Life Among the Philanthropoids

...The Foundation's shortcomings, and even some harmful effects, are largely due to its very bigness and to its difficult task of promotion of human welfare...

...by either mediocrities, "smart alecks" or incompetent nonentities...

...Besides the annual grants, computed in hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars, the trustees of the Ford Foundation recently approved two appropriations: one of $290 million for hospitals and medical schools, and another of $500 million for privately-supported colleges and universities...

...Financially supporting only a pet faction and current of thought in an educational, scientific or welfare field, the Foundation enormously reinforces that faction or current, and indirectly undermines other factions and currents which are sometimes more sound and creative than the Foundation's favorite...

...These and similar defects of the Foundation have notably sterilized its immense creative potential...

...now $300,000...

...Likewise, the promotion of human welfare by the Foundation would probably bring a much richer harvest if the choice among a multitude of submitted projects were made by a board of the most eminent experts in a given field instead of, as now, by a little bureaucrat placed through chance in a big position in the Foundation, or even by a board of the Foundation's trustees and "philanthropoids" who are often incompetent to pass sound judgment on the merits of this or that project...

...These appropriations probably exceed any grant ever made in human history by a private foundation...

...Finally, this situation also makes comprehensible the regrettable fact that despite hundreds of millions spent for huge team-research enterprises, nothing startling, even truly significant, has come thus far out of this "mass-production of research on the assembly lines" of the Foundation...

...Finally, Macdonald gives a positive and negative evaluation of its activities...

...Their wrong preconceptions, bias, and incompetence are responsible for their faulty judgments and mistakes...

...However good, the mere experience of a business executive or college administrator is not enough for a sound selection of fruitful projects in scientific, educational, cultural and ameliorative fields...

...When a wrong decision is applied on a large scale, it is bound to produce a wrong result on a large scale also...

...A conspicuous waste of big funds is another defect connected with the preceding one...

...former president, International Congress of Sociology This is an excellent unauthorized biography of the world's biggest foundation...

...Various divisions of the Foundation, like the Fund for the Republic, the Behavioral Sciences project and others, have spent now $100,000...

...He rightly dismisses the silly political accusations that the Foundation is promoting cither Communist, Socialist, "un-American" causes or "reactionary," "big-business" interests...

...In scientific research and related fields, "the bigger is not always best...

...to advance human welfare," and finds that this goal has been sincerely pursued, in many cases successfully...

...He does not question its official purpose...

...Liberally financing mainly huge team research projects, the Foundation weakens many a great genius who, as Albert Einstein correctly remarked, "is a horse for single harness, and cut out for tandem or teamwork: for well I know that in order to attain any definite goal, it is imperative that one person should do the thinking and commanding...

...Let us hope that it will free itself from these shortcomings, and let us wish it the fullest measure of success in advancing human welfare...

...Here, one creative genius (modestly supported to keep his soul and body together) is likely to make a discovery or create a masterpiece of great value which hundreds of research team-workers can never produce...

...All in all, his evaluation appears essentially sound to me...

...In a gracefully readable, now mildly satirical, now benignly humorous style, Macdonald accurately describes the reasons for its establishment and gigantic expansion by three generations of Fords, and tells of the fourteen trustees and some forty ""philanthropoids" who determine its policies and grants...

...Since the trustees and officers are all too human, they are not exempt from the humanum errare est...

...The book concisely outlines the life-history of the Foundation, its basic divisions, and the main philanthropies and research projects financed by it...

...It took the Rockefeller Foundation [one of the biggest] forty years to to give away the sum which the Ford Foundation now proposed to divide in the next eighteen months between the nation's colleges, hospitals, and medical schools...

...now $1 million or more for research adventures which have not yielded any important results, and which could have been done on a grant a tenth or a twentieth the size...

...now $700,000...

...In these creative fields, there is no tangible correlation between the amount of money spent and the fruitfulness of the results...

...The Foundation would likely obtain much more important results if, instead of overfinancing only its pet factions and huge collective projects, it modestly supported all the important diverse currents in a given field and financed scientific, cultural and educational projects of eminent individual creators and promising young talents as well as the huge collective projects of mediocre research-makers...

...Its capital is now in the neighborhood of some $3 billion...

...This preference of the Foundation for huge collective projects explains why the list of its amply financed projects contains among its researchers very few, if any, truly great names in the psychosocial and educational sciences: why its biggest divisions are headed, and its research projects are carried on...

...Reviewed by Pitirim A. Sorokin Professor of Sociology, Harvard University...