How The Ford Foundation Fucked-Up American Education

BroJack's "favorite" paragraph in this document:

"Reaping the full dividends of diversity may require an institution to
rethink certain aspects of the curriculum and other traditional
commitments of the academic community. Diversity also brings changes
outside the classroom affecting residential life, campus services,
cultural events, and student activities...
______________

Yeah, "traditional commitments" like actually teaching the subject at
hand.

BroJack
___________

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11674

How the Ford Foundation Created Multiculturalism
By Charles Sykes and K. L. Billingsley
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 9, 2004

Editor’s Note: One of the largest and most dangerous concentrations of
unchecked power in the United States is the Ford Foundation with
discretionary spending power that rivals that of government. It is
spending power moreover, for the political left and often the hard
left. [...] The story posted below, which originally appeared in
Heterodoxy magazine, reveals Ford’s crucial role in creating the
ideological movement called “multiculturalism” in our universities. --


[...] . And the dozens of scholars from campuses all over the country
who met here late last month did not look like revolutionaries. But
behind closed doors of the meeting rooms, the conference of "Cultural
Diversity Enhancement" had the tone of one of those "by any means
necessary" conventions staged by SDS in the late 60s. The subject was
how to turn American higher education inside out. It was sponsored by
the Ford Foundation, whose strategy for a radical transformation of
the university one critic has called "the academic equivalent of an
'ethnic cleansing.'"

[...] Robert Steele, a Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan, noted that
his group was aware that coercion would be required to change the
university: "People will not be quietly assimilated to
multiculturalism by truth through dialogue." They will have to be
bought off as well as brought along. [...]

Steele was followed by Jonathan Lee, a Philosophy Professor at
Colorado College, [...] ." Even science, the one area so far immune to
this radical transformation, would have to change, according to Lee:
"Instead of teaching science as a doctrine divorced from its social
context, we could teach science from a historical, economic
perspective."

The final speaker was Eve Grossman, a Princeton dean, [...] Therefore
"When we talk about changing things, we're really talking about
something no less radical than changing disciplines." Grossman made it
clear that her group of thinkers had kept their eyes on the prize: "If
we want to change the world, we have to change the students."

[...]

Ford is America's philanthropic superpower and by far the largest and
most powerful foundation in the world. But if in the past it thought
globally, it is now acting locally through an effort to mass produce
political correctness on campus the way Henry Ford cranked out Model
Ts [...]

"The Foundation is a creature of capitalism," Henry Ford II said when
he resigned in disgust from the foundation that bears his family name
in 1977, [...]

[...]

Ford supported La Raza activists in their attempts to organize
Hispanics in the Southwest. A month after Carl Stokes announced his
candidacy for mayor in Cleveland, Ford jumped in with a grant to CORE
(Congress of Racial Equality) to underwrite a voter registration
program that helped Stokes win. In 1982 the Urban Institute was the
recipient of a $3,500,000 Ford grant, which it used to produce a
26-volume critique of Reagan Administration welfare policies. Some of
Ford's 1991 grantees include the ACLU Foundation ($900,000), The
Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund ($500,000); The Lawyer's
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law ($350,000), and a $200,000 grant
to filmmaker Henry Hampton to make a documentary on Malcolm X.

The ultimate target of all this energetic social transformation,
however, is America's educational system, particularly its system of
higher education. [...]

It was a perfect place, the American university, for an eleemo-synary
institution to get a big bang for the buck. No central bureaucracy
dictates what is taught; more importantly, most schools are hurting
financially. Ford realized that with their enormous financial clout
and their appearance of being above politics, foundations were the
institutions best positioned to change the campus climate. Stripped of
all the elegant rationales and academic persiflage, it was essentially
a matter of using lucrative grants to bribe administrators into making
the desired changes. In the next two years, Ford has earmarked $79.2
million for "Education and Culture." That is the division currently
planning and bankrolling PC on campus.

[...]

Ford clearly got the most qualified people for the job. Brodie,
Shalala, Fergusson, and Kennedy had all fought the PC wars on their
own campuses, instituting "speech codes," bashing Western civilization
courses, and creating race-based admissions and hiring programs.
[......]


"Our commitment to diversity requires colleges and universities to
complete this transition by increasing substantially the numbers of
people from underrepresented groups in our student bodies, faculties,
and administrative offices. [...]

"Reaping the full dividends of diversity may require an institution to
rethink certain aspects of the curriculum and other traditional
commitments of the academic community. Diversity also brings changes
outside the classroom affecting residential life, campus services,
cultural events, and student activities...

