On three successive days during a memorable week last year I was asked for philanthropic advice by the representatives of three new and still largely unknown fortunes ranging from $700 million to more than $1 billion. The fortunes were entirely unconnected with one another. 

In each of the three cases steps had already been taken to establish a foundation or group of foundations to receive the money. The questions to me had to do with goals and strategies. In one case the donor had already committed about a third of his fortune to a single organization; in the other two cases the advisors were in the early stages of planning.

I was merely one among many people whose ideas and opinions were sought. The representatives showed the pressure they were under, however; they were expected to come up with ideas and projects and programs that were consistent with what the donors had in mind. "What the donors had in mind" was not always clear to their advisors, of course, and perhaps not to the donors themselves. It was also not obvious which of the vast array of philanthropic possibilities should take priority.

Other conversations with the agents of great fortunes have persuaded me: 

- that there are numerous new fortunes of great magnitude in the United States and elsewhere in the world; 

- and that many of the new fortunes do not appear on the lists of wealthy people; they are not only new fortunes, many are unknown. 

-giving large sums of money away intelligently continues to be very difficult. 

Reading and talking with people who are not burdened with great fortunes persuades me of two other things: 

- people who have never served as stewards of large philanthropic fortunes have no appreciation of the difficulty of what responsible and intelligent stewardship entails; 

-most people have little or no respect for other people's money, especially rich people's money. 

One of the best sources for thinking about enlightened philanthropy is the century-old essay by Andrew Carnegie on "The Gospel of Wealth." Dated and biased as it is, it is also more relevant and less biased than much of what currently passes for scholarly wisdom on the subject. Carnegie was clear about his political and economic values and about the moral obligation of people of great wealth to "administer" their wealth during their own lifetimes, rather than passing the responsibility on to heirs, anonymous trust officers, or bureaucrats. He believed that fortunes converted into taxes would be so dissipated and trivialized that the money would simply be wasted. He thought that people who are intelligent enough to amass great fortunes are intelligent to invest it for the public good; the former implied the latter. 

Most usefully, Carnegie put forward a short list of philanthropic opportunities: If you happened to be a person of great wealth a hundred years ago, Carnegie provided you with a list of seven philanthropic objectives you might consider. 

Carnegie had reasons for what he did; he stated his reasons publicly; he sought to persuade others of great wealth to take their public responsibilities seriously; he put the responsibility directly on the wealthy themselves. He believed that fortunes that were not responsibly administered should be depleted by death taxes. Carnegie was scornful of voluntary almsgiving, sharing the view of most leaders of the newly-emerging "scientific philanthropy" of the time. We may safely assume, I think, that he would have been equally scornful of government bureaucracies as agents of. philanthropy. 

Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Mrs. Russell Sage, and others also realized the need to provide organization and structure to their giving. They invented the general purpose endowed foundation that has come to dominate American thought about large scale philanthropy (public as well as private). They used advisors of various sorts: clergy, scientists, academics. out of the efforts of the largest and most "professional" of the new foundations emerged the foundation philosophy that Barry Karl and Stanley N. Katz have written about: the role of some leading foundations has been to seek out the root causes of social problems and to design strategies for their solution. No nation in history has ever had such substantial private resources organized to advance good works. 

The mechanism and the strategy has worked. Government agencies and legislatures as well as millions of individual donors have been able to invest in causes validated by the research and practice of a relatively small handful of foundations (often to the great displeasure of those populists who would seize all such large fortunes in taxes and allocate them through more "democratic" processes). 

II 

No field has benefited more diversely and generously from foundation philanthropy than has higher education. The great philanthropists of a century ago built universities and research facilities on models that have become internationally accepted. The partnership between the large foundations and the research universities would be considered collusion were it to have happened in the marketplace. The careers of many people have ranged back and forth between the two worlds of philanthropy and scholarship. The values of each have influenced the other. There is, however, a fascinating record of criticism of the relationship of philanthropy and higher education. It is worth bearing in mind when thinking about the relationship that seems to exist today. 

