1 23

Society ISSN 0147-2011 SocDOI 10.1007/s12115-013-9741-2

The Intellectual Crisis in Philanthropy

Lenore T. Ealy

1 23

Your article is protected by copyright and all

rights are held exclusively by Springer Science

+Business Media New York. This e-offprint is

for personal use only and shall not be self-

archived in electronic repositories. If you wish

to self-archive your article, please use the

accepted manuscript version for posting on

your own website. You may further deposit

the accepted manuscript version in any

repository, provided it is only made publicly

available 12 months after official publication

or later and provided acknowledgement is

given to the original source of publication

and a link is inserted to the published article

on Springer's website. The link must be

accompanied by the following text: "The final

publication is available at link.springer.com”.

CULTURE AND SOCIETY

The Intellectual Crisis in Philanthropy

Lenore T. Ealy

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Abstract Defenders of modern philanthropic freedom oftendefend donor intent and celebrate voluntary action.Nevertheless, donor intent and voluntarism have oftenundermined the conditions of constitutional freedom. Thispaper proposes that philanthropy currently suffers an intellec-tual crisis very much like the intellectual crisis in public admin-istration diagnosed by Vincent Ostrom. The Common CoreState Standards initiative is a case study of the problems ofepistemic drift in philanthropy and raises questions aboutwhether merely defending donor intent and voluntary actionfor their own sake is sufficient. To escape philanthropy’s cur-rent intellectual crisis requires a clearer consideration of theepistemic choices that shape donor intent and voluntary action.

Keywords Philanthropy . Philanthrocapitalism . Education .

Federalism . Public choice . CommonCore State Standards .

Vincent Ostrom . Public administration

In the May 2013 issue of Wall Street Journal.Money, BradReagan delves into the philanthropic approach of John andLaura Arnold, the young Houston couple who aspire to apply$4 billion in the next decades to “make transformationalchanges in society.” According to Reagan,

The Arnolds want to see if they can use their money tosolve some of the country’s biggest problems throughdata analysis and science, with an unsentimental focuson results and an aversion to feel-good projects—thesuccess of which can’t be quantified. No topic is tooambitious: Along with obesity, the Arnolds plan to diginto criminal justice and pension reform, among others.Anne Milgram, the former New Jersey attorney generalhired to tackle the criminal-justice issue, has a name for

all this: She calls it the “Moneyball” approach to giving,a reference to the book and movie about how the Oak-land A’s used smart statistical analysis to upend some ofbaseball’s conventional wisdom. And the Arnolds are inno hurry for answers. Indeed, they believe patience is akey resource behind their giving.

While the problems the Arnolds are tackling—such ascriminal justice, pension reform, and obesity—and the sheervolume of time and money they are willing to apply layoutside the capacity of most donors, their approach to philan-thropy seems to be less something new than a continuation ofthe principles of “scientific philanthropy” developed byProgressive-era foundations at the turn of the 20th century.

Scientific philanthropy arose out of the charity organi-zation movement as an effort to bring the tools of scien-tific expertise to the social problems of rapidly urbanizingand industrializing societies. Scientific philanthropy de-parted from traditional forms of charitable relief, such asdirect material relief and mutual aid, in favor of researchto discover the root causes of social problems. Thesecauses were often found to be some moral deficiency ofthe person in need of aid, and so Progressive philanthropyhelped forged a “problem-industrial complex” which unit-ed the forms of Protestant morality with the agencies ofinstitutional social control, especially through public edu-cation and the burgeoning administrative state.

In Liberalism and Social Action (1935) John Dewey sum-marized the Progressive reformers’ mandate to forge a newliberalism that departed from the old laissez-faire liberalism:

Organized social planning, put into effect for thecreation of an order in which industry and financeare socially directed in behalf of institutions thatprovide the material basis for the cultural liberationand growth of individuals, is now the sole method ofsocial action by which liberalism can realize its pro-fessed aims (60).

L. T. Ealy (*)1415 Ironwood Dr W, Carmel, IN 46033, USAe-mail: lenoree@thinkitecture.com

SocDOI 10.1007/s12115-013-9741-2

Author's personal copy

It would be “the smartest men in the room”whowould takeon such a transformation of the liberal vision, but this trans-formation would come with the heavy cost of trampling thetender liberties that ordinary Americans had been working outfor themselves amidst the hurly burly of the Republic’s firstcentury. After the Civil War the cacophony of industrial citiesand the opportunities for social construction as the populationcontinued to move west stirred the reforming spirit to newaspirations.

By the early twentieth century a new science of bureau-cratic administration applied to large-scale industrial corpo-rations, the emerging philanthropic foundations, and govern-ment agencies alike eclipsed Alexis de Tocqueville’s call toAmericans to work out a new science of association to securethe foundations of their experiment in democratic freedom.The new administrative techniques in philanthropy, as ingovernment and business, depended upon a new class of“experts” largely tapped out of the new academic socialsciences.