"This recognition of differences has framed affirmative action efforts
in admitting students, hiring faculty and awarding financial aid...."

It was likely this group that Ford Foundation President Franklin
Thomas, a former New York Deputy Police Commissioner, was thinking of
when he gushed, "there is more intellectual horsepower in this place
now than there has ever been." Some of the teachers and administrators
who had worked with the individuals probably would have had a
different word to use with the prefix horse.

Thomas wields substantial power as both President of the Ford
Foundation, an office he has held since 1979, and a member of Ford's
board of directors. In his review of 1989, Thomas wrote, "It is ironic
that at just the moment when the world is embracing the American
ideal, here at home we seem to be retreating from America's great
promise of opportunity." This promise he linked to the Great
Society-like programs of the 1960s, which he said were trashed without
the benefit of "objective assessments."

He doesn't intend to let the same thing happen to the adventures in
multiculturalism Ford is sponsoring. In a September 12, 1990, press
release, Thomas explains Ford's intention to "broaden cultural and
intellectual diversity in American higher education."

The program's goal is "to ensure that college curricula and teaching
keep pace with the rapid demographic and cultural changes under way in
American society."

Added Thomas: "Most of us have little understanding of the diverse
culture, attitudes, and experiences that make up our own societies.
Unfortunately, this ignorance about other cultures breeds
insensitivity and intolerance in young and old alike." He hermetically
sealed his theory with a strong bottom line: "to reach the roots of
intolerance and improve campus life, we must make the teaching of
non-Western cultures a basic element of undergraduate education."

Unlike most foundations which are necessarily reactive, seeing their
job as judging between the respective merits of proposals submitted to
them. Ford had a better idea. It would take the initiative. According
to its 1990 annual report. Ford "invited" 200 colleges to compete for
grants of $ 100,000. But with the carrot came a big stick: any group
or institution that receives any money from the Foundation must adhere
to Ford's affirmative action guidelines.

According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, every
grant application must include a "diversity table," stark as a South
African passbook, which details "the number of non-whites and women
involved in the project and, sometimes, at the entire institution."
And in Ford's view some minorities are more equal than others.
Asian-Americans may be one of the groups suffering most discrimination
in higher education, particularly in the University of California
system, but Ford does not consider them a minority eligible for hiring
preferences.

Ford's ramrod in multiculturalism is its vice president Susan
Berresford, whom the Chronicle describes as "dogged in her efforts."
According to administrators who have dealt with Ford, Berresford often
calls applicants on the carpet about their percentages to bully them
into conformity. As the same time, she denies that the rules
constitute a "quota system." Indeed, in the face of all Ford's efforts
to engineer human souls, Berresford persists in claiming that the
primary criterion to receive Ford money is "talent."

Looking at Ford's obsession with percentages of minorities and women
at the institutions with which it does business, Michael Joyce of the
Bradley Foundation says that such a draconian affirmative action
program is "an amazing thing because it means they are behaving as if
they were a government." Joyce adds, "None of us on the moderate or
conservative side even thinks of doing anything like that. We'd be
laughed out of the business if we tried to impose. Nor would we dare
involve ourselves in the criteria for hiring and that sort of thing."

Joyce's point is worth pondering. Imagine if, say, the John M. Olin
Foundation (which people on the Left have vilified simply because it
gave a small grant to Dinesh D'Souza to complete Illiberal Education)
attempted to establish the "Ronald Reagan Free-Market Studies Program"
at Stanford and insisted that, as a condition of funding, the school
hire more middle-aged, white, Austrian-American and Anglo-American
economists and change base curriculum to include Von Mises, Hayek,
Frederic Bastiat, Thomas Sowell, and Hemando de Soto. People all over
the philanthropic community, with Ford no doubt leading the charge,
would say that Olin was building fascism.

One of the schools which qualified for Ford's $100,000 "Cultural
Diversity Grant" and which therefore became one of its R&D projects
was Tulane University. "The amount of money is nothing," says Tulane
political science professor Paul Lewis, "it's simply an excuse to do
what they wanted to do," adding that "what they would really like is
one university to be a proving ground for their ideas."

The goals of Tulane's "Initiatives for Race and Gender Enrichment,"
were breathtaking in scope. According to the University' s President
Eamon Kelly, their objective was to "change, over time, the character
of our university, and to bring it to the next level of social and
human progress." At present, racism and sexism were "pervasive" in
American society and "fundamentally present in all institutions." No
one was immune because racism and sexism were "subconscious or at
least sub-surface."

