To Export Progress: The Golden Age of University Assistance in the Americas

Six: Promise and Performance in Exporting Progress

6 Promise and Performance in Exporting Progress Our view of the crusade to export progress through universities has been reasonably positive. Worthy tasks were undertaken with intelligence, and much good was done. That bottom-line performance fell far short of grand expectation is no surprise. A wide gap between promise and performance is common in policy reform. Similarly, reality rarely matches ideal types exactly ; ideal types are to help us understand reality, and such understanding has been our primary undertaking. This final chapter therefore first assesses the relationship between the facts discovered and the ideal type of philanthropic change. After that, the chapter synthesizes the evaluation of performance. It concludes with a brief look beyond our history.1 Ideal Types and Dilemmas in Voluntary Action The ideal type of philanthropic change has guided us very well when it comes to donor efforts. This conclusion is important, since our study has concentrated so much on documenting and understanding efforts (not just goals or “bottom-line” results). Most efforts fit the ideal type and are illuminated by it, helping to give us a good picture of what was actually done in an extraordinary era of university and development assistance. Promise and Performance in Exporting Progress | 221 The ideal type has also helped when it comes to goals and results. It illuminates in considerable terrain where a match exists between the ideal typical and the real world. There is also ample terrain, however, where the match is not close. The ideal type has been useful in such cases, too, in identifying and drawing contrasts between matches and discrepancies or even contradictions. But in these cases the concrete realities we uncover also lead us to reflect back on the ideal type. Beyond the simple fact that reality trails ideal type, the reflection exposes ambiguities, loose links, and tensions within the philanthropic ideal type itself. Certain ideal typical goals are partly incompatible with other ones, and the same holds for certain means and for certain results. More striking are inconsistencies in the interrelationships among goals, means, and results. An ideal typical flow is less common than inconsistencies. Most ideal typical means are inherently inadequate for the ideal type’s transforming goals and results. Such inconsistencies and contradictions have great practical importance because the ideal type reflects basic beliefs and assumptions of reformers.2 The soft spots in the ideal type parallel difficulties in the reality of voluntary action. In both, the problems are natural and not fully resolvable. Instead, a choice of one type of goal, for example, casts doubt upon another, and attempts to address the slippage between goals and efforts, or between efforts and results, create other inconsistencies. This leaves a basic dilemma in how to envisage and achieve change: directly pursue fundamental and widespread change but allow efforts to deviate from the ideal type, or stick with ideal typical efforts but then settle for less than the loftiest ideal typical goals and results. Similarly, if the ideal type is revised to come closer to reality, then it surrenders either much of what is distinctive and presumably strongest about voluntary efforts or what is most ambitious about goals and results. Our evidence has repeatedly shown this to be an assistance dilemma, a dilemma for donors. At the broadest level, it also pertains to reform in general , squaring with important findings from implementation studies.3 But our findings have particular relevance where key contributors (of fresh models and resources) are largely voluntary and aspire to major change. A major debate in U.S. philanthropy has pitted advocates of carefully focused, prudent means where donors can do things distinctly and successfully against critics who say philanthropy must daringly tackle wider, tougher problems, pursuing grander aims (Halpern 1998: 6–7; National Commission on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal 1997). The first group upholds ideal typical means but is vulnerable on whether goals are sufficient. The second group is vulnerable on means. The tensions and tradeoffs presented by each approach are commonly ignored, skirted, or wished aside.4 Yet subject matter like ours suggests how basic the inconsistency is between the careful efforts and the aim and achievement of fundamental change. The philanthropic ideal type includes a mechanism for surmounting the dilemma. This mechanism is the lever or recipient model. Grand goals can 222 | TO EXPORT PROGRESS be pursued through selective, prudent means by targeting ripe partners and structures that then become springboards for widespread, fundamental...