The shift from a spontaneous philanthropy oriented aroundvoluntary beneficent associations that often operated on prin-ciples of mutual assistance to an organized philanthropy em-bracing the new techniques of bureaucratic management wassymptomatic of a broader paradigm shift in American lifeaway from the principles of federalism and decentralizedself-governance and toward a centralized nation-state. Thisshift also precipitated a persistent intellectual crisis in philan-thropy that has sustained the delusion that public problems arenot the proper domain for citizen action but are instead mosttractable to experts armed with data and the tools of regressionanalysis. As William Schambra (2005) has observed, “when-ever modern ‘scientific philanthropy’ has systematically de-ployed its resources over the past 100 years, the retreat ofcitizenship has often been not just a side-effect, but in factan intended result.”

By the time America celebrated its second centennial, thecorporate liberal alliance of big philanthropy, big business,and the administrative state was well entrenched in America’ssocial, economic, and political institutions. Nevertheless, crit-icism of the system abounded from the Left and the Right.Especially in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the theme ofdecline displaced Progressive triumphalism. Robert Nisbet(1975) depicted the 20th century as a prototypical “twilightage” characterized by “the combined phenomena of sense ofcultural decay, erosion of institutions, progressive inflation ofvalues in all spheres, economic included, and constantly in-creasing centralization—and militarization—of power (vi).”

The Intellectual Crisis in Public Administration

By the 1970s, while Americans continued to give generouslyto charitable organizations, these organizations were

becoming increasingly entangled with the welfare state. Bigphilanthropy tended to promote this entanglement by utilizingits resources to lobby for expanding welfare state services,which would then be “provided” by charitable and socialwelfare organizations receiving government grants.

Despite the growing recognition by the mid-1960s thatwelfare state programs were correlated with unfavorable andsystemic changes in the family structures of welfare recipients(documented in the Moynihan Report in 1965), Washingtonsought to intensify its “War on Poverty” and to expand na-tional involvement in education.

At the same time, a handful of scholars were beginning toquestion the very premises on which the welfare state and thework of its regiments of public administrators rested. In TheIntellectual Crisis in American Public Administration , firstpublished in 1973, Vincent Ostrom awakened scholarly atten-tion to the instability of public administration in theory andpractice and set out “to challenge ways of thinking aboutthe constitutive nature of order in human societies.” “Whenadministrators act,” Ostrom wrote, “they constitute as wellas manage. But what is being constituted—Leviathans orself-governing communities of relationships in compoundrepublics (19)?”

In examining the patterns of order that had emerged underAmerica’s federalist system, Ostrom came to see that theprinciple of unitary power which Woodrow Wilson hadincorporated in his influential theory of the administrativestate did not map well onto America’s federalist constitu-tion or its traditional institutional landscape. Ostrom tracedhis skepticism about the principles of public administrationin part to his early experiences working on problems ineducational administration. This was the age of schooldistrict consolidation, but Ostrom began to believe thatthe creation of central administrative offices was not calledfor by prevailing circumstances. “Somehow,” he noted, “amultiplicity of independent jurisdictions had not generatedchaos. The American system of education had many sur-prisingly consistent patterns of organization in the absenceof any overarching hierarchy of authority. No master-general of American education could look at his watchand know what lesson students in each school would bestudying at any one moment (xxii).”

Patterns of order in education, Ostrom pointed out,could emerge, and clearly had, from the mutual adjust-ment of students, teachers, and administrators within andamong independent school districts. Instrumental in theformation of these patterns were the functions of numer-ous voluntary associations: “rivalry for personnel throughcompetitive placement offices, accrediting associations,and professional associations of teachers, administrators,and school board members were a few of the institutionsthrough which consensus evolved from discussion ofproblems and possibilities (xxiii).”

Soc

Author's personal copy

Turning back to The Federalist and to Tocqueville’sDemocracy in America , Ostrom came to see that the beliefthat the work of public administration was to discover thetechnical solutions that could solve public problems presentedan intellectual crisis that could be resolved only by recogniz-ing that American federalism already contained within it astructure for public entrepreneurship and processes of exper-imentation and warrantability that allowed for the emergenceof patterns of order, despite the fragmentation of authority andthe existence of overlapping jurisdictions.

Ostrom continued—especially in The Meaning ofAmerican Federalism (1991) and The Meaning ofDemocracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies (1997)—to lay solid groundwork for a new paradigm of democraticadministration that both incorporated the principles offederalism embodied in the U.S. Constitution and recoveredthe insights of Alexis de Tocqueville about the role ofdecentralized “democratic administration” in America. In ar-ticulating a new paradigm for public administration, Ostromargued that federalism operates within an open public realmthat allows people to “constitute themselves into mutuallyrespectful and productive working relationships” (2008, 168).

Ostrom (1991) offered a helpful summary of the constitu-tion of the “open public realm” within which federal systemsof governance operate:

The constitution and operational autonomy of the insti-tutions of civil society thus turn critically upon inalien-able rights of persons and citizens, with correlativelimits upon the authority of the instrumentalities ofgovernment as specified in a limited national constitu-tion, state constitutions, and local charters. Many of theinstitutions of civil societies, including families, busi-ness firms, trade unions, and all voluntary associations,are organized through what amount to governable con-tracts. Such contracts provide for revision, resolvingdisputes, and penalties for breaching the rules of asso-ciation that are enforceable either under the rules of civilprocedure or by arbitration. Voluntary associationshave an autonomous standing based upon the authorityof individuals to contract with one another and to holdproperty as shares in the assets of that voluntary asso-ciation. Religions institutions and the press have anautonomous standing based upon freedom of the pressand the free exercise of religion. These institutions arealso organized through rules of voluntary association(208–9).