If the disease was a pandemic of a strain of racism and sexism
resistant to such remedies as free inquiry and spirited open
discussion, the cure was systematic quota hiring, with the Tulane
provost empowered to intervene when enough "people of color" were not
hired. The quota hirelings were to be given reduced teaching loads,
higher salaries and extra stipends.

Ford's front-persons pressured departments to hold seminars on gender
and racial scholarship and to integrate materials on women and people
of color into their courses. To lift Tulane to the next level of
social and human progress the school would also need tools of
enforcement. Therefore, students were encouraged to report on one
another as one way of providing the university "with tools to begin
the process of removing racism and sexism from ourselves and our
institution." Department heads were ordered to report periodically on
racist and sexist attitudes among their colleagues and students. The
initiatives also provided for an "Enrichment Liaison Person" in each
department to act as a commissar monitoring conformity. On all counts,
the Tulane experiment gave a good sense as to what Ford' s PC
initiative would look like in widespread practice.

"My gut feeling about this," says renegade Tulane professor Paul
Lewis, "is that Kelly has been sent down as a missionary from the Ford
Foundation." Indeed, Eamon Kelly was a Ford Foundation program officer
in charge of social development from 1969-1974. (From 1974-79 he
headed the Foundation's Program Related Investments.) Ronald Mason,
Kelly's senior vice-president at Tulane in charge of implementing the
diversity initiative, was also a Ford transplant, as was the man
Kelley installed as chancellor, who has since departed.

For Lewis, a veteran of the civil-rights movement, the Ford initiative
at Tulane was "the worst assault on academic freedom since Senator Joe
McCarthy' s escapades in the 1950s." In the New Orleans
Times-Picayune, Lewis argued that "universities cannot operate where
dissent is discouraged, where inquiry is under the thumb of orthodoxy
and where professors and students are spied upon and reported."

As a result of his agitation against Ford's carpet-bagging at Tulane,
Lewis found an ally in philosophy professor Eric Mack. Mack pointed
out that the University's multicultural "Initiatives" did little to
remedy the fact that Tulane "offers almost no course in Islamic,
African, Near Eastern, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese history,
literature, fine arts, philosophy, or religion. Nor does the document
display any interest in intellectual diversity."

Throughout 1991 Lewis continued to mobilize opposition to Kelly's
plan. As a result, Tulane eventually dropped the declaration that
diversity, rather than scholarship or teaching, was the university's
highest priority. Last May, Tulane's board of administrators scrapped
most of Kelly's plan. Trying to snatch victory out of the jaws of
defeat, Kelly claimed implausibly that the board's statement, far from
foiling his plans, was actually an endorsement. "A liberal pragmatist
would have cut his losses," Lewis says, "but Kelly is digging in. He's
an ideologue."

While the Tulane battle raged. Ford was proceeding with its grand
strategy elsewhere. Boston College announced plans for a course on
"alterity" or "otherness." Denison University announced efforts to
extend its Minority and Women's Studies requirement into its Freshman
Studies Program. Haverford College announced plans to create or revise
ten courses relating to prejudice and discrimination that would make
up its new core requirement in social justice. The University of
Rochester announced plans to expand its Freshman Ventures to include
"the experience of oppressed groups and their resistance to
oppression."

The fact that all these announcements were made simultaneously, and in
virtually identical PC boilerplate, was no coincidence. Each of the
schools had received a grant under Ford' s "Race Relations and
Cultural Diversity Initiative." Other schools which got grants from
Ford included Bemidji State, Brandeis University, UCLA, University of
Iowa, Millsaps College, Mt. St. Mary's College, New School for Social
Research, Notre Dame, Pitzer, University o fRedlands, Southwest Texas
State, Virginia Commonwealth, and Wesleyan College.

The inclusion of Wesleyan, a prestigious liberal arts school in
Middletown, Connecticut, was of special interest. Ford's Education and
Culture Director Edgar Beckham is a graduate of Wesleyan. Beckham was
also a lecturer in the German department before going into
administration. As Dean of students and student services at Wesleyan,
Beckham championed politically correct programs. The kind of
networking Ford can do is shown by the fact that Beckham was able to
deliver Wesleyan to Ford for its pilot program and bag $ 100,000 for
his alma mater at the same time.

In 1990 Beckham told the New York Times that he was enthusiastic about
the Ford job "because of the experience I've had on a single campus."
It was Beckham's "strong view that if you want to get at the heart of
culture, you have to engage the faculty and you have to affect the
curriculum."

