Reply to Hall

Abstract

I am very grateful to Peter Hall for his characteristically learned and helpful contribution. I confess that I was appalled when I first started to read it, because no decent person likes to be exposed as a megalomaniac. But so be it. My piece was published as a Commentary, and it was intended to be just that—its origin, after all, was an informal speech to a group of philanthropy scholars. It was intended to be a brief, informal, and personal reflection of the attempt to develop a modern field of philanthropic studies, no more. However, I do not disagree at all with the much fuller and broader account that Peter gives. To be fair, the luncheon question that Humphrey Doermann asked me was not whether there was a literature on philanthropy, but whether there was a scholarly literature on philanthropic foundations. I would have given Humphrey a different answer if he had asked Peter’s question. Of course, I am familiar with much, but certainly not all, of the literature that Peter mentions. Having been a colleague of Merle Curti and Bill Taylor’s at Wisconsin (and having worked with their students mentioned by Peter), I was well aware of the Princeton Conference and the Curti project. Peter is, of course, correct when he points out the role of John D. Rockefeller in the creation of Independent Sector. I was thinking of what John Gardner did for and with the organization after Mr. Rockefeller’s death. I am, however, particularly intrigued by Peter’s comment in Note 13 that I was “jockeying for the commission’s research portfolio.” This is news to me, and I am at a loss as to what I was jockeying for. I am also confused by the statement that I was an active member of the Council on Foundation/Foundation Center Joint Committee on Philanthropy. I have no memory of such an organization, although I certainly do remember attending a few meetings in New York with Tony Cline (then president of the Russell Sage Foundation) and a number of other people interested in philanthropic research during what I would have thought to be early in the mid-1970s. Perhaps this group was sponsored by the Council on Foundation and the Foundation Center. I learned a lot at these