Educating Ourselves

The field of philanthropy is filled with organizations, some of which are directly concerned with the welfare of the field itself. Independent Sector, the Foundation Center, the Council on Foundations, and United Way of America are among the best known. There is also a myriad of other professional organizations that seek to enhance the professional development of their members: the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), for example, is well-known in higher education for the enormous array of courses and workshops it offers its members.

The nature of the meetings of professional organizations, of course, is such that emphasis is on the technology of the profession rather than on its philosophical basis, historical development, or ethical practices. Independent Sector commissioned Major Challenges to Philanthropy to contend with that problem. CASE has developed a code of ethics, as have other organizations that think of their members as full-fledged professionals.

The question of what professionals in philanthropy should know about philanthropics—about the organization, methods, and principles of voluntary action for public purposes, in case you've forgotten—needs wider consideration and discussion.

The educational model I propose would be close to the professional's home base. It would bring together professionals from the nonprofit world, from all sides of the desk—grantmakers, fund raisers, managers, trustees—and scholars from diverse disciplines. It would require of them a limited commitment of time: perhaps three or four hours at a session, eight or nine times a year. The commitment would also be a commitment of long duration: at least several years. Participation in such a group would call for an occasional personal contribution: a paper, a lecture, or a presentation of some sort that might be defended against collegial critique and examination. On occasion, these materials might be published, and often made available for teaching.

The characteristics I have just outlined are roughly those that have emerged and survived over the four decades that the University Seminars at Columbia have played such an important role in the intellectual life of New York as well as of the University itself. These are among the issues that we struggled with as we attempted to create the Columbia University Seminar on Philanthropy.

Not everyone would want to join such a group, nor would everyone be able to make an appropriate contribution. Judgment has to be exercised on the sticky question of membership. Some people would have much to take away from their participation, but little to leave behind. Some are not in sufficient control of their lives and schedules to meet the requirements of regular attendance. Some people are not good at discourse that is more rigorous than that of a lively cocktail party. Others are not interested in any subject with enough intellectual intensity or focus to sustain their interest over time.

The questions of membership should thus also address (1) intellectual background; (2) facility in group discourse; and (3) breadth of interest in the subject.

The seminar that brings practitioners and scholars together on a continuing basis is a model that can be replicated in every community in America that houses an accessible college or university. At this point in time, there are no more than a handful of true experts in philanthropy in the entire country—even academics of narrow intellectual orientation with little hands-on experience, and practitioners with a wealth of experience and little grasp of the principles that guide their work.

What we have instead is a large and unevenly educated population concerned with philanthropy or interested in it with little or no opportunity to discuss it seriously. After four years' experience with the Columbia Seminar on Philanthropy, I am convinced that it is the best model to meet the needs of the field of philanthropy as a whole. I am also convinced of its usefulness in coming to grips with some of the underlying and intractable issues that confront us.

The most serious challenge to such a study is the problem of the agenda. What will claim first priority? What is "the subject" as far as the particular group is concerned? Part of the answer depends on what people have done to provide themselves with a base of experience or knowledge or both. Those details will vary widely from one group to the next.

This is as it should be in the American philanthropic tradition.

Prospective [Top]

After a philanthropy seminar (of fund-raising professionals) not long ago, someone asked me what one should read to pursue an interest in the subject. I was stumped. What one reads next depends on what one has already read. And we have all read many things about philanthropy, albeit without realizing we were doing so. (Dickens's A Christmas Carol comes first to mind.)

Even so, I've fretted over the question ever since. The obvious things are there, at least for me: Robert Bremner's American Philanthropy (University of Chicago Press, 1960; a new edition is in preparation); James Douglas's Why Charity? (Sage Publications, 1984); the several works of Merle Curti and his colleagues (including Curti's essay in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas).

But the movement of ideas means that topics and themes of little interest to one generation may become compellingly important to another. Philanthropy has emerged from a place of relative obscurity to one of increasing respectability as well as current interest. The next decade will see a substantial increase in philanthropy research: in its most obvious manifestations of voluntary giving and voluntary service, but also in deeper study of the role of voluntary association in shaping the national agenda.