With Tocqueville, Ostrom held up as a model of realitythe constant tendency of “Americans of all ages, all con-ditions, all minds” to unite in mutual pursuit of knowl-edge, to ameliorate social problems, and to improve theirconditions.

In Reclaiming the American Dream (1965) and HealingAmerica (1983), Richard Cornuelle likewise sought to renewa Tocqueville-inspired hope for the revitalization of voluntaryassociation, in this case through philanthropy and what wehave come increasingly to call “social entrepreneurship.”Cornuelle believed that the perception that modern socialproblems were so complex that only big government couldpossibly solve them was precisely upside down. He calledfor a rediscovery of the potential of independent action,and suggested that the task of philanthropy should be tosupport anew “the vast, idle capacities of individuals andinstitutions to act directly and freely on public problems”(1965, 34). “In the end,” Cornuelle urged, “a good societyis not so much the result of grand designs and bolddecisions, but of millions upon millions of small caringacts, repeated day after day, until direct mutual actionbecomes second nature and to see a problem is to beginto wonder how best to act on it” (1983, 196).

Cornuelle’s insights about the crisis of confidence in philan-thropy, which he believed increased the closer philanthropyallied with government, paralleled the work of Ostrom.Ostrom had asked with candor, “Dare we contemplate thepossibility that the contemporary malaise in American societymay have been derived, in part, from the teachings of publicadministration” (2008/1973, 99–100)? Likewise, Cornuelleproposed that American philanthropy, which conceived of itselfas the support of civil society, had in fact been complicit in thegrowth and centralization of government over the previouscentury, a growth that had actually enfeebled civil society.

The bureaucratic model of public administration called forby Woodrow Wilson largely reduced the conception of dem-ocratic citizenship to the exercise of the franchise and thepetition of unitary power through political action. The realbusiness of the people would henceforth be overseen bytechnical experts within the administrative state. The man-agers of the philanthropic foundations that emerged duringthe Progressive era tended to subscribe to these new concep-tions of administration and citizenship and shared the hopethat technical solutions to public problems would be forth-coming. Philanthropy’s role in the new system would be toidentify possible solutions and to lobby government for wide-scale implementation (Ealy and Ealy).

This seduction of civil society to look to the newWashington bureaucracies for aid and support acceleratedduring the economic and social crisis of the GreatDepression and the New Deal response. The “social justice”aims of redistributionist government policies enacted duringthe Civil Rights era and the Johnson Administration’s War onPoverty helped further consolidate national power. Seekingnational political solutions to widespread problems, philan-thropy had in fact helped to weaken the intellectual and civichabits Americans had once honed through participation inautonomous associational activities.

Soc

Author's personal copy

Much as Ostrom was calling on the profession of publicadministration to re-examine its own operational paradigm,Cornuelle was proposing that philanthropy and the broad“independent sector” of which it is a part needed to betterunderstand and invest in the potential of decentralized, volun-tary action to develop patterns of order that would healAmerica.

The evidence strongly suggests that there needs to be adoctrine of separation of the independent sector and thestate. The sector must see itself not as an instrument ofthe state but as an alternative to the state. Some of theleaders of its charitable subsector hold out a vision of acomfortable future in the arms of the state, but pluralismbecomes a pretense if one sector of a pluralistic politybecomes dependent on another. A chastened, captive,and obedient pluralism is false and meaningless(Cornuelle 1983, 177).

Translated into Ostrom’s vocabulary, philanthropy neededto make different “epistemic choices” based on “[s]elf-con-scious awareness of the way that economic, political, episte-mic, and moral contingencies may work in complementaryways” (Ostrom 1997, 99). In other words, for philanthropy tofulfill its constitutional role in American order as a stimulus tovoluntary action for public benefits, it could not retain its 20th-century identity as part of the progressive cartel operating onvisions of public administration mired in bureaucraticprinciples.

Celebrating Philanthropy, Critically

Our present dilemma is deep and wide. We look to phi-lanthropy and civil society as key features of both theliberty and the humanity of our political society, but whathappens when philanthropy aligns itself with forces thatdegrade the potential for meaningful citizenship? We can-not afford to be Panglossian and believe that all is best inthis best of all possible worlds. It is imperative that wescrutinize philanthropy to improve the principles onwhich it operates, among which should figure large,“First, do no harm,” especially to the liberty that makesphilanthropy possible.

Donors are often motivated by a conviction that what-ever is, is not right. Philanthropy, in other words, tends tooperate on a presumption of the possibility of reform, orin today’s language, the end of philanthropy is “socialchange.” But what happens when the impetus to reformdepends too much on a paradigm that undermines theconstitutional design of American federalism? Is philan-thropy safe when it attaches itself too eagerly to the waysand means of the welfare state?

