Inderjeet, Parmar (2002) “American foundations and the development of international knowledge networks” in Global Networks. V. 2, no. 1. pages 13-30.
p. 25: “’Knowledge is power’, admits the Rockefeller Foundation’s Annual Report for 1957, ‘power which cannot escape the calculus of political rivalry’ (Rockefeller Foundation, 1957). See extended text below in notes
Description/definition of “international knowledge networks” – from page 13 - a system of coordinated research, disseminated and published results, study and often graduate-level teaching, intellectual exchange, and financing across national boundaries. The international networks may also include official policymakers and international aid and other agencies.
p. 13: “It is clear that American foundations consciously helped to construct U.S. international hegemony after 1945 through international knowledge networks that aimed to foster a pro-U.S. environment of values, methods, and research institutions across a range of fields and academic disciplines.”
Foundations as “parastates” – doing the work of western governments where politics made it best to do so.
The “corporative political economy” of foundations – page 4: “a liberal internationalism (a kind of ‘nationalist internationalism’) (Herman 1969; Patterson 1976), represents a genuine attempt to organize and mobilize intellectuals and universities of other nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, for example, to ‘develop’ themselves in a direction that would not only favor U.S. economic and strategic interests but, in doing so, lead to greater general economic growth, stability, and prosperity, and to peace.”
p. 14: “The US-based international networks operated across international boundaries to achieve their objective of fostering and consolidating US hegemony. They did this by:
· financing the creation of new educational and research institutions with a view to generating knowledge, ideas, and trained manpower, favoring particular kinds of economic development;
· consolidating existing institutions to the same end;
· sponsoring research programs and projects that favored particular lines of inquiry at the expense of others, thereby setting the agenda of research;
· establishing scholarships at elite US universities to educate and train students from the Third World;
· bringing together academics and practitioners, from the USA and overseas through conferences and seminars, to create networks that would act further to strengthen US hegemony.
The overall effect of network construction was to consolidate US hegemony in economically or strategically important areas of the world through the fostering of pro-US ‘modernizing elites’ (Magat 1979; Ransom 1974).”
Gramscian – the above describes efforts at building an intellectual hegemony – not a coercion of force, but rather a mobilization of knowledge, information, and ideas to advance a particular political mindset, and offset counter-mindsets.
Cold War – much of what Arnove (et al) speaks to in Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism, as well as the time period (the ‘golden era’ from 1960-1975) focused upon by Levy in To Export Progress, is the Cold War era. To think that a foundation based in the USA would support ideas that espoused communism (Mao-ism; Stalinism; Leninism; Trotsky-ite philosophy; etc.) is silly. The foundations, whether or not in organized, planned, concerted tune with government, were undoubtedly supporting a set of ideologies, and foregoing support of contrasting ideologies.
1911 – Carnegie Foundation created
1913 – Rockefeller Foundation created
1936 – Ford Foundation created – though not large-scale, nor really active until the late 1940s.
Scientific philanthropy – Carnegie and Rockefeller pursuit “. . . a rational activity that sought to maximize its effects on the social and other problems of order and stability in an industrializing and urbanizing America at the turn of the twentieth century.” (page 16)
Foundation focuses - practical, pragmatic, utilitarian, elitist, technocratic, scientific. (p. 16)
Cold War Ford Foundation funding – page 17 example – “The Ford Foundation alone spent $190 million on building up US expertise in world affairs at top US universities such as Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Berkeley, Stanford, Cornell, and Michigan (Magat 1979). A State Department survey of 1967 showed that of the 191 university centers of foreign affairs research, 107 depended primarily on Ford funding. . .”
The USA did not have an experience like the British did with their empire, nor the French with their colonial expansion into Africa and Asia. The USA had an isolationist streak that frequently led political reaction to world events up to the Second World War. Thus the tie-in by the foundations to bulk up US foreign affairs expertise – for a particular political rationale and purpose – to engage the Cold War intellectually.
Two sections – the first on Indonesia, the second on Latin America – serve as examples of US foundation policy in these places – in line with generalized statement made earlier, so I did not do any close reading.
