Self-introspective Yale report should be model for Big Philanthropy

Editorial note: this essay originally appeared at The Giving Review.

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Earlier this month, a 10-professor Yale University “Committee on Trust in Higher Education” released a report that is strikingly self-introspective and -critical for an elite-university document. It argues that the trust crisis is endogenous. Establishment philanthropy should watch, and learn.

“We undertook this task at a difficult moment for higher education in the United States,” according to the committee’s transmittal letter to Yale president Maurie McInnis, who convened it. “You encouraged us to take the long view. As you noted, the problem of declining trust did not emerge out of nowhere over the past few months or years. Nor is it a challenge that will be met through short-term solutions. We welcomed your call to think big, tell the truth, and entertain controversial ideas.”

McInnis, who began her Yale presidency last July, described higher ed’s role in creating the problem in an e-mail to the Yale community about the report and its work on trying to help solve it. “[W]e were certainly more than mere bystanders,” she correctly, and courageously, writes. “We must acknowledge how we have fallen short. That means welcoming as comprehensive a panorama of perspectives as possible—even, and especially, those that may be critical—and facing such criticism with humility and curiosity.”

Neither the committee report nor McInnis reflexively maintain that colleges and universities are being unfairly attacked by illiberal authoritarians or even fascists, as has been seen in this and other contexts of angry populist reaction against elite institutions of all sorts, including philanthropy. Nor do the committee’s 20 recommendations include one that higher ed just to “tell a better story” about itself to the populace and policymakers about what’s going on there, as if those reacting negatively against it are just ill-informed rubes or manipulated dupes.

While the 19th recommendation does urge that higher ed “communicate effectively,” the report notes that such communication “should not be treated as a public relations campaign but as an extension of the transparency this report calls for throughout.” It continues:

Effective communication begins with having something credible to say. But communication means listening too. We recommend that Yale do more to listen to Americans across the country—from families worried about college costs to those who feel universities have become disconnected from their values—through initiatives such as town halls and advisory councils. Building trust will require sustained attention to what the public wants and needs from its system of higher education.

The report is not defensive. It is not self-protective.

Similar questions and challenges

Big Philanthropy is just beginning to face similar questions about what’s going on there and challenges to its moral authority from the public, too. Trying to deflect or even avoid those questions, and to justify that authority, it clothes itself in traditional notions of charity. To too many for its taste, the link has become strained. The clothes don’t fit well.

The odds that large private foundations will learn from Yale’s example seem low. Philanthropy has been primarily defensive and reflexively self-protective in the face of populist questions about what it’s doing with its privileged status in the social contract generally and tax policy in particular. It’s pluralist enough, thank you, and just needs to “tell a better story” about itself and its magnanimous charity, as if more self-congratulation is in order.

But someone leading a large private foundation should mimic the McInnis model at philanthropy’s commanding heights. Answer some questions; heck, ask one or two. Honestly and pro-actively face, don’t try to creatively deflect, the challenges by tailoring a different narrative, devoid of any divergent skepticism.

Purpose and presumption

Generally, one of the more-introspective themes of the Yale report is that colleges and universities have confused their own purpose. This confusion is a “self-inflicted source of distrust.” Again, this distrust is not a result of misunderstanding, but rather a response to perfectly understood institutional decisions and behavior. Its claims otherwise lose it credibility. Its opacity even further erodes its legitimacy.

Specifically, the report does not just blame external critics for the polarization roiling our public life. It points inward, noting partisan slant in classrooms, self-censorship, and limits on open debate. Intellectual pluralism and heterodox worldviews are not protected in the academy, which is thus properly perceived as compromising one of its own defining and oft-professed norms.

There are other expressed concerns, as well, many having to do with cost-efficiency and bureaucratic bloat.

But perhaps the most-introspective point of the report is that higher ed’s legitimacy must be earned, not presumed. Trust is not owed to universities because of their history or status; it must be continually justified by performance and integrity. Public skepticism is treated as potentially warranted feedback, not mere hostility. The report rejects the traditional elite-academic stance of implicit authority.

Similar confusion and distrust

Establishment philanthropy faces a similar confusion of purpose, including that of the statutorily expressed policy underlying its tax-preferred charitable status. Distrust abounds, including because of that diversion of purpose. The diversion is understood by external critics. The understanding itself is expressed to elected policymakers, who act on it—asking the same questions and posing the same challenges or related, more-detailed ones of their own.

Their questions and challenges are not all by definition illiberal exercises of authoritarian government power. That dismissive characterization is unfair; it’s lazily unthinking. It’s permissible in a democracy to revisit policies, their original intent, and whether the implementation of those policies are serving to fulfill that intent; it’s responsible. Credibility and legitimacy in the nonprofit sector, a term derivative of the tax code, are at issue. Not unfairly.

There is more than a mere ideological and partisan slant in the sector and its philanthropic component. It is monoculturally progressive in worldview and increasingly politicized in action and effect, presumably purposely. Within it, there is no real widespread, pluralistic debate about its mission, its vision, its grantmaking. Name the populist conservative or populist progressive question-raiser, from either within or without, on the Independent Sector’s newly announced “Panel on Sector Independence”—defensively formed to protect, it sure seems, not to introspectively question, much less even gently challenge.

Humility and curiosity

A “philanthropic Yale report” is in order. It would do much good for the nonprofit sector and its philanthropic component, for charity, and for the country. Where’s Big Philanthropy’s McInnis? Where’s any acknowledgment, however reluctantly offered, that it’s “fallen short,” as she writes of higher ed? If even only partially?

As McInnis writes in the one context, so someone should say in the other: “That means welcoming as comprehensive a panorama of perspectives as possible—even, and especially, those that may be critical—and facing such criticism with humility and curiosity.”

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/self-introspective-yale-report-should-be-model-for-big-philanthropy/