The philanthropic sector enjoys privileges and immunitiesadministered under the Internal Revenue Service, includingtax-exempt status and, for some entities, the carrot of offeringcharitable deductions to donors. In defending their specialstatus, philanthropic entities seem to rely more on aPanglossian celebration of the virtues of good intentions thanon self-reflection about the desirability and difficulties ofdoing good.

“An Open Letter from Economists on the CharitableDeduction” recently published in Politico stated:

The social safety net comprises strands from govern-ment at all levels interwoven with services provided bynational philanthropic organizations like the Red Cross,and local organizations addressing local needs. As asociety we reap tremendous benefits in cost and effec-tiveness by relying extensively on these private institu-tions. Parsimonious with their resources, their efforts areoften leveraged many times over by dedicated, unpaidvolunteers inspired to support their communities inways and to a degree federal programs cannot hope tomatch. One needn’t disparage federal social safety netprograms to acknowledge the tremendous advantages tosociety, and the important budgetary savings, from re-lying on volunteer-driven, private, philanthropic organi-zations across the country. These organizations andvolunteers would not achieve the same kind of successwithout the charitable deduction and the generous supportof philanthropic Americans (Accessed online 5/1/13 athttp://acreform.com/article/politico_open_letter_from_economists_on_the_charitable_deduction/).

The Alliance for Charitable Reform, a group organized todefend “philanthropic freedom,” tends to be equally sweepingin its applause for philanthropy and the inviolability of donorintent:

ACR educates legislators and policymakers about thecentral role of private giving in American life and thusthe importance of protecting philanthropic freedom—theability of individuals and private organizations to deter-mine how and where to direct their charitable assets.Active in Washington, D.C. and in the states, ACR seeksto prevent policies that would diminish private giving,limit the diversity of charitable causes Americans sup-port, or place undue government regulations on philan-thropic organizations (accessed online 5/1/2013 athttp://acreform.com/about/values).

Such protection of the property rights entailed in donorintent are warranted within a free society, but to the extent thatour celebration of philanthropy, and our flattery of donors,becomes uncritical, troubles can quickly brew. The wide-spread adulation of philanthropy as a linchpin of freedom

Soc

Author's personal copy

can divert us from taking up seriously Ostrom’s challenge to“test our conjectures and our practical experiments by whathappens in the world of experience.”

Let me ask bluntly: Can philanthropy that operates inalignment with a paradigm of bureaucratic public administra-tion and “social change” antithetical to constitutional federal-ism really succeed in ameliorating social problems andstrengthening the general welfare?

A deeper analysis of the relationships between the principlesof donor intent and the principles of federalism is called for. AsOstrom (1973/2008) observes, our “social experience isplagued by circumstances that can be both counterintentionaland counterintuitive”(xxvii), and this is certainly as true in therealm of philanthropy as it is in the halls of government or thecorporate boardroom.

A Case Study: The Common Core’s Compromiseof Federalism

What happens when the intent of donors and the actions ofvoluntary associations fail to align with the principles of feder-alism necessary for sustaining America’s constitutional order?

Ostrom (1973/2008 and 1991) distinguishes the marks of afederalist-democratic order as opposed to a unitary-bureaucratic one, including “(1) a covenantal approach, (2)plurality among the institutions of governance, (3) constitu-tional rule, (4) contestation as a way of processing conflictsand achieving conflict resolution, (5) active citizen participa-tion in public entrepreneurship, (6) reaching out to new com-munities of relationships in open societies, and (7) achievingthe reformability of patterns of association in complexly or-dered societies” (1991, 252).

The tremendous promise inOstrom’s approach to developinga more robust “science of association” necessary for federalismseems to snag on the problem of what happens when theinstitutions of civil society abandon their necessary autonomyfrom government and thus abandon the epistemic choicesrequired for true democratic administration. Ostrom definesepistemic choice as “the choice of conceptualizations, asser-tions, and information to be used and acted on in problem-solving modes” (1997, 91).

The recent history of education reform, especially thedevelopment and adoption of the Common Core StateStandards, offers us a glimpse into the dark underbelly ofepistemic drift in the realm of philanthropy, as well as of thepotential constitutional dangers of liaisons between philan-thropy and government bureaucracies.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative (www.corestandards.org) was launched by the Council of Chief StateSchool Officers and the National Governors Association, withassistance, as we shall see, from the deep pockets of theirphilanthropic partners. The Initiative is described at the

website as “a state-led effort that established a single set of cleareducational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade inEnglish language arts and mathematics that states voluntarilyadopt” (accessed June 18, 2013).

Controversy over the Common Core has exploded in thelast year as it became clear that the Obama Administration hadleveraged administrative waivers to existing No Child LeftBehind requirements if schools and states “voluntarily”adopted the new Common Core standards. (No Child LeftBehind was, of course, the previous bi-partisan silver bullet ofeducation reform.) Before much of the ink was even onpaper, 45 states had quickly rushed to adopt the unfinishedCommon Core standards, often by administrative fiat ratherthan legislative deliberation. In some states, such asMassachusetts and Indiana, it is arguable that adoption ofthe Common Core replaces existing state standards thatwere stronger. At present, several state legislatures, includ-ing those in Indiana and Michigan, have called for a moredeliberate review of the new standards before proceedingwith implementation.

