Carnegie Corporation of New York: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century

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A Brief History of Carnegie Corporation of New York

Historian and former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin once remarked, “To try to create the future without some knowledge of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers.” I agree with him. In looking back over the impressive record of the Corporation, which spans nearly a century, it is plain we are not only reaffirming our historic role as an education foundation but also honoring Andrew Carnegie’s passion for international peace and the health of our democracy. Carnegie established Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911 “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.” While his primary aim was to benefit the people of the United States, he later determined to use a portion of the funds for members of the British overseas Commonwealth. With this mandate and an endowment of $125 million (later augmented by $10 million), Carnegie dedicated his foundation to eliminating one of the “greatest causes of social backwardness”—ignorance.

Carnegie was assuredly a creature of his times, yet he succeeded in enunciating the principles of philanthropy, as distinguished from charity, that are relevant today. To Carnegie, the aim should be “to do real and permanent good in this world.” The obligation of the rich was the betterment of their fellows, by placing the “ladders on which the aspiring can rise.” Libraries, museums, and universities were among the venues for reaching those “who have the divine spark even so feebly developed, that it may be strengthened and grow.” A maverick capitalist, Carnegie argued against inherited wealth, calling it bad for both society and the beneficiaries. Wealth aggregation, he argued, was necessary for progress and civilization, for “through it unimaginable benefits would be put into the hands of many,” but capitalists, “the anointed trustees of public wealth,” had a social and moral duty to administer that wealth on behalf of their fellows during their lifetime. His verdict was: “The man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced...” Carnegie gave away more than 90 percent of his wealth before he died in 1919.

As a self-educated man and firm believer in popular education (his formal education ended at the age of twelve), Carnegie thought that access to books should be a part of the birthright of every youngster and that public libraries, still an innovation in American life, should be an indispensable civic institution. Carnegie and Carnegie Corporation spent $56 million to establish 2,509 public libraries, of which 1,681 were in the United States. In his relentless quest for new knowledge and world peace, Carnegie founded four trusts and three “temples of peace.” Among them, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was heavily supported by the Corporation, as were other operating foundations established by Carnegie, including The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) and the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Carnegie ran the Corporation himself in its first eight years, continuing to create public libraries and making gifts for church organs, buildings and endowments, and cultural organizations. In 1917, with capital and initial subsidies from the Corporation, 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—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. The association managed the retirement accounts that were jointly funded by teachers and their employers. 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 was published by Harper & Brothers Publishers. The ten-volume study grew out of the Corporation’s concern with understanding the role of Carnegie libraries involved in social work with immigrants. 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.

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—and under the direction of Alan Pifer, who was president of the Corporation from 1965-1982[1], and who brought to the Corporation a deep commitment to social justice both in the United Sates and abroad—Carnegie 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 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.”

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. Also during this decade, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future used support from the Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation to publish What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future, a 1996 report that provided a framework and agenda for teacher education reform across the country. In 1997, the Corporation published the final report of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the culmination of three years’ work by Dr. David Hamburg, who was president of the Corporation from 1982-1997. 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.

Programs that that have been milestones for the Corporation in more recent years have often been undertaken in conjunction with other foundation partners. For example, in 2000, Carnegie Corporation joined with the Ford, Rockefeller and MacArthur foundations in an initiative that is now called the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa. Later, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation also became partners. Launched 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 and Science. (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. In 2001 the Corporation launched Teachers for a New Era (TNE), the largest teacher education reform effort in the country. The initiative, which also received support from the Ford and Annenberg foundations, grew out of a realization that schools of education in American universities are in a crisis: many cannot provide students with the knowledge, skills and competency they need to fulfill their professional obligations or society’s aspirations. TNE stressed that Schools of Education must become an integral part of their universities, drawing on every facet of these institutions’ resources to enrich their curriculum and they must, in turn, be integrated into the wider intellectual life of the academic community. TNE is grounded in three design principles: (1) building a culture of respect for evidence (2) effective engagement with the disciplines of the arts and sciences and (3) teaching as clinical practice. Through TNE, eleven higher education institutions are implementing institutional change on curricular, instructional, organizational and cultural dimensions, and thirty other colleges and universities participate in a TNE Learning Network.

Schools for a New Society, a Corporation initiative aimed at improving urban high schools (funded in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), and the New Century High School Initiative, the program in New York City (funded by Carnegie Corporation, Gates Foundation and the Open Society Institute) both engage civic leadership as well as district superintendents in focusing on the urgency of increasing high school graduation rates. Both initiatives focus on school district reform, changes in school structures, district policies, school accountability, curriculum, teaching and leadership capacity, in order to significantly change the outcomes for the majority of students.

An area in which the Corporation took the lead is campaign finance reform. Our efforts to address this issue were prompted by the fact that the most severe impediments to voting and civic participation affect minority groups, immigrants and poor, elderly and disabled persons. In addition, the corrosive role of money in politics inhibits people from all walks of life from running for elected office, a fact that has increased cynicism about the political process and depressed voter engagement. In response, the Corporation embarked on a longstanding effort in support of campaign finance reform, work that has demonstrated the importance of patience, time and the strategic placement of resources. Corporation grantmaking in this arena—approximately $19 million over 12 years (1992-2004)—is credited with having helped build the “modern” campaign finance reform movement.

Some of the programs that the Corporation has supported in recent years, which were conceived of and carried out under the guidelines of a specific time span, are coming to their natural end. Examples include some of those noted above, such as Teachers for a New Era, campaign finance reform and Centers for Advanced Study and Education in Russia. These factors also contributed to our determination to realign and integrate our program directions for the years ahead. Let me turn to those now.