The Ford Foundation, Matching Grants, and Endowment Building

This chapter examines the Ford Foundation’s predominantly economics- and finance-based expertise, and the way it sustained the country’s largest and most expensive performing arts institutions: orchestras, operas, and conservatories. Ford accomplished its goals primarily through matching grants and endowments, hoping with matching requirements to diversify organizations’ funding sources and expand the public’s commitment to local arts. Based on the expert advice of economists and administrators, Ford intended endowments to be a permanent source of income for orchestras and conservatories, if they managed the invested principal properly. In practice, however, wealthy individuals on boards of trustees for institutions such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Juilliard School solidified their personal, social connections to elicit five-, six-, and sometimes seven-figure gifts. In general, ordinary citizens and the local community did not participate, and as a result, broad-based support never materialized. Orchestras and conservatories came back knocking on the foundation’s door again and again.

O Conselho de Educação Superior nas Repúblicas Americanas

Este artigo tem como objetivo examinar a trajetória do Conselho de Educação Superior nas Repúblicas Americanas no período de 1958 a 1978. O Conselho, objeto ainda não investigado pela historiografia da educação brasileira, foi criado em 1958 pelo Institute of International Education (IIE) e sediado em Nova York. Era financiado, inicialmente, pela Carnegie Foundation, a Carnegie Corporation e a Ford Foundation. O Conselho abrigou, em seus quadros, intelectuais estadunidenses e latino-americanos com o intuito de elaborar recomendações para a solução dos problemas relativos ao ensino superior no continente americano. Através de uma pesquisa de caráter documental que examinou os Relatórios Anuais do IIE, o Arquivo Anísio Teixeira sob a guarda do Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil da Fundação Getúlio Vargas e os Relatórios Anuais da Comissão de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de nível Superior (CAPES) foi possível mapear as decisões do Conselho e avaliar o potencial de cooperação ou intervenção nas políticas públicas para ensino superior na América Latina.

Developing communities: the Ford Foundation and the global urban crisis, 1958–66

Between 1958 and 1966 the Ford Foundation embarked on a series of pilot projects of ‘urban community development’ in India and the United States. This article will highlight how both of these programmes emerged in response to what Ford officials understood to be a global urban crisis, caused by the migration of ‘backward’ rural populations into the cities. Rather than modernizing under the pressure of urban living, these newcomers appeared to be pooling into pockets of underdevelopment – ‘ghettos’ in the United States and ‘slums’ in India. Ford sought to tackle the problem by encouraging the participation of these marginalized communities in the process of urban renewal, a strategy intended to engineer the psychological modernization of their residents. In practice, however, Ford struggled to control the channels into which these mobilizations flowed, with poor urban residents utilizing the projects to push for radical changes concerning housing, policing, and tenant–landlord relations.