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EPILOGUE YEARS OF RENEWAL AND PERSONAL REFLECTIONS To move abruptly from the very public presidency of the University of California , with its 166,000 students, 155,000 employees, 9 campuses, 5 medical centers, 3 national laboratories, and an annual operating budget of $10 billion to the very private presidency of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, a California-based charitable grant-making foundation with a corpus of $825 million, was at once difficult and welcome. Incomparable factors of size, scale, and reach made the shift difficult, and novelty made my endeavors welcome. Shortly after my resignation announcement in November 1991 Roger Heyns, venerated chancellor emeritus of the Berkeley campus and long-serving director and president of the Hewlett Foundation, came to see me at my offices in Oakland. He intended to step down at the end of 1992 and asked if I would be interested in succeeding him. We discussed the matter at length, and I told him I appreciated his confidence in me. But I was receiving other invitations from within California and elsewhere and did not want to make a decision at that point. At three-week intervals thereafter he called to reassure me of his and Bill Hewlett’s continuing interest. Then in mid-January 1992 I told Roger I thought the fit was not right; he very graciously wished me well. In mid-February one of Ronald Brady’s former colleagues at the University of Illinois, Chancellor Emeritus Jack Corbally, then head of the Chicagobased MacArthur Foundation, was visiting the Bay Area. I had told Brady about the Hewlett offer, and he couldn’t believe I had turned it down: maybe 362 a talk with Corbally about his work at the MacArthur Foundation would help me think things through, Brady suggested. Corbally was a longtime acquaintance of mine as well, and I agreed to join Brady and Corbally for lunch in Oakland. Corbally was more enthusiastic about the MacArthur Foundation’s work than about graduate teaching (referring to my option to teach) and urged me to pursue the offer directly with Bill Hewlett. Heyns, Hewlett, and I met at Hewlett’s office in the Hewlett-Packard headquarters in Palo Alto in late February 1992. I liked Hewlett very much, and during my years at UC we had met at CalStanford Big Games: he was a Stanford graduate and Flora, his late wife, was a Berkeley graduate. It didn’t take me very long to see the position’s potential then and even more when Hewlett began to transfer his wealth to the foundation, as he intended to. I agreed to serve as the incoming president of the foundation, with effect from January 1, 1993, and informed the Board of Regents of my decision at our March meetings in Los Angeles. THE HEWLETT FOUNDATION I made few changes at the outset of my six and a half years with the Hewlett Foundation. Roger Heyns had bequeathed me an excellent but small staff of eighteen housed in leased quarters on Middlefield Road, in Menlo Park, California (including Marianne Pallotti, Heyns’s equally long-serving vice president, whose previous work with the Ford Foundation and her years with Hewlett proved to be invaluable). The foundation had carved out an unusual niche in the philanthropic world of grants: it made multiyear, general operating support grants to the nonprofit sector within the United States and abroad. The foundation’s endowment was $825 million and the annual grants approximated $40 million. Its areas of interest included population issues and conflict resolution worldwide; U.S.-Mexico relations; higher education issues nationally; environmental problems in the western United States; needful communities and neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area; and the performing arts from Santa Cruz County in the south to Napa and Sonoma counties in the north. The program officers, who identified the most promising nonprofits and the most recognized leaders whose focus and interests coincided with the foundation’s, were experts in their respective areas. They worked closely with these groups and negotiated our grants to optimize both the use of our resources and those of the nonprofits we were supporting. My work was to oversee the foundation’s investments and to review the grant proposals, to offer my suggestions and criticisms, to monitor the work of our program officers, to look for ways of improving our efforts, and to recommend PERSONAL REFLECTIONS 363 [3.139...

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