Carnegie Corporation of New York

Coordinates: 40°45′27″N 73°58′31″W / 40.757501°N 73.975309°W / 40.757501; -73.975309
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from
Carnegie Corporation
)
"Carnegie Scholar" redirects here. For the Scottish scholarship, see Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland § Carnegie Scholarships.
This article is about a U.S. philanthropic trust. For other uses, see Carnegie Foundation (disambiguation).

Carnegie Corporation of New York
FormationJune 9, 1911; 112 years ago (1911-06-09)
FounderAndrew Carnegie
TypeFoundation
13-1628151
Legal statusNonprofit organization
PurposeTo promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding
Headquarters437 Madison Avenue, New York, U.S.
Region
Global
MethodsGrant-giving
FieldsEducation, democracy, international peace, higher education in Africa
President
Louise Richardson
Chair of the Board
Thomas Kean
Revenue (2018)
$253 million[1]
Expenses (2018)$180 million[1]
Endowment (2018)$3.5 billion[1]
Websitewww.carnegie.org

The Carnegie Corporation of New York is a philanthropic fund established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to support education programs across the United States, and later the world.[2]

Since its founding, the Carnegie Corporation has endowed or otherwise helped establish institutions including the United States National Research Council, Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (formerly known as the Russian Research Center),[3] the Carnegie libraries, the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, and the Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop). It also has funded the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT), and the Carnegie Institution for Science (CIS). According to OECD, Carnegie Corporation of New York's financing for 2019 development increased by 27% to US$24 million.[4]

History

Founding and early years

By 1911,

organizational structures, but he chose a corporation as the structure for his last and largest trust. Chartered by the State of New York as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the corporation's capital fund, originally worth about $135 million, had a market value
of $1.55 billion on March 31, 1999.

In 1911–1912, Carnegie gave the corporation $125 million. At that time the corporation was the largest single philanthropic

British Commonwealth.[5]

In its early years, Carnegie served as both president and

ex officio
by presidents of five previously established US Carnegie organizations:

After Carnegie died in 1919, the trustees elected a full-time salaried president as the trust's

Carnegie Institution of Washington, the National Bureau of Economic Research, Stanford University's now-defunct Food Research Institute[7] and the Brookings Institution, then became interested in adult education and lifelong learning
, an obvious follow-on to Carnegie's vision for libraries as "the university of the people". In 1919 it initiated the Americanization Study to explore educational opportunities for adults, primarily for new immigrants.

Frederick P. Keppel

With

Frederick P. Keppel as president (1923–1941), the Carnegie Corporation shifted from creating public libraries to strengthening library infrastructure and services, developing adult education, and adding arts education to the programs of colleges and universities. The foundation's grants in this period have a certain eclectic quality and remarkable perseverance in its chosen causes.[8] His vision for adult education drew from both Victorian values of character as well as democratic ideals of freedom of thought and reasoning.[9] Through the Carnegie Corporation, he established the American Association of Adult Education, which focused on grant funding for adult education programs. The creation of an outside organization helped shield the Carnegie Corporation from accusations of political involvement in education, which would be viewed as private influence over public education. The corporation was aiming to prevent accusations of social-engineering of citizens by creating a separate organization.[9]
The AAAE's primary focus in the 1930s was promoting a more democratic society through the education of adults. The AAAE's most notable contribution was the Harlem Experiment, an initiative to provide adult education to African Americans in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance that began in 1926.

Keppel initiated a famous 1944 study of race relations in the United States by the Swedish social economist

American Dilemma (1944). The book had no immediate effect on public policy, but was later much cited in legal challenges to segregation. Keppel believed foundations should make facts available and let them facts speak for themselves. His cogent writings on philanthropy made a lasting impression on field and influenced the organization and leadership of many new foundations.[10]

In 1927, Keppel toured

poor whites in the American South.[11]

White poverty defied traditional understandings of white racial superiority and thus became the subject of study. The report recommended that "employment sanctuaries" be established for poor white workers and that poor white workers replace "native" workers in most skilled aspects of the economy.[12] The authors of the report suggested that white racial deterioration and miscegenation would be the outcome[11] unless something was done to help poor whites, endorsing the necessity of the role of social institutions to play in the successful maintenance of white racial superiority.[12][13] The report expressed trepidation concerning the loss of white racial pride, with the implicit consequence that poor whites would not successfully resist "Africanisation."[11] The report sought, in part, to forestall the historically inevitable accession of a communal, class based, democratic socialist movement aimed at uniting the poor of each race in common cause and brotherhood.[14]

Charles Dollard

standardized testing in schools to determine academic merit regardless of the student's socio-economic background. Its initiatives have also included helping to broker the creation of the Educational Testing Service
in 1947.

