Where Have the ‘Learned Foundations’ Gone?

When I was president of the American Council of Learned Societies a decade or so ago, I became concerned about what seemed to be the dwindling of foundation support for basic research on underlying issues affecting international affairs. With money from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, I hired two researchers to study the issue, and it turned out that I was right. Foundations were, by and large, interested only in research on short-term policy questions. And they were more likely to pay for research done by think tanks than universities because think tanks delivered more quickly and were less likely to stray beyond a grant maker’s research parameters.

To be sure, whether the research universities are “delivering the goods” is a question worth asking. But now we are confronted with an even more troubling lack of foundation support: a broad decline in philanthropic funds for research in the social sciences and humanities. The data are not satisfactory, but according to the Foundation Center, the dollar value of social-science research grants, as a percentage of all social-science awards, has declined to 27.8 percent in 2000 from 39.6 percent in 1992. The figures are based on grants of $10,000 or more that were made by a sampling of large foundations. Large grant makers are failing to fulfill what historically has been their most significant function — searching for the underlying causes of the major social, economic, and physical problems of the day.

Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Russell Sage, and other early-20th-century benefactors were more interested in the causes of social ills than in the symptoms. The quest to understand the underlying nature of the big problems was, for them, the highest aspiration of philanthropy. The institutions they founded were not merely grant makers, they were “learned foundations.” Their chief function was to support university research on basic questions of science, medicine, and society with the intention of developing the essential knowledge upon which ameliorative strategies could be based. Many times, and in many different areas of knowledge, they succeeded brilliantly.

These days, very few philanthropic leaders speak in the language of learned foundations. When I looked through the recent presidential messages of the largest grant makers, I found only one foundation leader who still used it. Gordon Conway, appropriately of the Rockefeller Foundation, wrote in the organization’s 2000 annual report: “We do not treat symptoms; rather, we go into things for the long haul, for that is the most effective, sustainable way to alter the root causes of the world’s complex ills.” Whether the Rockefeller Foundation is actually managed this way is, however, another question altogether.

We should rethink the functions and methods of all large foundations — their leadership, the role of their program officers, the formulation of their programs — in relation to the current complicated and crowded milieu that now exists for grant makers and grant making. After all, we need to know the underlying causes of terrorism just as much as we needed, in the early 20th century, to know the underlying causes of yellow fever. Likewise, supporting research on the causes of contemporary poverty is at least as important as spending for poverty relief.

To be sure, the original learned foundations were self-consciously elitist. The working motto of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s was “to make the peaks higher.” The foundations’ investment strategy was to identify the best research institutions, whether medical institutes, universities, or other kinds of organizations, and to support the most exciting things they were doing.

This was not ground-up, but top-down support, and for a long time it was an intelligent and successful philanthropic investment policy. Foundations’ grant making was based upon extended time horizons. Foundations knew the problems that interested them were big, and they were prepared to stick it out until they and the researchers they supported had time to develop solutions.

The foundations were therefore prepared to develop continuing relationships with their grantees. They were patient and persistent. They had self-confidence, and they were highly tolerant of failure, since they knew that “safe” and short-term research was unlikely to produce major discoveries. They defined their grants broadly, permitting grant recipients to make midcourse corrections — and sometimes even basic changes in purpose. They created a fluid system in which the foundations frequently cooperated with one another, and they were always close to the researchers they supported.

This situation began to change as the 20th century became more complex. The Great Depression forced the foundations to try to find solutions to short-term problems. World War II drained them of experienced personnel and produced large-scale government investment in research, forcing foundations to begin to reposition themselves and to rethink what their function was in a newer, congested, competitive investment market for research. The advent of corporate foundations in the 1950s only complicated matters further.

After the Soviet Union launched its first sputnik satellite in 1957, the U.S. government made huge investments in higher education and academic research, a trend that meant that foundations were no longer the biggest investors, but rather niche players. Most large foundations decided then that they needed to focus and invest even more selectively.

Since then, too, the number and kinds of foundations have proliferated tremendously. The current field includes a rapidly growing number of very large foundations, some of them brand new. But the field has not, on the whole, seen the emergence of new learned foundations, and many of the traditionally learned foundations — the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Pew Charitable Trusts, among them — are becoming narrower in focus and shorter in patience. They want different sorts of results, and they want them to be demonstrable — or “deliverable,” in today’s results-oriented language.

A good example can be found in grant making for elementary- and secondary-education research. If one looks back even 10 years, when much more foundation support was going to research and programs in that area, one might have said that the bulk of both money and internal expertise was coming from the Ford Foundation, with significant commitments from Carnegie, Pew, MacArthur, Rockefeller, Atlantic Philanthropies, and a handful of other foundations.

But the same thing cannot be said now about any of these foundations with respect to education investments. They are all making grants in that area, but the sums are smaller, and they have fewer program officers who are deeply knowledgeable and well-placed in the field of elementary and secondary education than a decade ago.

Indeed, I would argue that none of those foundations is a player in education policy in 2001. And education is not the only area where we are seeing comparably significant but little-remarked changes in foundation emphasis and behavior.

In fact, the big foundations today are undergoing a drastic reorientation. They start their planning with cautiously tailored objectives — and often a multiplicity of such objectives. Some grant makers are adapting a so-called venture-philanthropy model that calls for three- to six-year business plans, “managing partner” relationships, “accountability-for-results” approaches, “exit strategies,” and other hallmarks of the corporate world.

Still other foundations are turning to the “effective philanthropy” model developed by Mark R. Kramer and Michael E. Porter that contains some of the elements of the venture philanthropy approach, but emphasizes the duty of foundations to “achieve a social impact disproportionate to their spending” — carefully crafted objectives, close and long-term donor-grantee relations, and careful measurement of foundation investment results. Mr. Porter and Mr. Kramer emphasize that a foundation should “measure its success by the performance of the organizations that it funds.”

Other approaches exist, too, and they all have one thing in common: an unfortunate trend toward immediate and functional strategies.

I say unfortunate because the bigger and longer-term problems have not gone away. Such problems require large, independent, and thoughtful foundations to support innovative thinking and research.

The bottom line is that at least some of the big foundations need to continue to ask the big questions, cultivate American intellectual resourcefulness to find potential solutions, form partnerships with the academic world, and be imaginative and patient in awaiting answers.

If the leaders of learned foundations do not do such things, who will?

Stanley N. Katz is professor of public and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.