over-promising what will be achieved. Therefore, at the conclusion of the funded work, nothing but an absolute triumph will be acceptable to all parties involved. (Even if real success was elusive, the claim will be made that "moral victory was ours.") This is where the language used to describe such enterprises begins to sparkle with superlatives, and assurances are given that planned work is "unprecedented," "path-breaking, visionary," or even "unique" (the most abused and overused adjective of all). In the end, if the results are at best mundane, or the project is a failure, cynicism and skepticism that anything can be accomplished with a particular issue or in bringing about some civic, social, scientific or other advancement will be the likely result.

Many foundations, faced with past disappointments in terms of translating the knowledge generated by their work into policy, have switched to funding projects that produce immediate and easily quantifiable results. Understanding this, grantees more often approach foundations with unrealistic goals or claims; program officers all too often accept them as achievable benchmarks. I don't know why I continue to be surprised by a kind of benign neglect in judging the difference between promises made and promises kept about funded projects. Failure to reach stated goals should be followed by in-depth analysis to understand the reasons for it. What happened? What could have been done better, or differently? Even a "failed" project generates some knowledge. Assessing projects this way makes it easier to extract those necessary lessons learned from them and spares the program staff feeling that they showed poor judgment, a lack of foresight, or even were incompetent. Foundations can hardly be the only institutions on earth immune to failure and no one should expect them to be.

At Carnegie Corporation, while we are pleased to share our accomplishments, we do not shy away from discussing those occasions where we have fallen short. In fact, the Corporation was among the first foundations to produce an annual report (it has been doing so for more than eighty years), in an effort to provide a complete and accurate accounting of its work. The responsibility for an institution such as Carnegie Corporation to be accountable for its grantmaking was best summed up by one of our earlier trustees, who declared that it was incumbent upon foundations to have "glass pockets." Today, we uphold that tradition by constantly examining and assessing the impact of our grantmaking and trying to learn from our failures as well as our successes—and by sharing what we've learned with both the public and the foundation community.

For example, as noted earlier, we take great pride in the fact that we funded An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 landmark study on race relations in the United States, but the Corporation did not recognize its importance when the report was completed and did not promote it, in part because it had not fulfilled the somewhat limited purpose for which it was commissioned: to help guide Corporation grantmaking beyond its historic involvement in black education in the South. What the Corporation got, instead, was a clarion call for Americans to live up to the ideals of the American Creed or contemplate a deterioration of the values and vision that unites the country and makes it great. The study has been called "the most penetrating and important book on our contemporary American civilization that has been written," [137] but was still neglected for a time because it was not the product that the Corporation had planned on.

Similarly, the Carnegie Americanization Study of the early 1920s did not have the impact that the foundation expected. The effort was lead by Allen Burns, the executive secretary of the Cleveland Foundation and a former dean of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. Those involved saw the study "as the first step towards developing the U.S.-wide policy on immigration. Burns had identified an immediate need for such policy ´as the present confusion in Washington is causing increased discontent among our immigrants.' [138] The researchers emphasized that Americanization was not an ´unchangeable political, domestic and economic regime once and for all delivered to the fathers, but a growing and broadening national life, inclusive of the best wherever found. With all our rich heritages, Americanism will develop best [through] a mutual giving and taking of contributions from both newer and older Americans in the interest of the commonwealth.'" [139] , [140] The study received almost no public attention and failed to generate support for immigration policies that recognized immigrants' contributions to the development of the United States. In fact, just the opposite took place. The U.S., in the 1920s, instituted restrictive immigration policies that made a study about incorporating immigrants into American life—the focus of the Carnegie series—seem irrelevant. Now, we look back at the study, which was commissioned by the Corporation's fourth president, Henry S. Pritchett, and marvel at the fact that, at the beginning of the last century, Americans were wrestling with the same issues about immigration and "Americanization" that are part of the national debates going on today, and were equally divided on the subject. Pritchett's thoughts at the time still resonate: "Some [immigrants] do not find out for years that the public schools are free, that the police do not have the same power as in Russia, that citizenship is possible under certain conditions. The function of the government in dealing with this mass of incoming human beings has been merely to act as a screen for shutting out the most objectionable. No agency attempts to deal with the immigrant's needs after he has left Ellis Island...a private agency, in good relations with the government, could put into each newcomer's hands a brief statement in his own language, of his rights and privileges." [141]

In recent years, there have also been grants that did not achieve the results we and our colleagues had hoped for. In 2000, the Corporation and other foundations made grants to the Southern African Political Economy Series Trust in Zimbabwe, to support the efforts of the Constitutional Commission of Zimbabwe, which was drafting a new constitution for that country under its president Robert Mugabe. It was the Corporation's intention to support democratic reform and the rule of law in Zimbabwe through the constitutional process, as well as to support the efforts of constitutional advocates. However, these efforts have fallen short of the mark. The constitution proved to be an ineffective document that did not provide the societal protections we were seeking.

Our library-related work in sub-Saharan Africa has also encountered problems. The needs are so great in Africa that many individuals and organizations are moved to provide immediate assistance without any attention to long-term investments and sustainability. In one case, our eagerness to help improve libraries and library services in selected African nations spurred us to act as donors responding to needs rather than as long-term investors, and certainly, our grantees saw us that way. We wanted to help to develop modern libraries, seeing them, along with African universities, as the engines of change on the continent—a resource that would provide students, citizens, and future leaders with a gateway to knowledge. Instead, our funding was often used to cover costs or as budget relief, not for the intended purpose of helping to create excellent modern libraries. We also spread our resources