Arnove, Robert (1980) “Introduction” in Arnove, Robert (ed.) Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: the Foundations at Home and Abroad

Arnove, Robert (1980) “Introduction” in Arnove, Robert (ed.) Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: the Foundations at Home and Abroad Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. pages 1-23

Focuses primarily on Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations – the big three – and their investment in the production of culture and formation of public policy.

Well, how’s this for an introduction:

p. 1: “A central thesis is that foundations like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford have a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and, in effect, establish an agenda of what merits society’s attention. They serve as “cooling out” agencies, delaying and preventing more radical, structural change. They help maintain an economic and political order, international in scope, which benefits the ruling class interests of philanthropists and philanthropoids – a system which, as the various chapters document, has worked against the interest of minorities, the working class, and Third World peoples.”

p. 2: “Despite the imprecise and rhetorical nature of the term, cultural imperialism captures the scope and impact of foundational involvement in public education, professional training, and research activities, both nationally and internationally. In part, it denotes the ethnocentrism of an elite group from a particular class and cultural background, who arrogate the right to determine public policies in critical areas of culture not only for U.S. society but other societies as well. The term, furthermore denotes “the use of political and economic power to exalt and spread the values and habits of a foreign culture at the expense of a native culture” (The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought), and “the deliberate and calculated process of forcing a cultural minority to adopt the culture of the dominant group in a society” (Dictionary of Social Science). And cultural imperialism comprehends the contribution of educational programs to the functioning of an international class-system intimately related to situations of classical colonialism (nation to nation domination), internal colonialism (the economic, political, cultural and legal subjugation of groups within a nation), and neocolonialism (the continuing economic and cultural dependency of politically independent countries on the metropolitan centers of North America and Europe).”

Cultural Hegemony – Ideological Hegemony – via Marx and Engels, then Gramsci:

p. 3: “For Gramsci, intellectuals and schools were crucial to the development of consensus in society, to the rationalization and legitimation of a given social order. Cultural hegemony mitigated the necessity for the State to use its coercive apparatus to control groups which might otherwise be disaffected. This concept serves as a useful tool for examining the centrality, for foundations, of educational investments. Education – and higher education, in particular – has been the primary target of foundation funding activities.”

By the late 1970s, (page 30 “. . . education still is the number one priority of foundations, accounting for approximately 30 percent of expenditures, the highest percentage in any single area. . . an analysis of the investment patterns of nine major donors (Carnegie, Danforth, Ford, Grant, Kellogg, Lilly, Mott, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage) reveals that approximately eight times more was spent on higher education than on pre-collegiate education.”

Lion’s share of higher education foundation giving focuses on graduate level academic and professional programs at private colleges and universities.

Rhetoric of foundations – a doctrine of “independent institutions efficiently administering surplus wealth in the public interest [that] accorded with the American belief in pluralism and a thriving private sector.” (page 4)

p. 5: “From their beginnings, the activities of the giant philanthropic foundations were concerned not only with promoting stability and orderly change in the emergent national society, but with extending the “benefits” of Western science, technology, and value systems abroad.”

1915 – Walsh Commission – “. . . served as a forum for debating the role of the general purpose foundation in American society. As Howe notes [chapter one], not for another forty years would foundations be subjected to such critical examination and public scrutiny. The foundations survived the congressional challenge by obtaining unrestrictive state, rather than national, charters. The institutional autonomy they secured and the funding policies they pursued, in response to public outcry over their more blatant forms of self-serving grant-making, have continued relatively intact to the present day.” (page 7)

Chapter two – case studies – “The Carnegie Institute is studied with regard to its support for university-based academics who would address social issues of concern to the owners and managers of capital. As in the case of the Russell Sage Foundation [a separate case study in this chapter], the role of Carnegie was to mobilize and efficiently organize talent on a national scale.”

Chapter two – Rockefeller case study – “. . . examined in regard to the operating procedures it developed in response to the Walsh Commission investigation of its involvement in labor-management strife in the coal fields of Colorado. The foundation, accused of public relations activities on behalf of the Colorado Lead and Fuel Company (which was 40 percent owned by the Rockefeller family), moved to separate its activities from that of the family, and to separate grant-making from project management. Moreover, the foundation moved to gain respectability – to project an aura of disinterested detachment – by channeling its resources through intermediary agencies such as the American Council of Learned Societies and subsequently the Social Science research Council. As later chapters detail, these mechanisms and modes of grant-making are very much characteristic of the big foundations to this day.”

