June 14, 2001 | Read Time: 2 minutes
By MEG SOMMERFELD
When the John M. Olin Foundation closes its doors in the next few years, it “will leave a big black hole in the world of conservative philanthropy,” according to The National Review (June 11), a biweekly conservative magazine.
Although Mr. Olin, a munitions, metal, and chemical executive who died in 1982, did not draft a specific “sunset” clause for the foundation, he made it known to staff members and trustees that he did not want the organization to exist forever.
He made that decision partly because he was troubled that other philanthropies started by conservative donors adopted a more liberal bent over time.
Instead, he thought his foundation, which has given grants to such conservative recipients as the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University and Charles Murray, author of a controversial book on race called The Bell Curve, should cease operations once he and any hand-picked successors had passed away.
Following the death last year of the foundation’s longtime president, William Simon, that time has arrived. James Piereson, executive director of the Olin Foundation, has said that all grant decisions will be announced within three years, and all funds disbursed within five years, according to the Review.
The pending shutdown of the foundation, which has helped bankroll conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, “is the most obvious sign of an ominous development for the Right: the disappearance of foundations that have made so much of the conservative movement possible,” the magazine says.
Meanwhile, several leaders of other conservative foundations, such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, have resigned or retired recently.
But “there is still reason for hope,” according to the National Review, because the country is “simply sloshing” in new sources of money. Conservative organizations should angle for a portion of the estimated $12-trillion that the baby-boomer generation is expected to inherit, says Neal Freeman of the Foundation Management Institute, in Vienna, Va.
“Too many Beltway conservatives are scrambling for loose change on the sidewalk while bags of gold bullion sit untouched on the front stoop,” Mr. Freeman says.
