148
VICTOR S. NAVASKY
mission on higher education? Who else would have put up the money for
'Sesame Street?' "
But are these legitimate rhetoricals? IBM, which has helped rebuild
Bedford-Stuyvesant as part of its public affairs program, might have
spawned a "Sesame Street." A War on Poverty unbeset by a War on
Vietnam might have provided funds to give training to future generations
of black leaders. In a foundationless world any number of community
groups might have helped initiate early work on population control and
family planning, and so forth. Nielsen himself points out (apropos a
discussion of the comparative quality of government and foundation per–
sonnel) that even in the social sciences, government-supported offices of
naval research and institutes such as Rand "have achievements to their
credit which few private institutions can match."
Even if Mr. Nielsen is right and only "the third sector" will under–
take certain programs is that a priori an argument for or against those
programs? After all, if neither private enterprise nor public opinion
wants them, why should taxpayers subsidize them? To persuade us of his
case Mr. Nielsen must tell us more than that his sympathies lie with the
"modernists" who reject the traditional notion that foundations should
stick to the private sector (hospitals, boys clubs, etc.) and believe that
they should be "at the center of things, not the edges, and that they must
more than merely co-exist with government - - they must communicate
and collaborate with it."
And would it be possible for Mr. Nielsen to articulate a set of values
-- his implicit criteria -- on which most reasonable men, foundation–
men and nonfoundationmen alike, would agree? I'm skeptical. He ap- '
proves of the defense fund that Ford helped set up for Mexican–
Americans because, having defined a social objective, Ford was able "to
alter in a subtle way the balance of political forces in those areas where
Mexican-Americans are concentrated." Okay. Nielsen and I and many
Mexican-Americans are all for that particular defense fund, but many
other Mexican-Americans (the sort foundationmen tend to dismiss as one
component in the "extremists of both sides") are violently opposed to it.
Or consider the analysis of a New Left critic like David Horowitz
(which Mr. Nielsen doesn't, perhaps because it appeared in the presump–
tively "extremist"
Ramparts),
who points out that all of the top univer–
sity
In~titutes
of International Studies (including Columbia, Chicago,
Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, Cornell, etc.) are funded principally by one
foundation (the Ford Foundation); that none of these institutes would
exist without foundation funding; and that these institutes are critically
