Leading a Foundation

In your distinguished career -- we can't cover it in its entirety -- you've been chairman of an academic department, the head of a research institute, and lastly the head of a major American foundation. What is distinctive about being the head of a foundation that differs from the other two roles?

Well, whatever else, it's true that when you're in academic life, for research particularly and to some extent for education, you need to raise money outside the university. And then, when you go to a foundation, you don't have to raise money anymore. So as a friend of mine who made a similar transition once said, it's better to give than not to receive. But it is true that it's a different set of resources, so to say, when you think about making grants that will be useful in trying to develop a strategy that would have some real leverage for amplifying the work of your grantees. That's different than applying for grants yourself for a line of inquiry that you're familiar with.

Tell us a little of the history of the Carnegie Corporation. It was a gift from Andrew Carnegie?

Yes. He was a fascinating man who decided early in life that he was going to make a lot of money and give it all away in his lifetime. He came here as a poor boy from Scotland at age 12, with socially concerned parents, very much preoccupied with how the world could be a better place. And he did indeed make a lot of money, and he did indeed give it all away in his lifetime. He formulated this notion of a gospel of wealth, which is essentially that it's a crime for a rich man to die rich. Wealth is a social trust. You should enjoy it; at the same time you should make it available for larger public purposes. And he did a variety of philanthropic activities over a number of decades.

Then he sold his company to J.P. Morgan, a back-of-the-envelope deal rather different from today's elaborate contracts, and I think it was the biggest deal in history. Hundreds of millions of dollars, which on today's market would be many billions of dollars. And then he realized that he didn't have any clear-cut way to deal with how would he give it away over the long term. So he invented the concept of the general purpose foundation, and empowered his board to use the money any way they saw fit over an extended period of time. He felt that he, and probably nobody, had the wisdom to predict how it would be important in thirty of fifty years. And the general notion was more or less that you spend the income off the capital and you would do things in perpetuity that would be useful for the public good. And he gave a very broad mandate that it was to be for the dissemination of information for the well-being of the people of the United States. And then he added in, " ... for the people of the British Commonwealth," which was a large part of the world at that time, 1911 when he set up the foundation.

I get the sense, in looking at the work of your foundation during your tenure, that the head of a foundation really stands as a bridge between theory and practice, that a lot of your work is about finding the right ideas and making them effective in society. Is that a fair assessment of the role?

Well I think so; at least in the way I see the role. Now you should understand that foundations differ enormously one from another, and different foundation presidents will interpret their role differently, and the mandates given by the founders differ a lot. Carnegie gave us a very broad mandate. At the same time, I felt we should pay attention to his own patterns of philanthropy and his own outlook to a considerable degree. We should do that. And it was clear to me that he was interested in the connection between ideas and social action. He was interested in the connection between technological advances and social improvement.

He had two great themes of philanthropy in his life, peace and education. I felt we should pursue those. The foundation had always pursued education in one way or another, but had been rather variable in its pursuit of peace, and I thought we ought to come back to that, especially since we were in the depths of a Cold War exacerbation after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In pursuing those two themes, not just those two but mainly those two, I felt that there was an important interface between research and social action. We should bring to bear the best possible evidence that came from the sciences and scholarship and carefully assess the innovations in clinics and schools or wherever, and try to think carefully about how that insight and information and that evidence might be brought to bear in a way that might be socially useful on a broad scale.

Next page: Ideas and Issues