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problem: Mr. Nielsen, like most foundationmen, thinks that on balance
donor families have an unhealthy impact on the foundations they made
possible. They tend to treat the capital as private property and spend it
on charitable whim instead of following the guidelines of, say, Carnegie's
Alan Pizer who says, quite sensibly, that "foundations should anticipate
the strains of social change and facilitate the adaptation of major institu–
tions to such change."
Here too, however, Nielsen finds grounds for optimism. Old donors
(and their families), while they seem to have life expectancies which
would put most insurance companies out of business, eventually do fade
away and "in a number of instances it appears that the passing of the
donor has most clearly set the processes of institutional development in
motion.... Once the evolution begins, the process is sustained by in–
ternal forces which are generated. As the donor's influence lessens, a
foundation develops its own kind of institutional pride combined with a
somewhat greater share of accountability.. .. " Democratize the over–
seers and foundation staff men will be free to march with history.
Not enough worry about the dangers of bureaucratization for my
taste, not enough appreciation for the good old days when Andrew
Carnegie could single-handedly decide to devote some $43 million to the
improvement of libraries. But Nielsen doesn't delude himself with wish–
ful history. Take the area of race relations where he remarks, apropos the
Carnegie Corporation's failure to follow through on Gunnar Myrdal's
pioneering study,
The American Dilemma,
"There have been many ex–
amples of a foundation turning its back on its failure; the Carnegie Cor–
poration in the Myrdal study turned its back on a triumph." The race
crisis seems to have been too much for the big foundations. "Even the
most concerned and adaptable of the big foundations," he concedes,
"have lagged behind the pace of events in the racial crisis by five to ten
years. Black leadership itself and government action have been well in
advance of the big foundations, as have been a number of the smaller
foundations, such as New World, Taconic, Field and the Stern Family
Fund."
Logically one might even find a few million dollars' worth of hope in
this desolate record if, based on that experience, the big foundations
would give birth to satellite smaller foundations, free of bureaucratic
constraints and with specialties in areas like race. Their poor per–
formance on such urgencies notwithstanding, Nielsen sums up: "The big
foundations, for all their weaknesses, are nonetheless institutions in for–
ward movement but the pace is stately and dangerously slow."
A comforting conclusion but one which is built, it seems to me, on