The first critique is not of the foundation-university partnership but of the intrusion of business values into the university. The best source on that subject I know is Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America, written before World War I, a diatribe that has been widely imitated but not improved upon since. For Veblen, the problem lay in the academic entrepreneurs who managed universities and expanded their reputations by enlisting gifts and grants from wealthy businessmen in exchange for influence in university affairs. I assume that Veblen would see the foundation as merely a Trojan horse tactic in the war between those whose subject matter is money and those whose subject matter is ideas. For Veblen, who seemed never to worry much about how the bills were to be paid -- his or anyone else's -- money and ideas, businessmen and scholars, are simply incompatible. Veblen is an eloquent spokesman for the view that resources are necessary but that it is demeaning to be concerned about them. 

In each of the three cases steps had already been taken to establish a foundation or group of foundations to receive the money. The questions to me had to do with goals and strategies. In one case the donor had already committed about a third of his fortune to a single organization; in the other two cases the advisors were in the early stages of planning.

I was merely one among many people whose ideas and opinions were sought. The representatives showed the pressure they were under, however; they were expected to come up with ideas and projects and programs that were consistent with what the donors had in mind. "What the donors had in mind" was not always clear to their advisors, of course, and perhaps not to the donors themselves. It was also not obvious which of the vast array of philanthropic possibilities should take priority.

Other conversations with the agents of great fortunes have persuaded me: 

- that there are numerous new fortunes of great magnitude in the United States and elsewhere in the world; 

- and that many of the new fortunes do not appear on the lists of wealthy people; they are not only new fortunes, many are unknown. 

-giving large sums of money away intelligently continues to be very difficult. 

Reading and talking with people who are not burdened with great fortunes persuades me of two other things: 

- people who have never served as stewards of large philanthropic fortunes have no appreciation of the difficulty of what responsible and intelligent stewardship entails; 

-most people have little or no respect for other people's money, especially rich people's money. 

One of the best sources for thinking about enlightened philanthropy is the century-old essay by Andrew Carnegie on "The Gospel of Wealth." Dated and biased as it is, it is also more relevant and less biased than much of what currently passes for scholarly wisdom on the subject. Carnegie was clear about his political and economic values and about the moral obligation of people of great wealth to "administer" their wealth during their own lifetimes, rather than passing the responsibility on to heirs, anonymous trust officers, or bureaucrats. He believed that fortunes converted into taxes would be so dissipated and trivialized that the money would simply be wasted. He thought that people who are intelligent enough to amass great fortunes are intelligent to invest it for the public good; the former implied the latter. 

Most usefully, Carnegie put forward a short list of philanthropic opportunities: If you happened to be a person of great wealth a hundred years ago, Carnegie provided you with a list of seven philanthropic objectives you might consider. 

Carnegie had reasons for what he did; he stated his reasons publicly; he sought to persuade others of great wealth to take their public responsibilities seriously; he put the responsibility directly on the wealthy themselves. He believed that fortunes that were not responsibly administered should be depleted by death taxes. Carnegie was scornful of voluntary almsgiving, sharing the view of most leaders of the newly-emerging "scientific philanthropy" of the time. We may safely assume, I think, that he would have been equally scornful of government bureaucracies as agents of. philanthropy. 

Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Mrs. Russell Sage, and others also realized the need to provide organization and structure to their giving. They invented the general purpose endowed foundation that has come to dominate American thought about large scale philanthropy (public as well as private). They used advisors of various sorts: clergy, scientists, academics. out of the efforts of the largest and most "professional" of the new foundations emerged the foundation philosophy that Barry Karl and Stanley N. Katz have written about: the role of some leading foundations has been to seek out the root causes of social problems and to design strategies for their solution. No nation in history has ever had such substantial private resources organized to advance good works. 

The mechanism and the strategy has worked. Government agencies and legislatures as well as millions of individual donors have been able to invest in causes validated by the research and practice of a relatively small handful of foundations (often to the great displeasure of those populists who would seize all such large fortunes in taxes and allocate them through more "democratic" processes). 

II 

No field has benefited more diversely and generously from foundation philanthropy than has higher education. The great philanthropists of a century ago built universities and research facilities on models that have become internationally accepted. The partnership between the large foundations and the research universities would be considered collusion were it to have happened in the marketplace. The careers of many people have ranged back and forth between the two worlds of philanthropy and scholarship. The values of each have influenced the other. There is, however, a fascinating record of criticism of the relationship of philanthropy and higher education. It is worth bearing in mind when thinking about the relationship that seems to exist today.