Ford's grantees, many of whom are dependent on the foundation's largesse, were hardly in a position to contest the new grant language. But a handful of grantees did resist--beginning with the nation's top universities. On April 27, 2004, Ford received a letter signed by nine university provosts, from Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Yale and Cornell. These are some of Ford's most distinguished grantees, with whom it has a lengthy history. In 1965, for instance, Harvard established its John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics with a $2 million Ford grant.

In their letter, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the provosts expressed their "serious concerns" about the new language, on the grounds that it attempts to "regulate universities' behavior and speech beyond the scope of the grant." "It is difficult to see," they wrote, "how this clause would not run up against the basic principle of protected speech on our campuses." For instance, if Columbia University, a major Ford grantee, were to sponsor a Palestinian film festival--as it did in 2003--all of Columbia's Ford grants could theoretically be jeopardized if a film in that series was deemed to be supportive of "violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state." Pro-Israel critics at Columbia assailed the film festival on those very grounds.

In mid-2004 Ford responded to the provosts with a "side letter" affirming that the foundation had no desire to interfere with the speech "in classrooms, faculty publications, student remarks in chat rooms, or other speech that express the views of the individuals." The grant letter, Ford insisted, applies only "to the official speech and conduct of the university and to speech or conduct that the university explicitly endorses." The unity of the nine universities collapsed when Harvard accepted Ford's side letter in the summer of 2004. (Harvard's provost, Steven Hyman, and its president, Lawrence Summers, declined to be interviewed.) Some people close to the negotiations between Ford and the provosts are convinced that if the nine elite universities had maintained their unity, they might, in the end, have pressured Ford to change the language. (In their letter, the provosts had offered a proposed revision that Ford found unacceptable.)

If Harvard was particularly eager to settle with Ford, Stanford held out the longest before reluctantly accepting the side letter in late 2004. But the issue remains somewhat controversial at Stanford. At a meeting of its academic council on January 20, 2005, Provost John Etchemendy informed the faculty about Ford's "official speech...of the university" clause and declared, "Unfortunately they would not clarify exactly what that meant." Etchemendy warned the faculty that Stanford's administration could not protect their Ford grants. Today, Stanford administrators are quick to acknowledge that they are still concerned about the lack of clarity in the side letter and still unclear about the limits of the "official speech" clause. Does it cover the speech of professors? Does it cover Stanford University Press (which has a distinguished list in Middle East Studies)? Does it cover the Stanford alumni magazine? Says vice provost Stephanie Kalfayan: "Those are great questions. You should ask Ford." Susan Berresford says, "This is something we worked out with the universities. The side letters are clear. I don't see the value of going further into this."

In 2004 one other Ford grantee, the Drug Policy Alliance, joined the elite universities in contesting Ford's grant language. DPA is led by Ethan Nadelmann, executive director, and the tenacious Ira Glasser, DPA's president and the former head of the ACLU. On June 18, 2004, Nadelmann and Glasser dispatched a blunt letter to Berresford: "We believe that on its face, the overbreadth and vagueness of your language sweeps within its ban speech and advocacy that are critical to our work." They went on, as the provosts did, to request a minor revision in Ford's grant language: "a simple, supplementary sentence making clear that the ban...does not extend to advocacy or speech, but only to lawless, violent or discriminatory conduct." [Emphasis in original.] And they warned Berresford that an ominous precedent was being established:

The infamous blacklists of the 1950s were similarly imposed by the private sector (in response, as here, to pressure from government officials) and similarly implemented their restrictions through economic, not criminal, sanctions.... Today, everyone wonders how those blacklists got started, how they became so entrenched, why so few (except the victims) protested. This is how it begins: with restrictions on speech and advocacy that would be unconstitutional if the state imposed them, imposed instead by private sector funding, with the government lurking in the background.

In the end Ford and DPA could not agree, and in late 2004 DPA returned a $200,000 grant to the Ford Foundation. "Some of DPA's supporters have told me that we should just take the money, regardless of the way the grant letter is worded," Nadelmann wrote in a 2004 letter to his membership. "But this is a fight about fundamental principles from which we could not walk away."

In late June 2004 DPA's letters to Berresford were released to the ACLU national board, several of whose members had, six weeks earlier, scrutinized the Wall Street Journal article about Ford's conflict with the elite universities and wondered why an ACLU spokesman quoted therein neglected to criticize Ford's restrictions. Two gadflies on the ACLU board, Wendy Kaminer and Michael Meyers, immediately questioned executive director Anthony Romero's decision in early 2004 to accept a grant from Ford, which had been a generous benefactor: Between 1999 and 2004, the ACLU Foundation received $17 million from Ford. Romero, who spent ten years as a high-ranking Ford executive, was soon forced to admit to his board that not only had he advised Ford on the new language but that he had urged the foundation to "just parrot back language in existing federal law"--i.e., the Patriot Act, which the ACLU was then contesting with considerable vigor. In October 2004 the ACLU refused several Ford grants, which totaled more than $1 million.

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