How has this engagement proceeded with Ford's PC dollars? Wesleyan
boasts four organizations for "students of color" and supports a
chapter of SOAR, Society Organized Against Racism. A "students of
color council" meets regularly with Dean Janina Montero and other
officers, according to Montero, "to go over the agenda." One faculty
member who for obvious reasons prefers not to be named says that since
the Ford grant, Wesleyan's PC cadres have been pushing for race and
gender based hiring and "front-loading a lot of stuff into
orientation." Freshmen must attend a "four or five day boot camp"
which features "multicultural and homosexual propaganda." The Ford
grant also paid for faculty to have one course-load reduction, which
they were to use in the development of multicultural curricula.

Ford's initiative at Wesleyan also got a boost from President William
Chace, a former Donald Kennedy crony during his days helping to
dislodge Stanford's Western Civilization requirement. New
vice-president Joanne Creighton took charge of affirmative action,
targeting each department, with special emphasis on English and
History. Wesleyan became the success story that helped palliate the
fiasco at Tulane.

Evergreen State, in Olympia, Washington, was founded as an
"alternative" school in 1970 and remains a time capsule of fuzzy
leftism to this day, a sort of public version of nearby Reed College.
At Evergreen there is no classic breakdown of disciplines, only "team
teaching" and "collaborative learning." The racial break- down of
students and "faculty of color" is carefully monitored and
administrators can rattle off the racial percentages like the periodic
tables.

As it happens. Evergreen administrator Barbara Smith also runs the
Washington Center for Undergraduate Education, which owes its
existence in part to a grant from Ford. The Center is the largest
statewide education project in the country. Participating schools
include not only Evergreen, but the University of Washington and its
two branch campuses, Seattle University (a private school), and 12
community colleges for a grand total of 43 institutions. All of them
get information from the Center, a clearing house for
multiculturalism.

Barbara Smith wrote a grant proposal, sent it to Ford, and hit the
jackpot. With Beckham's enthusiastic support. Ford cut Evergreen a
whopping $718,400 grant for a "Cultural Pluralism Curriculum Infusion
Project," a "seven-step intervention" to promote cultural pluralism
and "manifest the point of view in new and reshaped courses." Smith
didn't even have to practice grantswomanship in getting the money.
"Out of the blue they [Ford] wanted to come and talk," she says. Edgar
Beckham and some Ford colleagues were soon winging their way to the
Evergreen campus, where they took a hands-on approach. "There was one
whole meeting where they coached us what to write," says Smith. By the
time they had collaborated on a proposal, the grant was a foregone
conclusion.

"The program wouldn't be in existence if it weren't for grant money,"
confesses Smith. "We had 90 people for 10 days in institutes. Seven
faculty and administrators from each school."

Without the grant, "we could not have had that kind of time or
participation." Ford, says Smith has a "well developed idea where
diversity should go, since they have a long-term agenda."

What is this long range plan? In addition to a sort of Johnny
Appleseed approach to sowing multiculturalism wherever it finds
fertile ground, Ford appears to be concentrating on what Beckham calls
"institutional clusters." Besides the Washington Center, Ford channels
money to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education and
the Associate Colleges of the Midwest. The clusters, says Beckham,
"will develop programs of institutional teams, leadership teams that
will undergo an educational process themselves and then return to
their campuses and influence the continuing institutional change."

Ford gave $434,000 to the Western Interstate Commission of Higher
Education to expand and streamline its Institute on Ethnic Diversity.
The Commission will invite Western colleges to attend intensive
seminars on making their core curricula more diverse. "Participating
institutions," the foundation notes, "will be required to make an
explicit public commitment, endorsed by the governing board, to work
toward greater campus diversity." The concept will include addressing
"goals, strategies and timelines for hiring minority faculty and
staff, increasing the enrollment and retention of minority students,
establishing faculty development programs, renewing the curriculum . .
.. and making appropriate changes in administrative policies and
practices."

Along with the clusters. Ford grants continue to flow to individual
schools. In Los Angeles, St. Mary's College is using a $100,000 Ford
grant to hold faculty-student "development workshops led by experts on
multicultural education and teaching."

Northeastern Illinois will use Ford money to hold a campus-wide
"University Day" with a diversity theme and workshops for faculty.
Pitzer College is using $100,000 in Ford funds to revise traditional
courses to "incorporate the perspectives of different racial, ethnic
and cultural groups." Queens College will launch a "Departmental
Diversity Initiative" that will include "re-evaluation of each
department's educational philosophy and program...."

