From the book, Philanthropy: Voluntary Action for the Public Good, by Robert L. Payton

Philanthropics

This book is about a domain of knowledge. My proposal is that we call it "philanthropics," a coined word intended to be parallel and analogous to politics and economics. Philanthropics would be the domain of inquiry concerned with the organization, methods, and principles of voluntary action for public purposes.

William Drennan has written an unpublished book entitled Neonyms, a book about words that he has coined to address aspects of modern life. Although he gleefully mixes Greek roots with Latin prefixes and suffixes and vice versa, some of his coinages are promising, for example, anaclysm, to identify "a momentous, constructive upheaval, especially in politics"; while some are less so, for example, chronoflake, as the category of "someone who keeps offbeat hours."[1] John Money, according to an advertisement of Prometheus Books, writes about sexosophy. Scholars have given us victimology recently, and narratology as "the theory of narrative." Professor DeVito's textbook Communicology (Harper & Row, 1982) is now in a second edition. Mortimer Adler coined propaedia and micropaedia to embrace his new design of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Some important new domains have failed to arrive at consensus about a label for their field: Women's studies and feminist studies may ultimately become gender studies, forever offending those who would limit gender to grammar.

Rhetoric seems unkillable, perhaps because its rivals are words like communicology. "I believe it was the Edinburgh logician Sir William Hamilton who said that a good new term is like a fortress to dominate country won from the forces of darkness; but those forces never sleep and will strive by their Philosophical Arm to recover lost territory. "[2] William H. Riker has defined "heresthetics" "to refer to a political strat­egy. Its root is a Greek word for choosing and electing.... And this is what heresthetics is about: structuring the world so you can win."[3]

The Oxford English Dictionary includes philanthrope for philanthropist (as in Too Late the Philanthrope), and philanthropism was once proposed to identify "the profession or practice of philanthropy; a philanthropic theory or system."

I came to the notion of philanthropics first while reading a book on dogmatics, and was encouraged when later coming upon this passage in the introduction to Friedrich Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man:

The systematic study of art, of its nature, effects, and its function as a distinctive value in human life, was not yet fifty years old. It had been started by A.G. Baumgarten when he founded what he called a new "science" and christened it Aesthetica (1750). From the very beginning the name gave rise to misconceptions.[4]

Misunderstandings have occurred even before the coinage of the word philanthropics. First, insistence that the philan­thropic tradition constitutes a domain of knowledge has prompted immediate suspicions that I am proposing to create an academic department. The place of the study of philanthropy in the university is a subject worthy of a separate essay, but I am most fearful personally that philanthropy might drift into academic isolation much as international studies and Afro-American studies have. I like the analogy to aesthetics because aesthetics fits comfortably within art history and philosophy as well as fine arts; philanthropics has even more opportunities.

The word philanthropy as presently used qualifies as what W. B. Gallie once called in a well-known essay an "essentially contested concept."[5] The book entitled Philanthropics (to which I will turn after this book is completed) will include an essay on the competing conceptual claims that are ob­scured behind the word philanthropy (and charity, too, of course—but the claims differ in some important respects). I once discovered that in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, published in 1936, the index, under the entry philanthropy, says "see charity." In the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, published in 1967, the entry charity in the index advises the reader to "see philanthropy."

Teaching About Philanthropy

It is also presumptuous for me to discuss the teaching of philanthropy because as I write this I have not yet done it. That is, I have not yet taught a course on philanthropy open to undergraduates, an ambition I hope to realize in the near future. Should that happen, I will join a growing number of college and university faculty members who are confronting philanthropy as a classroom challenge for the first time.

An insight into the likely character of teaching undergraduates about philanthropy may be gleaned from the win­ning entries in the competition sponsored by the Association of American Colleges. Fifty-one entries were received in the first round, and nine grants were awarded. The courses will be offered for the first time in the 1987-1988 academic year, and all that is available at this point are the proposals themselves. The winning entries received grants to sustain the courses over a three-year period of development, and funds could be used for purposes collateral to the courses themselves, as well as for released time. I have reviewed the 9 winning entries (as well as the other 42), asking myself a set of who-what-when-how-where and even why questions.

The winners come from an array of institutions: Regis College, Chapman College, Baruch College of City University of New York, Harvard University, Georgetown University, Northwestern University, Seton Hall University, Babson College, and Illinois State University. Fields of study range across American studies, economics, government, philosophy, and several interdisciplinary combinations.