The research needs are at least as great conceptually as they are empirically. Analysis of the ideas and methods of philanthropy lags well behind empirical research at this stage. Even while the millions of participants in philanthropic practice do their work through hundreds of thousands of organizations, others are just beginning to examine the assumptions on which the system rests.

We are beginning to see increasing interest in comparative studies as well. The European traditions from which we borrowed our own practice are in the process of being rediscovered at home. The Japanese have recently become more interested in their own philanthropic practices and traditions, and in this area, as in most others, will quickly become important actors. Philanthropic funds from the Middle East have brought political controversy with them; recent controversies over politically oriented centers at Stanford and Georgetown indicate how complicated it is to shelter diverse philanthropic agenda on a campus.

Comparative studies prompt us to look at the diverse religious origins of charity and philanthropy, and to ask about the place of these activities in the ideologies of secular states. I have been cautioned recently for making too much of the American tradition of philanthropy and not giving significant recognition to philanthropic traditions in other societies. To consider philanthropy a virtue (as I do) is assumed to imply criticism of those who don't practice it as we do. Defensiveness about other peoples' philanthropy is usually voiced in behalf of Third World nations and cultures. More careful ethnic studies would reveal patterns of philanthropic behavior in these cultures that would cause us to be more modest in our claims. I have observed the extraordinary hospitality of Africans toward strangers, for example, and the one-way transfers that take place among extended families and tribes, and there is obviously something at work in those societies akin to what we call philanthropy.

Having said that, and attended carefully to the criticism, it is time we put some substance into the argument. I don't think much is known about philanthropy on a comparative or cross-cultural basis, and we should begin to pull together what we do know and start filling in the gaps in our knowledge.

One place to begin—I keep telling my friends at NYU, City University, and Columbia—is in the New York Metropolitan Area. There is as much ethnic diversity within 25 miles of Midtown Manhattan as one could find in any thousand-mile radius elsewhere, yet so far as I know there are no doctoral students out there conducting surveys and interviews and gathering material.

People can't teach without materials, and scholars are producing those materials in increasing volume. Even so, the central text in one of the notorious controversies in American philanthropy—the John D. Rockefeller gift that prompted the famous "tainted money" article by Washington Gladden[6]—isn't conveniently available and hasn't been widely discussed among those of us most closely involved in analogous problems. Parallel to Brian O'Connell's celebratory anthology (America's Voluntary Spirit, The Foundation Center) should be a collection of essays that reveal the deep-seated controversies of our field: Tainted money is one; factionalism is another; desert, a third.

Philanthropy is an amorphous subject (or group of subjects). The University Seminar on Philanthropy at Columbia has been able to pursue its work for four years without agreeing upon a satisfactory definition of terms. There is also no agreed‑upon taxonomy, no body of theory to be tested.

Yet because philanthropy exists—there really is something out there—one can only conclude that the next few years will be years of improved understanding.

I find that I can best think about the future of research in philanthropy by thinking about ideas discovered beyond the imprecise realm of the subject as it is usually identified. I am greatly impressed by the diversity of work that is germane to the study of philanthropy that has been written with other purposes in mind. Occasionally someone writes a book that reaches a wide audience: Waldemar Nielsen's best seller The Golden Donors (Dutton, 1985), Robert Bellah and associates' Habits of the Heart (University of California Press, 1985). Other things come along that seem to catch the interest of a scattered collection of us. As a lifelong believer in the idea of general education, I think it is useful that we be alert to insights that appear in other fields so that we might begin to build a shared body of literature.

Some of the things I have read recently or have scanned and plan to read more carefully in the immediate future (pace Professor Bosanquet) indicate—to me, at least—the wonderful range of possibilities:

· Robert H. Walker's Reform in America (University Press of Kentucky, 1984) prompts me to look much more carefully at the interaction of philanthropy and reform in American life. Walker traces the idea of reform across areas as diverse as banking and finance, abolition and civil rights, and utopian communities. He proposes a taxonomy of reform that may be helpful in constructing a taxonomy of philanthropy.

