The Giving Review: A conversation with the Defense of Freedom Institute’s Jay P. Greene: Part 2

This interview originally appeared on the Giving Review

Jay P. Greene is a senior fellow at the Defense of Freedom Institute (DFI), where he focuses on combating antisemitism in K–12 education, higher education, and teacher unions. A leading education-policy scholar, Greene has spent more than three decades shaping debates over K-12 school choice, education reform more generally, and the civic effects of schooling through influential academic research, policy analysis, and public commentary.

His work evaluating school-voucher and parental-choice programs—including the publicly funded Milwaukee and Cleveland programs in the 1990s and early 2000s—helped establish the empirical foundation for modern reform and was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark 2002 Zelman v. Simmons-Harris decision upholding the constitutionality of vouchers.

Greene founded and chaired the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, served as a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and currently also serves as director of research for Do No Harm, where he leads research on the effects of ideological movements in medical education, research, and clinical practice.

Greene contributed two chapters to Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think, a newly released anthology from Encounter Books edited by Heritage president Kevin D. Roberts. Greene’s contributions are “The Donor Problem: Your Help Is Hurting” and “Trump’s New Plan.” The book also features a chapter by the Manhattan Institute’s John D. Sailer, in large part about the philanthropically supported “scholar-activist pipeline” in higher ed.

In Greene’s chapter on donors, he argues that those who want to improve higher ed should largely stop giving to existing colleges and universities, because entrenched institutional incentives and ideological cultures make even well-intentioned gifts unlikely to produce meaningful reform. Instead, he contends, philanthropy should support new universities and independent institutions that can compete with or bypass the existing higher-ed establishment, rather than perpetuate and strengthen it. “People who have a substantial amount of money and are considering donating to a university need to hear this simple advice: Don’t do it,” Greene begins.

The preternaturally good-natured Greene was nice enough to join me for a recorded conversation earlier this month. In the first part of our discussion, we talk about the K-12 school-choice and higher-education reform efforts, including philanthropic support of them—as well as the structural challenges for, and tax-advantaged status of, nonprofits involved in reform.

The just less than 23-and-a-half-minute video below is the second part, during which we talk more about philanthropic support of higher-ed reform, including for non-billionaires, the risks and drawbacks of funding conservative “beachhead” centers within existing universities in particular, and what ordinary citizens can do about the problems of and being caused by higher ed—as well as more about nonprofitdom’s privileged tax status.

Greene cautions wealthy donors—in this case, especially “merely” multi-millionaires rather than billionaires, whom he thinks should try creating new colleges and universities, as discussed in Part 1—against the temptation to support specialized, conservative “beachhead” centers inside existing universities that are usually devoted to civics, the Constitution, or other heterodox subjects. He thinks this strategy almost always fails, for institutional rather than ideological reasons.

First, he reasons, such centers survive initially only by reassuring the rest of the university that they won’t challenge existing departments. Second, their founding donor or donors eventually disappear and the administrators who were receptive to the gift retire. Third, the university’s existing bureaucracy then gradually strips the center of autonomy by blocking hiring, speakers, or other activities. Finally, because ultimate authority always rests with university trustees and administrators—not center directors—claims of permanent autonomy are illusory. As in so many other contexts, organizational culture almost always defeats isolated reform efforts inside mature, established institutions.

But wouldn’t the limited number of new universities Greene recommends creating and supporting turn out to be something of an isolated “beachhead” themselves within the higher-ed universe, and, if so, don’t they run the same risk of being defeated by the establishment? A new university, he answers me:

has a founding mission and now it may stray from its founding mission over time and get corrupted, but that corruption takes decades or centuries, okay? So nothing is eternal, but you will get meaningful change by founding a new institution. When you found a new center inside of a big institution, the organizational culture is still there. All the people whose priorities are hostile to you are there, and they have power, and they don’t go away, and they look at you with hostility and envy, and they figure out how to fight you over time and to take your stuff.

Well, wasn’t the Milwaukee school-choice program a helpfully incremental “beachhead” of sorts? In answer, Greene distinguishes between incremental reform that demonstrates feasibility and one that permanently changes an institution. In Milwaukee, reformers “did some very important initial things with that, which is it was ‘proof of concept’ that you could do it and the world wouldn’t collapse,” which is what many were arguing at the time.

If you’re not a billionaire or multi-millionaire and “just” an ordinary citizen interested in higher-ed reform, “I think one thing you can certainly do is help convince your policymakers to stop subsidizing universities” so much, according to Greene. “Because again, at the heart of the problem here is excess money, is trust-fund universities. And so people of more moderate means may not have as much money, but they have the same vote as rich people, so they can, through their vote, influence how much money is subsidizing badly behaving universities, and I think that’s an important way they can contribute.

“Financially, I think one of the more effective ways” people of lesser or ordinary means, he continues:

can help is by contributing to substitutes, alternatives to higher education that are still really important for the formation of our young people into good citizens and the development of them into skilled workers, right? There are ways to do that. For example, around universities, there are our organizations that help with young people and often they help make a very large institution feel smaller, to help again, really, with values formation. I’m thinking here of places like the Newman Center, which is essentially an organization for Catholic students at a university. As you know, these institutions that are not quite the university, but are working with university students. They could be very influential in helping shape and develop young people.

Bigness, charity, accountability, and political activity

Prompted by a question about whether his thinking and recommendations might be applicable in other nonprofit contexts where there are similar monoculturally progressive establishments, including Big Philanthropy and Big Labor, Greene returns to nonprofitdom’s privileged tax status.

“Like I was saying before” in Part 1, “I think we should probably get rid of the tax subsidy for any nonprofit above a certain annual revenue threshold,” he says. “I want soup kitchens, and I want charities, and I am so glad they exist, and they couldn’t exist probably without some tax subsidy. And I’m for small, very mission-focused nonprofits. But once they hit a scale, the grift starts happening.”

Greene continues:

If people want to continue to give to that because they believe in it and they think they can manage the grift and keep it under control, great. But I don’t want to use tax dollars to subsidize that. That’s some of how we’ve gotten the same kind of intellectual rot in big nonprofits … It’s the same trust-fund-baby problems. When you are awash in too much money, you can become reckless.

He underscores that “ultimately, everything is about accountability. Are you accountable to someone for something? And again, I don’t want to lionize for-profits too much, but at least there is some incentive, system of accountability, okay, however imperfect. … There’s no real accountability system for large nonprofits.”

Greene notes that a large section of the large-nonprofit landscape is now really just political activity. And by the way, I’ve got nothing against people engaging in it. “I think it’s great that people want to engage in political activity. But we’ve designed laws to make it not tax-subsidized, and people have figured out how to end-run that, and it would seem completely sensible to try to close the loophole and prevent those end-runs.

Greene concludes by describing a newly released report that he’s written for DFI, shedding light on foreign influence in American higher ed and recommending limiting the number of foreign students and H-1B worker visas for those working in it.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-giving-review-a-conversation-with-the-defense-of-freedom-institutes-jay-p-greene-part-2/