After a Decade at the Helm, Head of MacArthur Fund to Step Down

Adele Simmons, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in Chicago, announced last week that she plans to resign in September 1999.

Ms. Simmons, who took over MacArthur’s top job in 1989, joins a growing list of heads of the nation’s wealthiest foundations who have decided to resign recently. The presidents of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations as well as the Carnegie Corporation of New York have all stepped down in the past three years.

Ms. Simmons, 56, had made clear that she intended to stay for no more than a decade when she took the post at MacArthur in 1989. She previously had spent 13 years as head of Hampshire College, in Amherst, Mass.

“I have always believed that for most institutions — and particularly foundations — regular change of leadership is critical to continuous renewal,” said Ms. Simmons.

Another consideration, she said, was that 8 of the board’s 17 members will be ending their terms in 2002. Ms. Simmons said she believed it would be prudent to have a new president in place by then.

After stepping down in 1999, Ms. Simmons will take a year-long sabbatical — financed by MacArthur — to pursue her own interests. She declined to be specific, saying she was considering a range of ideas, such as concentrating on problems in the Chicago area, dealing with issues that affect youth, or getting involved in environmental or international causes.

The sabbatical is a routine part of MacArthur’s policy governing rewards to top employees who have worked at the foundation for a considerable period of time.

Many people say that Ms. Simmons has left an indelible mark on the $4-billion foundation.

During her tenure, MacArthur, which is well-known for the “genius” fellowships that it awards each year, has emerged as a significant player in dealing with national and international issues.

The foundation was one of the first to make grants in Russia at the end of the Cold War, and set up an office in Moscow in 1992. Under Ms. Simmons’s leadership, the foundation started programs to support women’s reproductive-health programs in Brazil, India, Mexico, and Nigeria; provided funds to protect biodiversity in endangered areas worldwide; and financed groups whose work led to the extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995.

Domestically, the foundation’s $40-million grant in support of school reform in Chicago is widely credited with improving reading and math skills of the city’s students. Ms. Simmons also greatly expanded the foundation’s use of program-related investments: MacArthur currently has a $100-million portfolio of low-interest loans to support a wide range of projects, including housing for the poor and small businesses worldwide.

Ms. Simmons made numerous structural changes in the way MacArthur operates. She led the foundation — which was established in 1978 — through its “adolescence,” said John E. Corbally, who preceded Ms. Simmons as president and who now chairs MacArthur’s board.

MacArthur’s earlier days were marked by some rocky times. John D. MacArthur, who died in 1978, left no instructions for how the foundation should be organized or what areas it should support.

After his death, there was much wrangling for control of the foundation, and the fund was mired in lawsuits alleging mismanagement by trustees.

Even after the lawsuits were dropped, the board continued to play a strong role in making individual grants.

The foundation also spent much of its first decade concentrating on selling off many of Mr. MacArthur’s assets and developing grant-making programs.

“It’s hard to remember or realize that the MacArthur Foundation is a very young foundation,” said Ms. Simmons. “When I came, all the programs had really just been put in place. So it was first an opportunity to nurture and encourage those programs and help build linkages among them, and ultimately to restructure the existing programs.”

Ms. Simmons tried to make those changes as part of a strategic-planning process in 1996-97 that she supervised. That process resulted in the redesign of the foundation’s programs that is now being carried out.

Most domestic and international grant making, formerly conducted through six separate programs, has been integrated in two major programs. The Program on Human and Community Development supports work in the United States dealing with economics, education, youth, and community and human development. The Program on Global Security and Sustainability focuses on arms proliferation, the environment, population, and human rights.

Each program is designed to encourage collaboration among researchers, policy analysts, and the people and non-profit organizations carrying out the work.

“I’ve always, wherever I’ve been, been looking for ways to make connections,” Ms. Simmons said. “In one area [MacArthur] had some wonderful research going on, but the researchers weren’t really talking to the practitioners we were supporting.”

Added Mr. Corbally: “The new approach helps to insure that we are focused, yet able to respond to the constantly changing world in which we work.”

Some grantees said the restructuring has already helped their work.

“They’ve achieved a pretty good balance between a desire to be innovative and a desire to be reasonable,” said John Steinbruner, senior foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, in Washington. “Those of us that work in this world realize how difficult that is. It’s an operation that quite seriously attempts to bring largely independent researchers and those with public-advocacy careers, and make them talk with each other.”

MacArthur’s board has already begun its search for a new president.

“It’s a really interesting opportunity,” said Mr. Corbally, “and I think that we need to see, as the times change, how our programs should change.”

For example, Mr. Corbally said he would like to see the foundation make fewer and larger grants. “It’s very difficult to make hundreds of small grants,” he says. “We need to build on what we have and have it relate to a changing world.”