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"Remarks"
2003 Foundation Conversation Meeting
March 21, 2003
New York, NY
Richard Ekman
President
Council of Independent Colleges
It’s a pleasure to be able to welcome all of you to
this annual event in New York City. The Council of Independent Colleges
is pleased to hold a major event each year in New York—because so
many foundations are located here, because New York is a major cultural
and commercial center for our country, and because CIC wants to play a
part in helping to support New York after the terrible events of September
2001.
I’m particularly grateful to TIAA-CREF and to its president, Herb
Allison, for hosting us in this magnificent conference center, and I’m
grateful to Bob Frehse of the William Randolph Hearst Foundations and
Doreen Boyce of The Buhl Foundation, for their leadership in organizing
today’s program.
Today, our goal is to explore the relationship between two key segments
of the so-called “independent” sector—colleges and universities,
on the one hand, and philanthropic and corporate foundations, on the other.
Our topic is the role of liberal art colleges in a democratic society.
Nothing could be quite as important or appropriate as an exploration of
the ways in which these two major non-governmental sectors work together
to define and enhance that role.
I probably do not need to remind anyone in this room that only a generation
ago both higher education institutions and foundations tended to focus
on long-term and gradual changes in society. The rationale—sometimes
articulated, but often implicit—was that it was the responsibility
of local, state, and federal government to attend to the immediate needs
of citizens. Only non-governmental entities, such as colleges or foundations,
could take the longer view of what was likely to ameliorate our social
and civic problems.
In recent years, these roles have been changing. Government at all levels
has been less effective in dealing with many of the near-term problems
that we are facing, and colleges and universities and foundations have
tended to do more to demonstrate their immediate usefulness to the communities
in which they are located. This is not to say that colleges and universities
or foundations have altogether abandoned their traditional long-term goals
of the development of human and intellectual capital or the support of
basic research that may eventually produce discoveries that will improve
our civic or material circumstances, but the new fact of the past 25 years
has been the extent to which colleges and universities have been deeply,
actively involved in their communities in trying to address such issues
as hunger, poverty, school improvement, and the extent to which many foundations
are also now focused more narrowly on short-term and measurable goals.
The good news is that voluntarism appears to have increased in American
society, and especially among young people, including college students.
The bad news is that voting and other kinds of political activism are
much diminished in comparison with a generation ago. Quite a bit has been
written about these diverse trends. William Galston of the University
of Maryland and Sylvia Hurtado of the University of Michigan have written
about these matters especially well, in my view. Private colleges and
universities, with their long commitment to certain values and traditions
of service, have been especially prominent in the increased voluntarism.
If you look closely at the activities of Campus Compact, for example,
you will see that it is the smaller private colleges that are the leaders
nationally in service learning and in other forms of community service.
And if you look at CIC’s own “Engaging” and “Urban
Missions” programs you will see remarkable evidence of these activities.
But the proposition before us today is what foundations and colleges
can do—and should do—together to strengthen democratic society.
We will begin today with a panel in which three brief presentations, representing
very different approaches, will stimulate our thinking. Then we will divide
into small groups where two or three foundation officers will moderate
discussions on today’s topic. Finally, we will come together for
lunch and after lunch Leslie Lenkowsky, chief executive officer of the
Corporation for National and Community Service, will speak to us. I should
point out that one of our panelists, Eugene Lang, chairman of the E.M.
Lang Foundation and founder of Project Pericles, will be speaking about
Project Pericles publicly for the very first time today and Leslie Lenkowsky
will be describing the CNCS’s work in higher education publicly
for the first time today. We are honored by the participation of these
individuals, as well as by Gara LaMarche of the Open Society Institute
and Richard Guarasci, president of Wagner College and author of Democratic
Education in the Age of Difference.
Thank you.
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