The Generosity of America – P1/3
Adam Meyerson has been president of The Philanthropy Roundtable. He also served as vice president for educational affairs at the Heritage Foundation from 1993 to 2001. The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Washington D.C. in the “First Principles on First Fridays” lecture series sponsored by Hillsdale College on January 8, 2010. Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in three parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”
The following is the first part of Adam Meyerson’s speech:
In 1853, a professor and preacher named Ransom Dunn set off on a two-year journey to raise funds for Hillsdale College, a young institution of higher learning in southern Michigan. Ransom Dunn would ride on horseback for 6,000 miles through the farm communities of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and altogether he raised $22,000—the equivalent of about $500,000 today. The rural families then populating the upper Midwest were not rich. They were braving the winters and struggling to make a living on what was then the American frontier. But these families were willing to part voluntarily with $10, $50, $100 apiece—the highest contribution was $200—to support Hillsdale’s mission—a mission set forth in the College’s Articles of Association, whose authors proclaimed themselves “grateful to God for the inestimable blessings resulting from the prevalence of civil and religious liberty and intelligent piety in the land, and believing that the diffusion of sound learning is essential to the perpetuity of these blessings.”
We can learn several lessons from the horseback rides of Ransom Dunn. To begin with, charitable giving in America has never been the exclusive province of wealthy people. Throughout our history, Americans from all walks of life have given generously for charitable causes. Indeed, the most generous Americans today—the group that gives the most to charity as a proportion of their income—are the working poor.
Second, unlike many of those seeking donations in the charity world today, Ransom Dunn did not raise funds for Hillsdale by appealing to donors’ guilt, or by urging them to “give back” to society. Instead, he appealed to their ideals and aspirations, their religious principles, and their desire to create an institution of learning in the upper Midwest. Hillsdale was also an important center of anti-slavery teaching, and Dunn appealed to the convictions of people who sought an end to this great evil in our nation.
Third, the tradition of private generosity in America has always been central to our free society. Voluntary donations from the farm families of the Midwest made it possible for Hillsdale to be independent, which in turn gave Hillsdale the freedom to challenge prevailing cultural and political wisdom. Following another private institution, Oberlin, Hillsdale was the second American college to grant four-year liberal-arts degrees to women. Founded at a time when Michigan public schools were officially segregated by race, Hillsdale was also the first American college to prohibit in its charter any discrimination on the basis of race, religion or sex. Without the independence that comes from private support, Hillsdale would not have been able to provide this leadership.
The creation of Hillsdale College was similarly part of a larger philanthropic movement to create an educated citizenry, with the character and the knowledge to govern themselves as a free people. In his book The Americans, the late Daniel Boorstin, former Librarian of Congress, wrote about the great age of college creation in the 19th century. Every town in our decentralized republic wanted its own college, both to promote economic opportunity and to encourage citizen leadership. Boorstin cites an amazing statistic: in 1880, the state of Ohio, with three million inhabitants, had 37 colleges; by contrast, England, with 23 million people, had four degree-granting institutions. It was philanthropy that enabled colleges across America to grow and flourish.
This tradition of private support for education has continued in the 20th and 21st centuries, even as government has assumed a much greater funding role through federal student loans and scholarships, scientific research grants, and state appropriations. The growth of the modern research university received an enormous boost from philanthropists such as Johns Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and James Buchanan Duke. Private support has continued to sustain Hillsdale’s independence by enabling it to forego state and federal government support altogether. Charitable giving has also helped to create entire new fields of academic study. We owe the field of law and economics to the John M. Olin Foundation. And the Whitaker Foundation launched the field of biomedical engineering, which has been so important in providing new limbs for the wounded veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Today, Americans voluntarily give over $30 billion a year to support higher education, and—thanks in part to philanthropy—America has the best colleges and universities in the world. Even our great flagship state universities depend on private contributions for much of their excellence. The University of Virginia, for instance, receives more revenue from private gifts and endowment income than it does from Virginia state appropriations. And in a time of state budget cuts and the stifling impulse toward sameness that results from bureaucratic rules, public universities across the country rely on private contributions for many of their unique attributes and distinctive achievements.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
