Solid Foundations

For the second time in the last two years, representatives of the Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and smaller foundations are under Congressional fire for using their tax-exempt funds to support projects "not in the public interest." But so far the Committee has expressed less concern with the abuse of tax privileges than with the policies of modern education.

It is strange that some conservative Congressmen feel concerned that educational programs of the foundations set up by three of America's most influential industrialists are really designed to build a welfare state in America. Yet the Reece Committee won its initial appropriation last July by claiming that it could uncover the Communist roots beneath the "diabolical conspiracy whose aim is the furtherance of socialism in the United States."

The chief trouble--the Committee claimed in its staff report last week--is that education has become centralized, and has lost the "natural safeguards" inherent in local control. Central planners, by donating large grants to universities in foreign countries, have given education an "internationalist viewpoint" supposed to be dangerous.

These initial charges in the Reece Committee's preliminary report were issued before the group had heard representatives from any of the major foundations, and they are radically different from the conclusions of the Cox Committee of 1952. This earlier committee, after long investigations, had observed that the officers of the major charitable trusts recognized their public obligations, and noted that only a few of the countrys three thousand foundation were under subversive influence.

The investigation of major educational foundations for deviance from "the principles underlying the American way of life" challenges, in effect, the leadership of American education itself. Scarcely masterminded in a central office, the research programs at the major universities are planned initially by the faculty of the school concerned, then considered by foundation officials, who commonly are prominent educators in their own right. Frequent policy statements and financial reports usually tell the public more about the operation of the foundations than they know about their local college, whose traditions the Reece Committee expects it to "safeguard."

Paradoxically, the Committee's own threat to take away the tax immunity of the large foundations presents in itself a grave threat of centralized education. With the Committee judging which foundations were supporting "Un-American" education, university faculties would have less control over the evaluation of their own research programs.

It is important, of course, that Congress and the Bureau of Internal Revenue scrutinize the educational foundations frequently, and warn them when they expand into the arena of politics. Reece's group has evinced some interest in this type of abuse of tax-exemption privileges, and by setting sensible standards for detecting the line between education and indoctrination the Committee can perform a service.

Within educational borders, however, the Government should give the foundations control over their own policies. For in trying to ensure that universities teach only the "ancient traditions" of the country the Reece Committee is bound to violate one: that of the freedom to uncover fresh ideas.