Posted on 12/28/2005 10:19:28 AM PST by neverdem
How John Olin and William Simon helped create the conservative counterintelligentsia.
Recent reports of gloominess besetting conservatives may be exaggerated, but there is one real reason for them to shed a tear: Last month, the trustees of the John M. Olin Foundation met to approve its final grants. After a half-century of operation, the foundation is closing up shop, following the wishes of its founder, who deliberately limited the organization's lifespan to prevent its one day falling into the hands of directors who were foes of his ideas. (Mr. Olin took comfort in the wisdom of this policy after Henry Ford II's angry resignation from the Ford Foundation in 1977 over its antipathy to capitalism.) Conservatives will thus lose one of their great sponsors and encouragers, a foundation that--with its support of writers, intellectuals and magazines--has had a profound effect on the dissemination of right-of-center ideas. Those ideas now inform much of the national conversation, but they struggled to be heard back in the 1970s, when the foundation got going in earnest.
Under the direction of William E. Simon, a former Treasury secretary and a Wall Street financier, the charitable organization funded by industrialist John Olin embarked on a remarkable campaign. Its aim was to roll back what Mr. Olin saw as an alarming national trend toward the sort of values, "terribly devoid of soundness," that had undermined his alma mater, Cornell University, during the heyday of student radicalism.
The campaign to nurture a "counterintelligentsia," as Mr. Simon called it, was a resounding success. Olin dollars helped fortify research institutions (including the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation), got the Federalist Society off the ground, promoted the teaching of law and economics, and funded valuable publications (including the New Criterion, the National Interest, Commentary and an array of conservative college...)
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
It looks like we need some new conservative foundation money. I'd guess that the ratio of liberal to conservative foundation grants is about 97-3.
So what does one do to get this grant money?
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