Regardless of the content of the standards, in many ways,the development and implementation of the Common Coreepitomizes the trend to cartel federalism described byMichaelGreve in TheUpside-Down Constitution (2012). In contrast toconstitutional or competitive federalism, which works to dis-cipline government at all levels, Greve describes cartel feder-alism as a form of bargaining among state governments andlocal elites that works to strengthen and centralize the nationalauthority in return for attractive political and revenue returns.“A cartel federalism that empowers government at all levels ispathological, and quite probably worse than wholesale nation-alization,” writes Greve (4–5).

Common Core proponents have defended their effortsas the outcome of voluntary consultations and collabora-tions among most of the best sorts of concerned leaders ineducation and government. It is backed, moreover, notonly by government and education leaders and their na-tional associations, but has also had the strong support ofcorporate and philanthropic America. It is true to claim, asthe advocates of the Core do, that their coalition has broadand deep roots in civil society. It is also the case thatmany of the Core’s advocates were both prescient anddismayed when the Obama administration sought to sup-port the movement, fearing that tying Race to the Topdollars to Common Core adoption by the states wouldtaint the appearance of voluntary accomplishment.

Nevertheless, taking cover behind “voluntary” action can-not obscure the core fact of the Core, which is its relentlesspush to shift responsibility from local citizens and indepen-dent school districts to the far-removed high cover offered bystate and federal cooperation, “public-private partnership,”and the ever-alluring satisfaction of being in step with thetimes.

Soc

Author's personal copy

We need to look beyond the Panglossian doublespeak char-acteristic of much philanthropic boosterism today. The Spring2013 issue of Philanthropy magazine, published by thePhilanthropy Roundtable, recounts the “Common Core’sUncommon Rise” and is suggestive of the now all-too-common ways cartel federalism and its helpmate,philanthro-policymaking, work to generate and promote pol-icy bandwagons:

Although state education standards vary, the Gates-funded American Diploma Project (which convenednearly 40 states by 2008) revealed “that there was greatconsistency among the participating states’ standards,”Sanford explains. This was a foundation to build on.“Meanwhile, a number of organizations were calling forversions of national standards on equity and competi-tiveness grounds. The different groups began meeting tosee if they could come to a consensus on a commonagenda across groups and states. The governors andchiefs had been working on college and career-readystandards in their individual states and across states,while the Alliance for Excellent Education, the HuntInstitute, the Fordham Institute, and others had beenadvocating for national standards.”Philanthropic funding brought these conversations to-gether in one place, and “from those meetings emergedthe idea of leveraging the cross-state work that thegovernors and chiefs had been working on with thevoluntary mechanism that the American Diploma Pro-ject had been using to help states benchmark standardsto college and career readiness,” Sanford says. “Thatapproach would maintain state decision-making andindependence in standard-setting (purely voluntary statedecisions), while also generating the benefits of multiplestates having the same high standards.”

It was through the bipartisan membership associations ofgovernors and state school commissioners (the officialauthors of the Common Core standards) that states wereable to convince the funders that they could make theCommon Core happen. “In the early stages of conversa-tion with the foundations, there was a lot of skepticismabout whether the states could do this and would dothis,” explains Gene Wilhoit, who was until recentlyexecutive director of CCSSO. “We didn’t have the entiresupport we needed when we started the process. Sowhen we sat down with the philanthropic communitywe had to make some pretty specific promises tothem—like having so many states agree to participatein the process, and that those states would sign on to theadoption.” Cash-strapped states did not have the fundsnecessary to undertake the Common Core project ontheir own, and funding from the federal government

wasn’t desirable from the states’ perspective—governorsand education commissioners knew that if voters were toembrace national benchmarks, they would need to beconvinced that states were in the driver’s seat.

As of this writing, 46 states have committed to adoptthe Common Core standards. “This is a massive andlargely unprecedented coalition,” says GregoryMcGinity, the Broad Foundation’s managing directorof policy. (Accessed online 4/26/13 at http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/topic/excellence_in_philanthropy/common_cores_uncommon_rise)

With the money of prominent philanthropists lubri-cating the coalition, the Obama administration leverag-ing influence on behalf of Common Core adoption bystates, and brand-name corporations such as GE andExxonMobil supporting an advertising campaign in sup-port of the Common Core, what matter is it that policyanalysts across the spectrum from Brookings to Heritageare expressing skepticism?

On Ostrom’s terms, not merely the means used to incen-tivize state adoption but also the expensive advertising cam-paign on behalf of the Common Core being paid for by bigbusiness and big philanthropy are a travesty of the principlesof the res publica , contriving to use power to foreclose thedevelopment of open discourse. “Mass media,” writes Ostrom,“are destructive of the essential reciprocity for intelligible com-munications. Citizens, addressed en masse, no longer functionas intelligent artisans in self-organizing and self-governingcommunities of relationships (1991, 266–7).”