The corporation determined that the U.S. increasingly needed policy and scholarly expertise in international affairs, and so tied into area studies programs at colleges and universities as well as the Ford Foundation. In 1948 the trust also provided the seed money to establish the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, today known as the Davis Center for Russia and Eurasian Studies,[15] as an organization that could address large-scale research from both a policy and educational points of view.

In 1951, the Group Areas Act took effect in South Africa and effectively put the apartheid system into place, leading to political ascendancy for Afrikaners and dispossession for many Africans and colored people suddenly required to live in certain areas of the country only, on pain of imprisonment for remaining in possession of homes in areas designated for whites. The Carnegie corporation pulled its philanthropic endeavors from South Africa for more than two decades after this political change, turning its attention from South Africa to developing East African and West African universities instead.

John Gardner

liberal arts education program. In the early 1960s it inaugurated a continuing education program and funded development of new models for advanced and professional study by mature women. Important funding went to the key early experiments in continuing education for women, with major grants to the University of Minnesota (1960, co-directors Elizabeth L. Cless and Virginia L. Senders), Radcliffe College (1961, under President Mary Bunting), and Sarah Lawrence College (1962, under Professor Esther Raushenbush).[16] Gardner's interest in leadership development led to the White House Fellows
program in 1964.

Notable grant projects in

behavioral sciences and urged the corporation to funded much of the US' basic research on cognition, creativity, and the learning process, particularly among young children, associating psychology and education. Perhaps its most important contribution to reform of pre-college education at this time was the series of education studies done by James B. Conant, former president of Harvard University
; in particular, Conant's study of comprehensive American high schools (1959) resolved public controversy concerning the purpose of public secondary education, and made the case that schools could adequately educate both average students and the academically gifted.

Under Gardner, the corporation embraced strategic philanthropy—planned, organized, and deliberately constructed to attain stated ends. Funding criteria no longer required just a socially desirable project. The corporation sought out projects that would produce knowledge leading to useful results, communicated to decision-makers, the public, and the media, in order to foster policy debate. Developing programs that larger organizations, especially governments, could implement and scale in size became a major objective. The policy shift to institutional knowledge transfer came in part as a response to relatively diminished resources that made it necessary to leverage assets and "multiplier effects" to have any effect at all.[17] The corporation considered itself a trendsetter in philanthropy, often funding research or providing seed money for ideas while others financed more costly operations. For example, ideas it advanced resulted in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, later adopted by the federal government.[18] A foundation's most precious asset was its sense of direction, Gardner said,[19] gathering a competent professional staff of generalists that he called his "cabinet of strategy," and regarded as a resource as important to the corporation as its endowment.

Alan Pifer

While Gardner's opinion of educational equality was to multiply the channels through which an individual could pursue opportunity, it was during the term of long-time staff member Alan Pifer, who became acting president during 1965 and president during 1967 (again of both Carnegie Corporation and the CFAT), that the foundation began to respond to claims by various groups, including women, for increased power and wealth. The corporation developed three interlocking objectives: prevention of educational disadvantage; equality of educational opportunity in the schools; and broadened opportunities in higher education. A fourth objective cutting across these programs was to improve the democratic performance of government. Grants were made to reform state government as the laboratories of democracy, underwrite voter education drives, and mobilize youth to vote, among other measures.[20] Use of the legal system became a method for achieving equal opportunity in education, as well as redress of grievance, and the corporation joined the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and others in funding educational litigation by civil rights organizations. It also initiated a multifaceted program to train black lawyers in the South for the practice of public interest law and to increase the legal representation of black people.[21]

Maintaining its commitment to early childhood education, the corporation endorsed the application of research knowledge in experimental and demonstration programs, which subsequently provided strong evidence of the long-term positive effects of high-quality early education, particularly for the disadvantaged. A 1980 report on an influential study, the Perry Preschool Project of the HighScope Educational Research Foundation, on the outcomes for sixteen-year-olds enrolled in the experimental preschool programs provided crucial evidence that safeguarded

