The board of trustees, president, staff, and the entire Carnegie Corporation of New York community extend their deepest condolences to the family of Helene L. Kaplan, trustee emerita of the foundation, who served as the first woman to chair the board of trustees from 1984 to 1990. Kaplan was a member of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government and twice led the foundation’s presidential search committee. She died at home on January 26, at the age of 89.
Kaplan joined the board of Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1979, at the request of then president Alan Pifer. Shortly thereafter, Pifer announced his intention to step down and asked Kaplan to chair the search committee for his successor. Kaplan was instrumental in the selection of David A. Hamburg, a prominent physician and educator, who served as Corporation president until 1997. Kaplan then headed the search committee that chose Hamburg’s successor, Vartan Gregorian, who served as president from 1997 until his death in 2021.
Kaplan served on the board of the Corporation for a total of 24 years, and was the first person to chair the board twice. In recognition of her efforts, she was the first chair to be elected an honorary trustee, one of only two trustees in the Corporation’s history to earn such a distinction. From 1988 to 1993, she was a member of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government, chairing its Task Force on Judicial and Regulatory Decision Making. Highly regarded for her collegial relationships with Corporation staff members, she made several site visits to Corporation-funded programs overseas.
For example, in 1984, Kaplan and a few other board members traveled to South Africa to evaluate a Corporation-funded program, and subsequently made recommendations on future grantmaking in the region. The foundation had been considering discontinuing support for South Africa, but based on the trustees’ findings, it instead increased funding, adding support for maternal and child health care, not only in South Africa, but also in other parts of Africa. “It was a kind of epochal moment,” Kaplan recalled later. “I always felt that South Africa was my emotional quicksand. I could never leave it behind me.” A year later Kaplan was tapped by U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz to serve on an advisory committee that would help make U.S. policy recommendations for South Africa.
Helene Lois Finkelstein Kaplan was born in New York City in 1933. She attended Barnard College, receiving a bachelor’s degree cum laude in 1953. She married Mark N. Kaplan in 1952. Kaplan knew from an early age that she wanted to become a lawyer. “I was always very interested in effecting policy changes in society and saw lawyers as people who accomplished things,” she told the New York Law Journal in 1985. Kaplan and her husband agreed that she would postpone law school to stay home and raise their two young daughters. She eventually enrolled at New York University, receiving her law degree in 1967. Kaplan went on to have a distinguished legal career, ultimately of counsel at Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom before retiring in 2014.
Kaplan was active in the nonprofit sector as a trustee of many educational, scientific, arts, and charitable institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History, Barnard College, the Commonwealth Fund, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute for Advanced Study, Mount Sinai Hospital, the J. Paul Getty Trust, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
She received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Columbia University in 1990 and an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from Mount Sinai School of Medicine the following year. She was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society.
In addition to her husband, Kaplan is survived by her daughters, Marjorie and Sue, and four grandchildren.