According to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (sorry, I don’t have a link that provides free access to this piece),
Nine elite universities . . . — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago — are challenging antiterrorism language that the Ford and Rockefeller foundations recently added to their standard grant agreements.
The Ford Foundation’s new provision states that the foundation would withdraw its funding if any of a university’s expenditures promoted “violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state,” no matter what the source of the funds. Rockefeller’s language states that a grantee shall not “directly or indirectly engage in, promote or support other organizations or individuals who engage in or promote terrorist activity.” . . .
Ford adopted its language following an investigative series last fall by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, an international news service in New York. The series revealed that Ford funded a number of Palestinian groups that had orchestrated anti-Israel resolutions and activities at a United Nations conference in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. The U.S. delegation walked out of that conference in protest.
In response to the series, Ford acknowledged that grantees “may have taken part in unacceptable behavior in Durban” and terminated its support for one organization, the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights, to which it had given $1.3 million between 1997 and 2001. . . .
Jewish leaders who advised Ford on its new policy criticized the [university] provosts’ stance. David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, said the language is “eminently reasonable. I would like to think that with or without Ford’s language, America’s universities would not in any way want to associate themselves with the promotion of violence, terrorism or bigotry.” . . .
Foundations are certainly entirely free to attach whatever strings they like to their grants. At the same time, universities are right to be cautious about such strings, especially if they’re so broad. I’m all in favor of destruction of certain states — I think that North Korea should be destroyed as a political entity, and probably (if the South Koreans don’t mind, though I’m not sure they’d really like it) merged into a democratic united Korea. I’m delighted that the Soviet Union has been destroyed. I support many kinds of violence — defensive violence, violence in a just war, and the like — and think universities ought to have speakers and programs where this view is endorsed. As to “bigotry,” I guess it all depends on how you define it.
I’m not sure what the proper reaction for universities would be. One possibility might be to accept grants that have the strings, so long as the strings don’t affect the university’s ability to spend its own money on those things that the grant doesn’t cover: The university might then fund a conference on what to do in the Far East by spending Ford money on everything but the speaker who thinks the state of North Korea should be destroyed as a political entity, and then use its own money to fund that other speaker. Another possibility might be to point out to the foundations that the language they’re proposing is likely broader than what the foundations themselves should want.
Comments are closed.