Public Broadcasting Act of 1968 that established a public broadcasting system. Many other reports on US education the corporation financed at this time, included Charles E. Silberman's acclaimed Crisis in the Classroom (1971), and the controversial Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America by Christopher Jencks (1973). This report confirmed quantitative research, e.g. the Coleman Report, showed that in public schools resources only weakly correlated with educational outcomes, which coincided with the foundation's burgeoning interest in improved school effectiveness.[22]

Becoming involved with South Africa again during the mid-1970s, the corporation worked through universities to increase the legal representation of black people and increase the practice of public interest law. At the University of Cape Town, it established the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa, this time to examine the legacies of apartheid and make recommendations to nongovernmental organizations for actions commensurate with the long-run goal of achieving a democratic, interracial society.

The influx of nontraditional students and "

College Entrance Examination Board
). Building on its past programs to promote the continuing education of women, the foundation made a series of grants for the advancement of women in academic life. Two other study groups formed to examine critical problems in American life were the Carnegie Council on Children (1972) and the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting (1977), the latter formed almost ten years after the first commission.

David A. Hamburg

David A. Hamburg, a physician, educator, and scientist with a public health background, became president in 1982 intending to mobilize the best scientific and scholarly talent and thinking on "prevention of rotten outcomes" - from early childhood to international relations. The corporation pivoted from higher education to the education and healthy development of children and adolescents, and the preparation of youth for a scientific and technological, knowledge-driven world. In 1984 the corporation established the Carnegie Commission on Education and the Economy. Its major publication, A Nation Prepared (1986), reaffirmed the role of the teacher as the "best hope" for quality in elementary and secondary education.[23] That report led to the establishment a year later of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, to consider ways to attract able candidates to teaching and recognize and retain them. At the corporation's initiative, the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued two reports, Science for All Americans (1989) and Benchmarks for Science Literacy (1993), which recommended a common core of learning in science, mathematics, and technology for all citizens and helped set national standards of achievement.

A new emphasis for the corporation was the danger to world peace posed by the

nuclear nonproliferation experts. After the end of the USSR, corporation grants helped promote the concept of cooperative security among erstwhile adversaries and projects to build democratic institutions in the former Soviet Union and Central Europe. The Prevention of Proliferation Task Force, coordinated by a grant to the Brookings Institution, inspired the Nunn-Lugar Amendment to the Soviet Threat Reduction Act of 1991, intended to help dismantle Soviet nuclear weapons and reduce proliferation risks.[25]
More recently, the corporation addressed interethnic and regional conflict and funded projects seeking to diminish the risks of a wider war resulting from civil strife. Two Carnegie commissions, Reducing the Nuclear Danger (1990), the other Preventing Deadly Conflict (1994), addressed the dangers of human conflict and the use of weapons of mass destruction. The corporation's emphasis in Commonwealth Africa, meanwhile, shifted to women's health and political development and the application of science and technology, including new information systems, to foster research and expertise in indigenous scientific institutions and universities.

During Hamburg's tenure, dissemination achieved even greater primacy with respect to strategic philanthropy.[26] Consolidation and diffusion of the best available knowledge from social science and education research was used to improve social policy and practice, as partner with major institutions with the capability to influence public thought and action. If "change agent" was a major term during Pifer's time, "linkage" became a byword in Hamburg's. The corporation increasingly used its convening powers to bring together experts across disciplinary and sectoral boundaries to create policy consensus and promote collaboration.

Continuing tradition, the foundation established several other major study groups, often directed by the president and managed by a special staff. Three groups covered the educational and developmental needs of children and youth from birth to age fifteen: the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development (1986), the Carnegie Task Force on Meeting the Needs of Young Children (1991), and the Carnegie Task Force on Learning in the Primary Grades (1994). Another, the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government (1988), recommended ways that government at all levels could make more effective use of science and technology in their operations and policies. Jointly with the Rockefeller Foundation, the corporation financed the National Commission on Teaching & America's Future, whose report, What Matters Most (1996), provided a framework and agenda for teacher education reform across the country. These study groups drew on knowledge generated by grant programs and inspired follow-up grantmaking to implement their recommendations.