No matter from which direction, the view of our fellowcitizens as “target markets” and “market segments” to be wonbelies the pretense of liberty and tolls a death knell for the typeof constitutional federalism sustained by a form of constitu-tional discourse such as that engaged by Madison andHamilton, Tocqueville and Ostrom, Cornuelle and Hayek.

With a few state legislatures calling for a re-examination ofthe Common Core adoption, an auspicious moment is arisingfor moral leadership to help citizens re-examine both the prin-ciples of federalism, the role of education in promoting liberty,and the problems that can ensue when we believe the donor isalways the smartest, and most beneficent, person in the room.

Returning to Epistemic Choices and ConstitutionalDeliberation

Hopefully deliberation on the Common Core will proceednot merely on consequentialist grounds that examine onlythe projected impact of these new standards on studentlearning but will elevate the conversation to constitutionalprinciples about the fitness of this type of nationalizing

Soc

Author's personal copy

reform, voluntary or not, for the practice of Americanfederalism as it ought to be.

The current debate over the Common Core is not primarilya debate over the existence of high expectations and standardsfor education. It is rather a debate over what the substance ofsuch standards should be (an epistemic question) and overwho should establish these expectations and standards forstudents (a constitutional question). Should these expectationsbe set within local contexts by parents, teachers, and localschool boards, or should these standards be driven down intolocal schools by administrative fiat backed by expensiveadvertising campaigns?

Regardless of the merit of the proposed standards, it stillmatters who decides and whether there are rights of exit fromthe influence of the interlocking directorates of educational“experts,” government agencies, and companies standing toreap the rewards from selling new curriculum-aligned mate-rials and tests to thousands of local school districts and fam-ilies. This is exactly the sort of debate over the very possibilityof freedom in America that should be enjoined by those whowould renew the federal vision of the American Founders.

Returning to a federal system that promotes liberty does notmean returning to educational arrangements that fail to pro-vide access and opportunity for all children. But it doesrequire renewing one of the perennial conversations of aself-governing people: How can a society so constitute itselfthat its members will be free participants in a self-governingorder and not merely the subjects of the state? (RobertHawkins, in Ostrom, 1991, xi)

Philanthropy in a self-governing society should keep theends and means of our federalist institutions ever in mind.Ostrom observed that “the capacity of people to function inlarger political communities may depend critically upon theknowledge and skills that these same people acquire in smallerpolitical communities.” Such smaller political communitiesmay indeed include schools of all sorts, where people areengaged in both instrumental and civic ends together. It isessential that such engagement be elicited through invitationand encouragement in a context of meaningful choices ratherthan through regulatory regimes that mandate compliance tominutely defined policies and procedures.

Ostrom (1991) pointed out the hollow victory of democracyif federalism is abandoned:

Those who continue to assume that the national govern-ment, because of its “federal form,” is competent todetermine all matters that pertain to the governance ofAmerican society have fallen into two errors: that ofneglecting the limited capabilities of those occupyingpositions of national authority; and that of consideringcitizens to be “more than kings and less than men”(Tocqueville [1835] 1945, 2:231), so that they are pre-sumed to be competent to select their national rulers, but

incompetent to govern their own local affairs. The“federal form” of the national government is nosubstitute for a federal system of governance. (129)

The ongoing intellectual crisis in philanthropy is thus partand parcel of the intellectual crisis of public administrationdiagnosed so well by Ostrom as an invitation to Leviathans.But there is still time to correct course by developing deeperunderstandings of the role of philanthropy in a free society andensuring that our theory better aligns with our practice. Thealternative is to drift further along toward soft despotism, oreven harder forms of serfdom.

A Philanthropic Education for Federalism?

What are we to make then of the philanthropic visions of folkssuch as Laura and John Arnold, Bill and Melinda Gates, andother “philanthrocapitalists” who believe their business acu-men can be readily applied to solving social problems, or evenmore chillingly, to transforming society through the applica-tion of vast quantities of money to actuating their own modelsof social change?

To the extent that data might help us understand what sortof philanthropic solutions work, the desire of donors such asthe Arnolds to bring data analysis to their philanthropy islaudable. But we are left nevertheless with the troublingquestion of whether successful solutions in one context aretransferrable to other places and other times. The question ofthe warrantability of philanthropic experiments brings us backto the problems of epistemic choice. How do we know whenwe can leave the realm of experimental action for the modernphilanthropists’ holy grail of scale?

As David Bosworth (2011) recently observed, the“quantiphilia” of much of modern philanthropy, inclines phi-lanthropists and those who serve them to a form of hubris thatis unwarranted and outright dangerous in a free society.Bosworth writes:

Market-based capitalism can be enormously creative inthe material sense, but it is a categorical error to pre-sume, as quantiphilia does, that the techniques forboosting productivity in the corporate world can besuccessfully transferred to the public arena. Humanbeings are not ‘upgradeable’ machines; standardizedtests can only measure a very narrow slice of intellectualachievement; workers in public education and publichealth bring a different ratio of motivations to their jobsthan those in the private sector… (386–7).

