American Foundations: Roles and Contributions

5. Foundations and Higher Education

98 5 Foundations and Higher Education peter frumkin and gabriel kaplan American philanthropic foundations have a long history of supporting higher education. It is a domain in which foundations have focused tremendous resources over time.1 Although foundation dollars make up only a small part of higher education revenues, they constitute more than a quarter of all foundation giving. And nearly all foundations report some giving to higher education.2 Funding higher education has proved attractive to foundations for two very different reasons. The first is that higher education has long been seen as a critical gateway to greater opportunities.3 By supporting colleges and universities, foundations can increase the life chances of young people who often start out with considerable disadvantage. To many, higher education appears to be the great equalizer in American society.4 The second reason stems from the desire of many foundations to support the advancement of knowledge and institutional excellence.5 Colleges and universities are often where medical and scienti fic breakthroughs originate and where the arts and letters are nurtured. As a consequence, and as chapter 4 suggests, over time foundations have been major donors to core research and teaching programs in higher education.6 These two 1. Bremner (1988); Sealander (1997). 2. Lawrence and Marino (2003). 3. Lucas (1994); Veysey (1965). 4. Lee (1963). 5. Fosdick (1989); Geiger (1990). 6. Karl and Katz (1981). foundations and higher education 99 rationales are, of course, quite different, and it may be useful to think of them as constituting two poles: one focused on access and social change and the other on core capacity and institution building. While the second pole is familiar and straightforward enough, the first is more complex. Paradoxically, higher education is both a sensible and an unlikely place for foundations to pursue a social change agenda grounded in increasing access and opportunity. On one hand, colleges and universities are indeed the access points to the middle class and to increased lifetime earning potential. It is only logical that foundations wanting to address inequality and lack of opportunity would focus their attention on higher education. If the doors of colleges and universities could be opened more widely, a large number of young people long lacking access to ladders of opportunity could be given new possibilities for self-improvement and advancement.7 Some institutions have also reached out to the neighborhoods that surround their campuses and attempted to bridge large divides of class and race.8 These efforts, along with progressive policies in the areas of recruitment, have made it possible for higher education to inject into its more traditional work an element of social change. On the other hand, colleges and universities seem uniquely ill equipped to serve donors interested in promoting change. Higher education is full of large and intransigent institutions that have entrenched procedures and defined cultures .9 Work within this environment requires patience and a willingness to accept compromises. Moreover, colleges and universities are not, by their nature, oriented toward social change. Their missions rarely include controversial social and political goals. Tenure protects academic freedom, but the more mundane reality is that academic freedom is rarely fully exercised. The largest universities are deeply committed to scientific discovery and basic research, pursued according to the academic ethos. Gifts to colleges and universities can and often do seek simply to increase the capacity of institutions to do this work at a high level. In examining the role foundations have played in higher education over time, it may be useful to ask to what extent change-oriented foundation giving has or has not competed with core capacity and institution-building support. Although higher education and foundations have been linked for more than a century, it is unclear which of these two major objectives foundations have sought more to achieve through their funding of universities and colleges. It is also not obvious how foundations go about the work of delivering grant support to higher education, the role they play in the operation and organization of higher education , and the influence they have on university behavior. One thing is clear: the 7. U.S. Department of Education (2006). 8. Julianne Basinger, “A Promoter of Town-Gown Cooperation Finds Development May Be Her Undoing,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2, 2000, p. A41. 9. Barley, Meyer, and Gash (1988). 100 peter frumkin and gabriel kaplan current landscape of foundation philanthropy in...