Target Ford (Page 6)

It's too early to determine how the events of 2003 have influenced Ford's overall grant-making, and the possible extent to which program officers and trustees are distancing themselves from grantees that undertake controversial and politically risky work. What seems clear is that Ford has turned its attention to anti-Semitism, as it promised Nadler it would. And the foundation has done it in part by funding some of its chief antagonists from 2003. In 2004 Ford gave $361,000 to Abraham Foxman's Anti-Defamation League for its World of Difference Institute, whose mission is to "combat racism, anti-Semitism and all forms of prejudice and bigotry," followed by an additional $1.1 million in 2006 for the same project. (ADL's last Ford grant was in 1967, and Foxman declined to be interviewed.) The American Jewish Committee received $400,000 in 2006, its first grant since 1998. David Harris, head of the AJC, did not return phone calls. In 2004 Ford also gave $625,000 to the Simon Wiesenthal Center--which chaired the delegation of Jewish organizations at Durban--to develop a tolerance and diversity training program for New York's criminal justice community, the first grant the Wiesenthal Center has received from Ford.

ADL still has Ford under a microscope, and has heavily criticized recent actions by the foundation, including its decision to fund a conference on academic boycotts sponsored by the American Association of University Professors in Bellagio, Italy. The conference was eventually canceled.

"Large foundations," Dwight Macdonald observed in 1956, "are timid beasts." To compare Berresford's response to the crisis of 2003 with McGeorge Bundy's response to the events of 1969, when he was dragged before Congress, is to realize that Macdonald's quip is largely but not completely accurate. In The Color of Truth, his fine biography of McGeorge and William Bundy, Kai Bird noted that in response to the political assault from conservative critics in 1969, Bundy "essentially refused to back off." Under his direction, Ford defiantly stepped up its funding of a wide range of antipoverty and social justice groups. In his last annual report as president, in 1978, Bundy urged his colleagues at Ford not to "shy away from controversial activity."

By instituting the new grant language in 2004, Berresford undoubtedly believed that she was acting in the best interests of both Ford and the foundation sector. Emmett Carson of the Minneapolis Foundation says that Ford may have seen the grant language as "a compromise they could live with." Carson adds: "In hindsight, ten or twenty years from now, we may be prepared to say it was a very shrewd decision, a very modest compromise, at a time when the field lacked the voice, lacked the courage, lacked the sophistication to have the level of debate that was necessary."

The historical evidence is beginning to accumulate, and not in a way that honors Ford. In one of their letters to Berresford, Nadelmann and Glasser wrote, "On the day the government decides to use your restriction as a precedent and model for its own, it will be too late to say you're sorry. Do not do this, Susan." That day arrived on February 7, 2005, when the Justice Department approvingly (and repeatedly) cited Ford's new grant language--along with the grant language of the Rockefeller and Charles Stewart Mott foundations--in its motion to dismiss in American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, et al. v. Office of Personnel Management, et al.

In 2004 the ACLU and a dozen other organizations sued the OPM, a government agency, to prevent it from forcing nonprofits to certify that they do "not knowingly employ individuals or contribute funds to organizations" on terrorist watch lists before receiving any of the $250 million donated annually through the Combined Federal Campaign, which allows federal employees to allocate funds to various charities and nonprofits. Berresford's response to the Justice Department's citation of Ford? "The government finds its own language to express its own standards and views," she says, "and they're free to do that in whatever way they see fit." Wendy Kaminer of the ACLU laments the fact that "the Bush Administration has invoked Ford's restrictions as a model for its own restrictions on US charities."

In recent months, however, the Rockefeller Foundation has distanced itself from Ford. Rockefeller has changed its grant language for 2006 in a way that satisfies groups like the ACLU and in a way that is consistent with what the elite universities requested of Ford in 2004. Indeed, Rockefeller's president, Judith Rodin, was the president of the University of Pennsylvania in 2004 when that institution challenged Ford. Susan Berresford insists she has no plans to alter Ford's grant language. "Ford," says Anthony Romero of the ACLU, "really stands alone at this point."

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