Vartan Gregorian

During the presidency of

social sciences and humanities, in the independent states of the former Soviet Union
.

Louise Richardson

On November 18, 2021, the corporation announced that Louise Richardson will become its next and 13th president.[28] She joined the foundation in January 2023 at the end of her seven-year term as head of the University of Oxford.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c "Annual Report 2018" (PDF). Carnegie Corporation of New York. 2019. Retrieved April 11, 2019.
  2. ^ Carnegie Corporation of New York
  3. ^ "Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies". Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. Harvard University. 2017. Retrieved October 29, 2018.[permanent dead link]
  4. ^ "Carnegie Corporation of New York | Development Co-operation Profiles – Carnegie Corporation of New York | OECD iLibrary".
  5. ^ "Carnegie Corporation of New York: Historical Note". Columbia University Libraries. Retrieved July 18, 2023.
  6. ISBN 978-1623964474. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help
    )
  7. ^ "Food Research Institute". Stanford University.
  8. ^ Richard Glotzer, "A long shadow: Frederick P. Keppel, the Carnegie Corporation and the Dominions and Colonies Fund Area Experts 1923–1943." History of Education 38.5 (2009): 621-648.
  9. ^
    ISSN 0018-2680
    .
  10. ^ Walter Jackson, "The Making of a Social Science Classic: Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma." Perspectives in American History 2 (1985): 221-67.
  11. ^
    ISBN 0-8135-2612-4
  12. ^
    ISBN 0-8223-3724-X
  13. ^ Racially segregated school libraries in KwaZulu/Natal, South Africa by Jennifer Verbeek. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, Vol. 18, No. 1, 23-46 (1986)
  14. ISBN 0-631-21222-1
    , 1999
  15. ^ "History". Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. Harvard University.
  16. ^ Elizabeth L. Cless, "The Birth of an Idea: An Account of the Genesis of Women's Continuing Education," in Helen S. Astin (ed.), Some Action of Her Own: The Adult Woman and Higher Education, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1976, pp.6-7.
  17. ^ "Carnegie Corporation of New York: Historical Note". Columbia University Libraries. Retrieved July 19, 2023.
  18. ^ Mullis, Ina V. S. (2019). White Paper on 50 Years of NAEP Use: Where NAEP Has Been and Where It Should Go Next (PDF) (Report). American Institutes for Research. Retrieved July 17, 2023.
  19. ISBN 0226467805
    – via Google Books.
  20. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved July 19, 2023.
  21. ^ Evans, Eli (1973). A Step Toward Equal Justice: Programs to Increase Black Lawyers in the South (PDF) (Report). Carnegie Corporation of New York. Retrieved July 17, 2023.
  22. ^ Coleman, James S. (1966). Equality of Educational Opportunity (PDF) (Report). U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare/U.S. Office of Education/U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved July 19, 2022.
  23. New York Times
    . May 16, 1986. p. A17. Retrieved July 19, 2023.
  24. ^ "David A. Hamburg, 1925–2019". Carnegie Corporation of New York. April 23, 2019. Retrieved July 18, 2023.
  25. S2CID 174803927
    . Retrieved July 19, 2023.
  26. ^ Hamburg, David (2010). "Carnegie Corporation: 1982-1997: Research-Based Action for Constructive Child and Adolescent Development". On-line Supplement to Fall 2010 Carnegie Reporter. 6 (1). Retrieved July 19, 2023.
  27. ^ Gregorian, Vartan (February 2, 1999). "New Directions for Carnegie Corporation of New York: A Report to the Board". Carnegie Corporation of New York. Retrieved June 26, 2023.
  28. ^ York, Carnegie Corporation of New. "Carnegie Corporation of New York Appoints Louise Richardson as President". Carnegie Corporation of New York. Retrieved March 27, 2022.

Further reading

  • Sara L. Engelhardt (ed.), The Carnegie Trusts and Institutions. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1981.
  • Ellen C. Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.
  • Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
  • Patricia L Rosenfield, A world of giving : Carnegie Corporation of New York-- a Century of International Philanthropy. New York : PublicAffairs, 2014.

External links

40°45′27″N 73°58′31″W / 40.757501°N 73.975309°W / 40.757501; -73.975309

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carnegie_Corporation_of_New_York&oldid=1214463772"