Mary Oates at Regis College wants to offer the course "to deepen student understanding of the character, historical evolution and significance of philanthropy in American life." Chapman College, in the words of its president, G. T. Smith, considers "a life of service to others" as one of the six "central commitments" of its program.

Richard Freeman of Harvard will treat philanthropic behavior as "an important component of American capitalism." Freeman adds that

If the course is successful, it will place the issue of philanthropic and volunteer behavior, and the humanistic and moral underpinning of such behavior, into economics, currently one of the university's largest majors, and will alter the perspective of students toward the role of non-profit­seeking behavior in a free enterprise economy.

William Brandon and Kenneth Fox of Seton Hall University, both political scientists, want their students to analyze the "social and political consequences" of the origins of philanthropy. They also say they want to "prepare our stu­dents to play a role in current policy debates about the appropriate roles for government and the private sector." Albert Anderson and Fritz Fleischmann at Babson College, along with some others, see in the study of philanthropy an opportunity to bring out the tension between individual success and individual responsibility in American culture.

Some of the courses, then, are intended to influence student behavior later in life as well as to expose them to the tradition. Chapman College believes that there is "self-fulfillment through service." Baruch College's course will try to inform students about the interaction among individuals, corporations, and public agencies. Margaret Wyszomirski and Leslie Lenkowsky of Georgetown offer their course in the context of a public policy program.

Even so, none of the winning entries includes an explicit intention to make use of the campus's own nonprofit sector, nor does there appear to be a special effort to engage in the courses themselves the faculty members and administrators who help to guide the campus nonprofits. The interaction of the campus and the classroom, even in the weak academic tradition of "co-curricular" studies, is not apparent in these proposals. Although some of the courses will draw on outside resources, most of them will not make important use of practitioners other than as occasional lecturers.

Most of the courses will be lecture courses, alas, with some extra effort given to discussion sections. Some will be offered in seminar format. Guest lecturers will be common. Babson and Illinois State will seek to involve the broader campus community, by offering some of the lectures as public lectures or, in Illinois State's case, conducting a campus-wide workshop.

All of the courses were designed for upper division undergraduates (with Georgetown allowing for the possibility of some master's students). Courses designed for first- and second-year students—similar to Gettysburg's freshman colloquy on social justice and individual responsibility—did not appear. The profile of institutions would suggest a male and female population aged 20 through 22. Regis's course has a particular interest in the role of women and others "outside the mainstream" in philanthropy; Illinois State has express concern about the international influence of philanthropy; and several institutions will try to relate the course to foundations and nonprofit organizations. Most of the courses will be team-taught, and in some cases the teams will include lectures by outsiders.

The question of the organizational locus of philanthropy in the curriculum is obviously not one to be argued in such a competition. The academic culture devotes its primary po­litical energies to quarrels over turf and territory. Only a handful of institutions—none of them among the entrants in the first AAC competition—have established academic centers for the study of philanthropy. Those that have carefully respect prior academic claims by insisting on joint appointments between philanthropy and established disciplines. The various interdepartmental and interdisciplinary forms of centers, institutes, and committees hold part of the future in their hands, assuming they achieve an adequate financial base and adequate enrollments.

The more interesting question is that quoted earlier from the Harvard proposal of Richard Freeman. There is an important intellectual issue in the establishment of the place of philanthropic behavior in economics. As Freeman's proposal makes clear, his course will confront students with difficult issues for philanthropy, such as those relating to free­rider problems, public goods, and notions of the evolution of cooperation based on analysis of the prisoner's dilemma. Philosophy and religious studies have yet to establish such a beachhead. Political science accounts for philanthropic organizations under its rubric of interest groups, but there has been little exchange of ideas between the two fields.

The tentative conclusions to which I have come are these:

· The study and teaching of philanthropy can be used to illuminate other fields, just as these other fields can illuminate our understanding of philanthropy.

· Both specialized and interdisciplinary approaches are important.

· I see little evidence that the value of active learning as a pedagogical approach to the study of philanthropy has been recognized. The effort to use the study of philanthropy as a way to instill values or to make implicit values explicit—to surface the deep—seated dialectical tensions of philanthropy will fail unless there is a better fusion of theory and practice.

· There are abundant opportunities for field work and for the involvement of practitioners. Students should be able to observe firsthand what it means to be a philanthropic "professional."