Foundations as Change Agents and Envoys of the Status Quo

In 1959, when Charles T. Duncan gave his presidential address to the Association for Education in Journalism, he was among the first in our field to recognize the role of outside funding as he offered cautionary praise for a tiny coterie of foundations then supporting journalism and communication schools. In the years since, foundations have cut a broad swath across journalism and communication education, funding physical plants, endowed professorships, research and teaching programs, centers for advanced study, scholarships, conferences, and the like. Universities on the receiving end of this largess usually express gratitude and praise their benefactors. Having personally benefited from foundation funding from my first academic appointment forward, I'm mindful about how foundations do business and why. Overall, I think they do good work for largely beneficent reasons, but not always. Foundations set the rules for their grants-and we grantees and wannabe grantees respond to their invitations like guests at a dinner party, doing their bidding, observing their protocols and saying "thank you," if we expect to get more funding. And while foundations have their own agendas, some have invited ideas (and even criticism) for the academy that have shaped-and even changed-their policies and programs. In my experience, foundations can either be agents of change or promoters of the status quo-and some can be both. Most media-related foundations are interested in funding programs that provide a stream of potential employees and have rigid ideas about how that ought to be done. Editors, they often believe, know best about what should to be taught, how and by whom. Respect for research, theory, or criticism is scant and those who toe the professional line typically get rewarded. On my watch at the Gannett/Freedom Forum-funded Media Studies Center at Columbia, we tried to break that mold urging mutual respect between the academy and the industry, which naturally resulted in some unvarnished criticism of both. This aimed to advance diversity (of the generic sort) in and among our schools of journalism and communication, thus sometimes departing from the industry-driven model. This approach eventually got the ire of some who argued, in effect, "he who pays the piper calls the tune. " That inspired the rear guard Winds of Change report from our parent foundation, which lionized faculty from the newsroom and dissed those with other backgrounds-all with the complicity of educators. Always in foundation largess there are lessons about influence-and independence. Other foundations, like Knight, have also been generous, but also with a potentially self-serving result by funding journalism education as they'd like it to be. Its centerpiece is the endowed Knight professorship and while the foundation never dictated who should be named to these posts, independent search committees ended up mostly choosing former Knight-Ridder employees. As a result, first-class journalists have joined university faculties, which would not likely have happened otherwise, and most transformed themselves into productive teachers or researchers in these lifetime sinecures. And although this is a classy group that adds immeasurably to the institutions where they are in residence, I wonder, though, what might have happened if a more diverse group had been anointed. Also in the change agent category is the Pew Memorial Trusts, which has funded various programs in our field, most visibly the efforts to promote civic or public journalism, and others to advance excellence in journalism. The Wall Street Journal has weighted in critically on this funding, so I will not repeat that critique, and, again, admire the multi-faceted work of this philanthropy, which can rightly claim to serve the public good. Still, this is an organization outside the media community, endeavoring to influence the media and journalism. Whether this is simply American pluralism at work or an undue influence is worth considering. …