The cautionary tale here is not one that diminishes thepursuit of data and knowledge through research, but one thatenjoins humility about how such knowledge can be most

Soc

Author's personal copy

wisely brought to bear within a society. Despite the pretense atits basis in professional and scientific expertise, the rush topush universal adoption of the Common Core and its affili-ated testing regime belies the persistence across the adminis-trative classes (whether anchored in business, government, orphilanthropy) of the Progressive technocrat’s vision of socialcontrol qua social change. There is little vision here of asociety comprised of thinking and acting people utilizingknowledge-coordinating institutions such as schools andmarkets, and democratic institutions at their deliberativebest, to attain patterns of social and economic flourishingunprecedented in human history.

Copyrighted educational standards that will suffer onlymarginal changes by local and state school boards, which ishow the Common Core is presently structured, are a far cryfrom the educational principles of the American founders,who widely enjoined both the discovery and diffusion ofknowledge as necessary for freedom.

Benjamin Franklin, arguably the model philanthropist forAmerica’s federal republic, ardently believed in the support ofeducation through both public and private means:

The good Education of Youth has been esteemed by wiseMen in all Ages, as the surest Foundation of the Happi-ness both of private Families and of Commonwealths.Almost all Governments have therefore made it a princi-pal Object of their Attention, to establish and endowwithproper Revenues, such Seminaries of Learning, as mightsupply the succeeding Age with Men qualified to servethe Publick with Honour to themselves, and to theirCountry (“Proposals Relating to the Education of Youthin Pensilvania”, 1749).

Nevertheless, Franklin’s vision of learning centered uponthe enlightenment Republic of Letters rather than onmandatedcurriculum or compulsory schooling. The Founders did notexpect all students to become scholars, but sought to make theopportunities of education widely available to those studentswho would take up the quest for education as a means ofpersonal and patriotic advancement.

Proponents of the Common Core believe that they areensuring that more American students will have access tothe knowledge they need to be “college or career ready.” Butdespite the explosion of funding for public education in thepast century and an unprecedented democratic access of stu-dents to public schools, we seem to be no happier with studentachievement. Perhaps we would be better off using our researchdollars to better understand why students are not alreadyattaining proficiency in the knowledge available to them thanin rushing through one more costly attempt at “reform.” Betteryet, we might spend some time looking at the knowledge thatthey are acquiring and imagining what the world might looklike when such knowledge is all that remains to inform theconstitutional choices of future generations.

At a different epistemic level, by centralizing educationstandards and seeking more uniformity and quantitative legi-bility about student and school performance, the CommonCore is more likely to disrupt rather than enhance the dynamicprocesses by which knowledge advances. The integral align-ment of scientific discovery and political freedom andpolycentricity has been clearly defended by Michael Polanyi(1946/1964):

Whether a free nation endures, and in what form itsurvives, must ultimately rest with the outcome of indi-vidual decisions made in as much faith and insight asmay be everyone’s share. Any power authorized tooverrule these decisions would of necessity destroyfreedom. We must have sovereignty atomized amongindividuals who are severally rooted in a commonground of transcendent obligations; otherwise sover-eignty cannot fail to be embodied in a secular powerruling absolutely over all individuals (72).

It is often said that form follows function, and if schools arenot merely to transmit static knowledge but are to cultivatenew generations of citizens who can participate freely andconscientiously in perpetuating a self-governing society,schools themselves should make possible participation in theforms and substance of both self-governance and intellectualdiscovery. This necessitates, of course, that participants cometo know the state of current knowledge and to appreciate howwe got there. Lest we dispense with things needed, the “gram-mars” of each academic discipline and a cultivated historicalunderstanding will wisely precede the cultivation of tools andtechniques of discovery. At least in this, the quest to acquaintstudents with a common core of knowledge is sound, but themeans by which the Common Core reformers would enforcesuch learning contradicts the ends of learning.

In considering the role of education, we must take accountof the progress of knowledge itself and our advancing under-standing of the mechanisms of the creation, diffusion, andvalidation of knowledge. We understand today through thework of social theorists such as Ludwig vonMises, F. A. Hayek,Michael Polanyi, Michael Oakeshott, Dierdre McCloskey, andothers that themethods of scientific rationality are not applicableto the management of social problems in which human personsare actors. The insights of such writings as Hayek’s seminalessay, “Individualism, True and False,” should be brought tobear on our present understandings and policies in regard toeducation. Hayek observed the problems with the expandingbureaucratization of social life:

If it is true that the progressive tendency toward centralcontrol of all social processes is the inevitable result ofan approach which insists that everything must be tidilyplanned and made to show a recognizable order, it is

Soc

Author's personal copy

also true that this tendency tends to create conditions inwhich nothing but an all-powerful central governmentcan preserve order and stability. The concentration ofall decisions in the hands of authority itself produces astate of affairs in which what structure society stillpossesses is imposed upon it by government and inwhich the individuals have become interchangeableunits with no other definite or durable relations to oneanother than those determined by the all-comprehensiveorganization (27).1

Supporters of the Common Core celebrate the rapid adop-tion of the standards by 45 states as testimony to the merit ofthe standards. Hayek, invoking the insights of Lord Acton,offers us an antidote to this sort of “we’re all in this together”boosterism: “while individualism affirms that all govern-ments should be democratic, it has no superstitious beliefin the omnicompetence of majority decisions, and in par-ticular it refuses to admit that ‘absolute power may, by thehypothesis of popular origin, be as legitimate as constitu-tional freedom.’” (29)

