In 1961, Charles and Marie Robertson anonymously gave Princeton University $35 million to create programs at its Woodrow Wilson School for Public Policy and International Affairs that would “strengthen the Read more…
During the 1960s (and after), many liberal reformers became convinced that the best way to improve social outcomes in areas like schooling, crime and safety, employment, and family structure was Read more…
Even the quintessential government responsibility of national defense turns out to have elements where private giving can solve needs more effectively than state action. Retired general and successful businessman George Read more…
In 1955 the Ford Foundation announced an extraordinary “special appropriation” of $560 million—the equivalent of more than $5 billion in 2015—the largest single investment in the history of philanthropy—to strengthen Read more…
In mid-twentieth-century America, business was already a popular college major, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Even with one out of seven students on campus specializing in some form Read more…
New U.S. responsibilities on the global stage after World War II brought needs for expertise in many exotic regions. To fill knowledge gaps that were handicapping policymakers, business executives, and Read more…
Harry Earhart expanded the White Star Oil Company into a large enterprise during the automobile revolution, then established the Earhart and Relm foundations. In 1949, the Earhart Foundation focused on Read more…
Originally formed to establish a reliable flow of donations to America’s historically black colleges and universities, the United Negro College Fund later took on the added mission of distributing individual Read more…
The seminal research and theory explaining the development of young children was formulated by a British psychiatrist named John Bowlby, whose career was built largely on American philanthropy. In the Read more…
Though his success in business took him far beyond the borders of his native state, James Duke never truly left North Carolina. The longtime owner of Southern Power, and American Read more…
Two decades after his father founded the General Education Board (see 1902 entry), John Rockefeller Jr. set out to expand the reach of the family’s education philanthropy. Having been involved Read more…
Just before the turn of the millennium, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation put into operation a major college scholarship program for minority students, with an initial grant of a Read more…
Character education has been a centerpiece of the training provided by America’s military academies right from their foundings. The honor codes and leadership lessons expounded at West Point, Annapolis, and Read more…
The first BASIS school was opened in 1998 with the intention of creating an open-admission public school that could produce results as good as the world’s top-scoring schools in places Read more…
Ted Forstmann and John Walton were two of the country’s most successful businessmen, but they’d never met until they donated $6 million to the Washington Scholarship Fund. That fund was Read more…
In the late 1990s, some Silicon Valley investors impressed by the ability of imaginative entrepreneurs to solve knotty problems in technology decided to see if they could apply some of Read more…
Raised in an orphanage run by nuns, Tom Monaghan had a deep appreciation for Catholic education. After the 1997 sale of his stake in Domino’s Pizza, the firm he founded Read more…
In 1986, a public-school teacher in upstate New York created a special high-school curriculum to encourage more of his students to study engineering. Within a few years he was not Read more…
The Charter Schools Development Corporation was founded in 1997 as a philanthropically funded nonprofit with a sole focus on addressing one of the most pressing obstacles to charter-school creation today: Read more…
Franklin Olin didn’t finish school, but he was mechanically gifted and sufficiently studious that at age 22 he passed the entrance exam for Cornell University, where he studied engineering. He Read more…