The set of chapters on foundation activities vis-à-vis Black education and education in Africa define the early history of major foundations – Slater, Phelps-Stokes, Rockefeller, and Carnegie are named explicitly by Arnove – as promoting “segregated betterment” (page 10) for Blacks and Africans.

p. 11: “Edward Berman, in Chapter 6, discusses the activities of the Phelps-Stokes Fund in exporting the U.S. model of ‘adaptation” and industrial education for blacks to British Africa in the period between 1910 and 1945. The assumptions both U.S. and British colonialists shared were (1) that neither the African nor the American Negro would be self-governing in the foreseeable future and (2) that a narrowly defined vocational education could be used to train American Negroes and Africans to become productive, docile, and permanent underclasses in their respective societies.

The involvement of American philanthropy in advising South Africa in the development of its apartheid policies is also documented. What is made evident in the Berman chapter is not only the emergence of a national but an international network of corporate interests, philanthropists, and policymakers who increasingly coordinate activities to their advantage.”


Post-WWII, Berman (Chapter Seven), sees foundations and philanthropists as understanding that “segregated betterment” was no longer viable. Instead, foundations turned to concentrate on co-opting those who lead Africa to political independence.

pp. 11-12: “With the demise of classical colonialism and the creation of independent states governed by Africans, American philanthropists . . . pursued new policies in education which would link the emergent indigenous leadership to U.S. values, modus operandi, and institutions. These policies were designed to ensure that U.S. vested economic and strategic interests were not threatened. Chapter 7 details the activities of the big three foundations (Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller) that led to

1) the creation of lead universities in countries [Nigeria, Zaire, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya] considered of geo-strategic and/or economic importance to the United States; 2) an emphasis within these institutions on social science research and related manpower planning programs; 3) programs to train public administrators; 4) teacher training and curriculum development projects; and 5) training programs which brought African nationals to select universities in the United States for advanced training and returned them home to assume positions of leadership.”

Arnove mentions his own Chapter (Ten) and the shifts in focus by the late 1960s that saw foundations begin to assist African and other Third World academics to network between and among themselves, but to do so in such a way that information, research, data, etc. flowed back – first – to the West, thus perpetuating the hegemonic control the West had over global processes in education.

pp. 17-18: “The power of foundations like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford has long resided in their providing necessary seed money for professional advancement and institutional growth, for innovation and research in unchartered and perhaps risky areas where other sources of funding are unavailable. Through funding and promoting research in critical areas, the big three have been able to exercise decisive influence over the growing edge of knowledge, the problems that are examined and by whom, and the uses to which newly generated information is put. Through the education programs they fund, foundations are able to influence the world views of the general public as well as the orientations and commitments of the leadership which will direct social change.

Foundations and their staff represent neither retrograde reactionaries nor subversive radicals. Rather, as Fisher suggests in Chapter 8, they represent a sophisticated conservatism, supporting changes that help to maintain, and make more efficient, an international system of power and privilege. Their watchwords have been efficiency, control, planning. From the perspective of the foundations, those responsible for guiding and controlling change at home and abroad should be competent and pragmatic individuals – people much like the philanthropoids themselves.”

p. 18: “.The consequences of foundation support for the work of intellectuals are manifold. It cannot be argued that, in the absence of foundation funding, scholars, researcher, and academics would engage in militant action. More reasonably, it can be argued that foundation patronage has helped impede the formation of a critical scientific and intellectual community which examines basic mechanisms and thought systems of repression.

p. 19: “A critique of domination must begin with an examination of the role of intellectuals and their connections to those groups which exercise hegemony I a society. This critique must examine their assumptions, languages, and modes of work as well as their funding sources and clients. This book ahs been dedicated to an elucidation of a principal source of patronage for those who work with ideas. It has examined past policy rationales for such involvements by foundations, the expectations held by foundations for researchers and academics, the funding patterns and modus operandi by which foundations elicited the support of and worked with the agents of cultural production and dissemination. It is hoped that the critiques contained in Philanthropy and Cultural imperialism will lead to greater sensitivity on the part of academia to the ramifications, past and present, of foundation policies in the field of culture – and to greater awareness and understanding on the part of the public to the workings and consequences of these powerful institutions.”