How Foundations Work: What Grantseekers Need to Know About the Many Faces of Foundations

Chapter One

Foundations at the Crossroads

There can be no doubt either, among those familiar with the facts, that the wholesale college giving and the consequent wholesale college begging of the last twenty years have gone far to transform the American college president into a soliciting agent…. Today the typical board of trustees is not seeking a scholarly president; it is seeking a president who can get money…. Many a college president spends his best years in the hopeless endeavor to grasp… a reward that has been dangled before his eyes, with the kindest intentions, by one of the endowed foundations.

HENRY S. PRITCHETT, ANNUAL REPORT OF THE CARNEGIE CORPORATION (1922, pp. 17–18)

As foundations approach the end of the Twentieth Century, ...