Likewise, we should hold no superstitious belief in theomnicompetence of donor intent. The vision of donors andthe impact of their philanthropy should be subject, like all newknowledge, to contestation and empirical warrantability in theopen public realm. Philanthropy increasingly operates as aculture of reform, with associated goals of social justice,theories of social change, and increasing impatience for scal-ing up positive results to national policy prescriptions. Anenvironment inviting contestation and warrantability, by con-trast, would require philanthropy to shrug off the impetus toreform and reinvent itself as a culture of inquiry with moremodest goals of discovering how time, talent and treasurework best to ameliorate suffering, advance the frontiers ofknowledge, and foster human flourishing and freedom.

We must defend philanthropic freedom, in the sense ofprotecting property rights and the enforceability of contracts.Nevertheless, we should encourage donors to be humble abouttheir intent, to refrain from shortcutting public deliberation,and to refuse to manipulate public policy and political out-comes, especially in favor of centralizing administrative pow-er. If the philanthropic enterprise is to help restore the robust-ness of civil society, there will be errors, for error is one of the

feedback loops for learning. But it will be less costly forfailures in small experiments than in broad scale nationalreforms. The use of philanthropy to create and sustainmono-centric policy regimes contradicts federalism and dis-rupts the entrepreneurial experimentation that is a crucial tolearning and discovery.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb cautions, there are black swansafloat in the currents of history, and life itself is volatility. Inreflecting on the nature of learning, Taleb (2012) reminds usthat structured, standardized learning—in other words, thateducation that bureaucrats can manage—can generate fragil-ity. Taleb observes that antifragility requires rigor, but alsoneeds “randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that makelife worth living” (242).

In the end, philanthropy and education that seek to managethe processes of living and of intellectual discovery in alliancewith the regulatory power of centralized administrative re-gimes treat the human intellect as instrumental rather than asa sacred property of persons who are themselves ever in theprocess of moral and intellectual development. A philanthro-py that would best serve human moral and intellectualdevelopment by advancing the discovery and diffusion ofknowledge cannot compromise the principles of freedomon which it depends. Such a philanthropy will supportresearch and widely share its discoveries, it will be hum-ble about its own visions of change, and it will becautious of its powers to transform society in its ownimage. Can philanthropy emerge from its century-longintellectual crisis? It depends upon the epistemic and consti-tutional choices we begin to make.

Further Reading

Bosworth, D. 2011. The Cultural Contradictions of Philanthrocapitalism.Society, 48, 382–388.

Cornuelle, R. 1965. Reclaiming the American Dream: The Role ofPrivate Individuals and Voluntary Associations . New Brunswick,New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.

Cornuelle, R. 1983. Healing America. New York: Putnam.Dewey, J. 1935/2000. Liberalism and Social Action . New York:

Prometheus Books.Ealy, L. T., & Ealy, S. D. 2006. Progressivism and Philanthropy. The

Good Society, 15, 35–42.Greve, M. S. 2012. The Upside-Down Constitution . Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.Nisbet, R. 1975. Twilight of Authority. New York: Oxford University

Press.Ostrom, V. 2008/1973. The Intellectual Crisis in American Public

Administration , 3rd ed. With Barbara Allen. Tuscaloosa: TheUniversity of Alabama Press.

Ostrom, V. 1991. The Meaning of American Federalism: Constituting aSelf-Governing Society. San Francisco: Institute for ContemporaryStudies.

1 Unfortunately, Hayek’s analysis tended to posit dualisms—the State andthe Market, the tribal order and the extended order, community andcommerce—that have not helped us explain domains of human actionsuch as philanthropy and education very well. Ostrom’s insights take usfarther toward a helpful analytical framework that depicts howdecentralized and overlapping jurisdictions can generate alignment withthe rule of law at multiple levels as well as workable patterns of order inwhich both constitutional and collective choices can be expressed bycitizens most involved in the production and use of goods such aseducation, which are mostly private but possess positive externalities thatmake our communities better places to live.

Soc

Author's personal copy

Ostrom, V. 1997. The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability ofDemocracies: A Response to Tocqueville’s Challenge . Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press.

Polanyi, M. 1946/1964. Science, Faith and Society. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press.

Reagan, B. 2013. The New Science of Giving.Wall Street Journal.Money,May 17, 2013.

Schambra, W. A. 2005. The Problem of Philanthropy for Civic Renewal .Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement. Accessed online June18, 2013 at http://www.pacefunders.org/pdf/essays/Schambra%20FINAL.pdf.

Taleb, N. N. 2012. Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder. NewYork: Random House.

Lenore T. Ealy is president of The Philanthropic Enterprise, a researchinstitute that promotes understanding of how voluntary social cooperationand philanthropic institutions best promote human flourishing. She is alsofounding editor of Conversations on Philanthropy: Emerging Questionsin Liberality and Social Thought. Ealy consults with donors, socialentrepreneurs, and policymakers to help align programs and policies withthe essential principles of self-governance in a free society.

Soc

Author's personal copy