July 29, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The $10-billion William H. Gates Foundation should help lead the way in making grant makers more accountable to the public about their practices and the impact of their work, a scholar argues in The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 23).
The Gates Foundation should “devote some attention, and a bit of money, to several neglected but festering issues in philanthropy,” writes Daniel S. Greenberg, a science journalist and visiting scholar in the department of the history of science, medicine, and technology at the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. Those issues, Mr. Greenberg writes, are “decisions made in secret, with virtually no accountability” outside of foundation boardrooms; “a general lack of interest in whether those decisions turn out to be the right ones; and the percentage of assets that foundations should give away.”
Mr. Greenberg calls foundations “the last vestiges of monarchism on the U.S. landscape.”
“Although Bill Gates and his fellow foundation builders merit gratitude for their generosity, the fact is that much of their donated wealth would end up in public treasuries if the tax laws didn’t permit its diversion for privately controlled philanthropic purposes. That makes a strong argument for transparency in foundations’ operations: The public has a right to know how, why, by whom, and with what effect the money that might have belonged to it is being spent.”
Mr. Greenberg calls on the Gates Foundation to open its decision-making process to public scrutiny “and not continue the customary practice of simply issuing a list of awards.
“What did reviewers say about the applications that passed muster, and about those that didn’t? Make the evaluations public, with sensitive information withheld as needed. And, recognizing that program officers and trustees are not infallible, provide an appeals mechanism for rejected applicants.”
Mr. Greenberg also calls for a “well-financed, independent assessment service” to examine present and past grant-making projects to determine the effects of expenditures. “The Gates Foundation could set a beneficial example by endowing an autonomous inspectorate available to all foundations,” he writes.
Finally, the Gates Foundation could lead the way by spending more than what the federal government requires grant makers to pay out annually — 5 per cent of assets, or 3.5 per cent for medical-research philanthropies. Foundations should voluntarily exceed the legal minimum, Mr. Greenberg argues, “or they are likely to find politicians imposing a higher minimum on them.”
