An Infinity of Options

"In sheer dollars, public philanthropy outstripped private philanthropy as early as 1929," says Henry T. Heald, newly retired president of the Ford Foundation. Now governmental philanthropy in education, health, welfare and economic development so vastly overshadows private giving that it accounts for no less than 10% of the gross national product. As Government continues to pick up projects pioneered by the private foundations, such diminished giants of good giving as the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations are taking a thoughtful new look at where to put their money.

The need for reassessment of their roles conveniently coincides with significant changes in leadership. At Ford, which has pumped $1.82 billion--70% of all its grants--into education in the past 30 years, McGeorge Bundy, shrewd national security assistant to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, this month succeeded Heald as president, while M.l.T. President Julius Stratton has become board chairman.

At Carnegie, Alan Pifer has been moved up as acting president to succeed John Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Rockefeller's President J. George Harrar keeps the post he took over from Dean Rusk in 1961.

Bold Projects. The basic role of these foundations, explains Heald, has long been to "provide the cutting edge for social advance by calling wider attention to important problems and supporting experiments and testing ideas that may be applied on a national scale if proven effective." The foundations have been so successful at this that the Federal Government has adopted many of their ideas in such educational programs as the preschool Head Start training for deprived children, school curriculum development, grants to improve university graduate programs in science and engineering, interdisciplinary research in biochemistry and biophysics, much of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Believing that they should "never spend a cent of very precious money if someone else can take care of the project," as Pifer says, the foundations welcome the federal invasion.

The foundations are now free to turn to bold, short-term tryouts of imaginative projects, which Government cannot tackle, since, as Pifer puts it, "failures can't be tolerated" in tax-supported programs. Another expanding field for foundations is providing an objective analysis of how the Government programs are functioning. Government, argues Heald, "is not the best judge of its own performance--the painstaking job of investigation and analysis can be done only by the scholar."

Facts of Philanthropy. Among the most likely areas of concentration in education, say the foundation leaders, are pioneering new techniques in vocational education, bolstering the rapidly multiplying two-year community colleges, improving teacher training at all levels, finding ways of developing imaginative leaders for major universities, upgrading the quality and improving the organization of all of education.

Foundation leaders agree that their future will be determined less by anything Government might do than by their own ability to turn up significant new ideas. In this, they have unlimited freedom to seek ideas anywhere, and there is great "excitement," says one of them, in the fact that they still enjoy "an infinity of options."

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