· Franklin I. Gamwell's Beyond Preference (University of Chicago Press, 1984) is a bold effort to find a secure base for voluntary association. Gamwell examines the work of economist Milton Friedman and philosophers Alan Gewirth, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne in the course of offering his own conceptual framework. Gamwell wants to base his own theory on a defensible metaphysics.

· Robert E. Goodin's Protecting the Vulnerable (University of Chicago Press, 1985) examines our moral duties and the mechanisms we develop to meet them.

· Lawrence C. Becker's Reciprocity (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986) offers a study of reciprocity as a fundamental moral virtue.

· Amartya Sen's Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford University Press, 1981) includes a chapter on "the Ethiopian famine"—the famine of 1972‑74, however, not the famine of 1984-85. (The Columbia Seminar has devoted a year and a half to consideration of the response to the recent famine as an informal case study of philanthropy in action.)

· A Polish scholar at the University of Warsaw, Stanislaw Ehrich, has written Pluralism On and Off Course (Pergamon Press, 1982), a rare opportunity (for me) to look at an eastern European perspective.

· The sociologist Donald N. Levine of the University of Chicago, an authority on Georg Simmel, has written The Flight From Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1985). 1 found it helpful in many ways; thinking about "strangerhood," for example.

· Michael Ignatieff, in The Needs of Strangers (Viking, 1985), writes with occasional elegance and sharp insight about the thorny idea of desert and the "complex human emotion" of pity, "mingling compassion and contempt," and draws from King Lear, Augustine, Pascal, and Adam Smith, among others.

· Dante Germino's Political Philosophy and the Open Society (Louisiana State University Press, 1982) builds on the work of Eric Voegelin. Germino's discussion of the idea of metaxy ("the between" the human and divine) offers a tantalizing insight into the realm of the philanthropic.

I find that I need to go back to some other things. I want to read much more deeply in and about Aristotle, the Stoics, Thomas Aquinas, Jeremy Bentham, and Henry Sidgwick. I continue to remain hopeful that someone will compile an anthology or guide to philanthropy in literature. Beyond Norris Pope Jr.'s Dickens and Charity (Columbia University Press, 1978), I know of no guides to the work of authors who have shaped public attitudes toward charity and philanthropy. Is there a comparable study of Balzac, for example? Of Jane Austen? Of Kurt Vonnegut and other contemporary writers?

Professor James Childress, a colleague at the University of Virginia, and I will co-chair a project funded by the Lilly Endowment on the place of philanthropy in world religions. We hope that it will help all of us find our way in traditions unfamiliar to us. I have yet to find a collection of essays that would introduce me to the basic writings or other manifestations of the values on which non-Western religions and cultures have developed their philanthropic practices. That should be a piece of cake for anthropologists and other stu­dents of comparative religion (my perennial nominee is Clifford Geertz, whose field experience ranges across Islam from Indonesia to Morocco).

I am also hopeful of finding (for example, in the recent writings of Jon Elster for Cambridge University Press) an in­sight into what Marxists think about philanthropy (if they were ever to take it seriously and not simply repeat clichés).

Finally—although that is merely a phrase indicating that I am about to end this piece, not that I'm going to shorten my reading list—I would like to understand the link between philanthropy and personality. Could one find common per­sonality traits among people engaged in philanthropic work? How would the personality traits differ between those, say, who work as grantmakers in foundations and those who work abroad in relief agencies? Do the volunteers brought together by the independent sector share characteristics of behavior as well as values? How does personality affect career pat­terns? Relationships among professionals and volunteers? And so on.

For the new inquirer into philanthropy, then, I would draw from the following insight into academic learning: in Human Beings, the British psychologist Liam Hudson told of discovering that successful students in the humanities varied quite widely in their IQ scores. They also differed in their work habits and in the range of their reading.

The inter-correlations between these three variables were, effectively, nil. I noticed, though, that among the most suc­cessful each student was either high in I.Q., or very widely read, or exceptionally hard-working.... Only if he lacked all three of these qualities was a student in academic difficulties.[7]

Most of us have at least one of these academic virtues going for us. We think we know where we want to go. All we need now is a map.