Feminist College Funders and the Problem of Donor Intent

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | February 26, 2021 | Martin Wooster

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Suppose you’re a donor interested in steering a college in a more sensible direction with your grants. Many questions will arise with the restrictions you put on your aid. Can you give money to a college and have any sort of say in what professors teach—or are you restricting academic freedom with your donations? Do you have any say in who is hired with your donations—or who is fired?

Those are questions donors wishing colleges to teach courses that promote market-oriented ideas or traditional culture have to address. But what Joan Marie Johnson shows in Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy and the Women’s Movement, 1870-1967 is that women giving money to colleges and universities in the early years of the 20th century faced exactly the same questions.

She shows that the efforts of these donors, when successful, were a triumph for donor intent. Those who insisted on tight restrictions on the use of their money got the results they wanted, while those who failed to do so were disappointed.

Johnson, who works in the provost’s office of Northwestern University, cannot resist showing her contemporary “wokeness.” She dutifully denounces the donors she covers, describing them as “affluent white women who, despite their class and race privilege, still experienced sexism.” By our standards, those donors were rich, but not particularly privileged, since married women at the time had no say in how their wealth could be spent; husbands completely controlled household finances.

All of the women Johnson writes about were either single, widowed, or, in the case of Katharine Dexter McCormick, had a husband who, for most of their marriage, was in a mental hospital suffering from schizophrenia. The gratuitous “privilege” swipe isn’t merited.

Johnson is on sounder ground when she says that these white donors cared little about Blacks.

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Those who insisted on tight restrictions on the use of their money got the results they wanted, while those who failed to do so were disappointed

Case in point, Arnold Schwarzenegger gave USC $20 Million Dollars to build he Schwarzenegger School of Cultural Marxism and demanded that his donation only be used to Hire Marxist and Communist Teachers. USC has held up their end of the Bargain and Arnold is still a Marxist