US foundations and African education: an example of foundation cooperation – section begins on page 22
Carnegie based its colonial era activities in British Africa, modeling programming on its domestic education work “on behalf” of southern Black Americans. A Black elite needed to be formed, so Carnegie sought an institution to sponsor – Tuskegee, with its tradition of educating a Black elite, was chosen. Hygiene, home economics, industrial, and agricultural training – practical, utilitarian, pragmatic.
p. 22: “According to Merle Curti, post-1945 philanthropy effectively continued the Tuskegee tradition in its attempts to develop ‘sound native leadership’ in the Third World and to lift ‘the lethargy imposed by ancient custom’ (Curti 1963:573). The Ford Foundation, working on the basis that every society required an educated elite to lead it, financed an active program of training elite cadres in public administration, agricultural economics, and in the social sciences. . . . the [Rockefeller] Foundation focused a great deal of its funding ($10 million between 1963 and 1973 [ - Daniel Levy’s golden era!]) on the new federated University of east Africa (UEA) and, with Ford Foundation cooperation, established several institutes of economic and social research. The Rockefeller Foundation also placed numerous Africans in US universities, employing American faculty at Ibadan and UEA.”
Inderjeet goes on to describe the creation – through means already outlined above in general terms – scholarships, fellowships, seminars, focused research, etc – the creation of knowledge networks within British Africa, and post-colonial nations in Africa.
p. 23: “The immediate effects of Rockefeller and Ford Foundation funding are noted by Thompson. Some 66 percent of all UEA faculty had held either Rockefeller scholarships or special lectureships; 8 percent of UEA’s full professors and deans had held such Rockefeller Foundation awards. Thompson also notes that the presence of Rockefeller-funded Americans also played a key role in institutional and curricular development, most notably at the Institute of Development Studies in Nairobi, under the directorship of James S. Coleman.”
David Court (1979) is cited as showing how changes were wrought in the focus of scientific and social scientific research, from pursuit of knowledge to pragmatic, practical, utilitarian research focused on ‘development’, and that foundation support was instrumental in forging this shift.
Foundation sponsorship of African Studies departments (Northwestern, Boston University, Columbia, Wisconsin, Indiana, UCLA, Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Chicago), and the creation of the African Studies Association. From footnote #5 – page 27 – “The Carnegie Corporation, between 1947-1960, contributed . . . $721,500 to African Studies . . .”
New section – Discussion and conclusions – starts on page 24
p. 24: “Through such networks of scholars, foundations, policymakers, administrators, and international agencies across the world the foundations exercised intellectual influence by setting the research agenda. They mobilized bias by strategically using their vast financial resources to determine which questions were worthy of consideration, how they were to be addressed, the methodologies and paradigms to be employed, and which scholars and institutions were to be supported to conduct the research.”
p. 25: “It is important to study examples of alternative development strategies that were not pursued because of foundation intervention. That is, were there available alternative non-elite based strategies that were actually marginalized? This would address the problem in the literature that suggests that had foundations not intervened, other viable indigenous mass-based development plans would have emerged. For example, the viability of strategies of non-formal education for empowerment might be assessed. It would be interesting to identify and study the impact of alternative foundations or other organizations, against which we might compare the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie philanthropists. One example comes immediately to mind: the American Fund for Public Service, which according to Curti, was not especially successful, but would be worthy of deeper analysis.”
The foundations were not, as their own supporters and literature at times portray, a third force in international affairs, but a large-scale effort subsidiary to US political and strategic interests during the Cold War and afterward.
p. 25: “’Knowledge is power’, admits the Rockefeller Foundation’s Annual Report for 1957, ‘power which cannot escape the calculus of political rivalry’ (Rockefeller Foundation, 1957). . . their support of US foreign policy objectives and of the ideology of liberal internationalism, during and before the Cold War, cannot legitimately be considered non-political or non-ideological. Neither can the fact that they exported ‘the American way of life’ and ideas about the role of education in development, be considered non-ideological. The political, intellectual, and ideological effects in Indonesia and Africa, for example, are also very clear.” footnote
p. 26: “International knowledge networks mattered during the Cold War, and they continue to matter today. It is likely that improvements in communications technology, a greater level of diversity in the ethnic, gender, and national origins of foundation trustees, a more transnational outlook exemplified by support for the Trilateral Commission (Gill 1990), and the relative absence of ideological opposition to foundations and other such agencies, have enhanced the power of such bodies (Reinicke 2000). As such, their activities ought to draw the attention of all those interested in ‘how power works’ and how elites try to manage global change.”
Footnote – page 27: “According to the social scientist and former Ford Foundation official, Francis X. Sutton, ‘[I] is unquestionable that the Ford Foundation promoted the social sciences in many parts of the world as a means of “development” in ways that were not politically neutral’ (Sutton 1998:36)”