The University of Iowa will use a Ford grant in "a required
two-semester course." (Ford is not in the business of funding
electives.) Notre Dame's $91,640 Ford grant will bankroll two-week
intensive workshops for faculty members in core curriculum.

De Pauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where Dan Quayle went to
school, is now having financial problems but thanks to Ford there is
plenty of money for PC. De Pauw chaplain Stuart Lord holds classes in
"deconstruction," the "reversal of negative and pessimistic ideas that
have been embedded in people' s minds." Professors send students to
the video room to watch PBS fare such as "Racism 101." A multicultural
tape features Gary Harper, a Purdue graduate student arguing —
unopposed of course — that "homosexuals have their own culture and
face the same oppression" as other groups.

In his recent convocation address, De Pauw President Robert Bottoms
quoted antediluvian lefty William Sloane Coffin, who had spoken at the
school, to the effect that "freedom means building a fair and just
civic order." Bottoms said that De Pauw had "speeded up" the diversity
process and referred to the "black perspective" and "Hispanic
perspective" as though such a thing actually existed. "The
administration's task," Bottoms said, "is to keep the issue of
community on the institution's agenda. In fact, it may be much more
important than most of what occupies our time." That line may have
been the harbinger of a new direction for the school, taken with an
eye to more grant money. Last year De Pauw invited Edgar Beckham to
give a convocation address, after which the Ford official asked if
anything was being done in multiculturalism. Administrators knew that
money was to be had and quickly submitted a proposal. Ford responded
with a grant. The school used the funds to establish Ekabo House, an
experiment in multicultural living.

A $ 100,000 Ford grant will enable the University of Redlands to run a
four-week workshop "focused on the introduction of cultural diversity
into the curriculum." Vassar's $100,000 from Ford will set up teams of
students and faculty who will "develop recommendations for revision
often traditional courses that serve as introductions to disciplines
in the humanities and social sciences." Ford wrote a $326,700 check to
the University of Pennsylvania for "a series of summer seminars in
African-American cultural studies." A $300,000 Ford grant to UC
Berkeley supports "faculty and student interdisciplinary research on
the African diaspora," while a $180,125 Ford grant pays for a new
doctoral program at Michigan State in comparative black history. Under
the Ford Plan, radical administrators, faculty and foundations merge
in a PC menage a trois, backed by Ford's fathomless vault of dollars.
One gets little clue about this audacious strategy, however, from
Ford's own literature. "They don't want to be too public about what
they are doing," says the Bradley Foundation's Michael Joyce, "because
they worry that if people with common sense understood what they are
doing they would be rejected."

If Ford, as claimed, learns from its grantees, they should pay heed to
Marty Strange of the Ford-funded Center for Rural Affairs, in
Walthill, Nebraska. "It is a sad day when philanthropy becomes the
custodian of change," Strange recently told the Chronicle of
Philanthropy, "because then when change occurs you've got a vested
interest and you don't want any more change to occur. And that's
exactly what a foundation ought to avoid.

By all indications Ford has thrown such caution to the winds. In fact,
it is speeding up its PC production line. The foundation plans to hire
a scholar in residence to advise the foundation on "diversity-related
issues."

When he resigned from the foundation his grandfather started, Henry
Ford II said that he hoped it would spend itself out of existence. But
that is not going to happen. Ford has all the money it will ever need,
and is able to function as an invisible government in a field like
education. It can pursue its radical goal of transforming higher
education and yet avoid scrutiny. Even Edgar Beckham admits that "the
foundation doesn't get opposition." The last independent book-length
critique of the philanthropic leviathan was Dwight MacDonald's The
Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions published in 1956.

Ford is so insulated from the consequences of its acts that it never
has to reckon what it has done or is doing. As Irving Kristol has
noted, during the 1950s Ford pushed the behavioral sciences in the
belief that they would bring about the "politics of the future" and
create a better society. They didn't and couldn't. The professors
groomed in that misguided project were constantly sharpening their
tools but were capable of no real agriculture. Ford also bankrolled
the 1967 effort to decentralize New York City' s schools, which led
Kristol to comment that Ford "blithely went ahead and polarized the
city, inflicting enormous damage on the public school system and on
the political system of the city. And having caused the damage, it
lost interest and went on to something else."

There is a phrase to describe the basis of the Ford Foundation' s
meddling in higher education: the arrogance of power. The architects
of its assault on higher education are armchair radicals creating a
revolution from above. There is no enthusiasm for the future they are
plotting, no demand for the innovations they are putting into place.
But like other revolutions this one does not think in terms of
informed consumers considering the pros and cons of its product, but
only of passive victims who have to buy whether they like it or not.