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	Who Receives   Total grants from the foundations above, and examples of funded programs, in the area: Harvard University $9,219,333 Conservative foundations: $2,057,554 Program on Constitutional Government, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Liberal foundations: $7,161,779 Edward S. Mason Program in Public Policy and Management Civil Rights Project Pluralism Project Boston University $1,692,592 Conservative foundations: $409,592 Institute for the Study of Economic Culture, Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology and Policy Liberal foundations: $1,283,000 School of Medicine’s Healing Landscape Project Tufts University $1,336,877 Conservative foundations: $616,877 Liberal foundations: $720,000 Boston Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights Boston College $911,464 Conservative foundations: $351,464 Liberal foundations: $560,000 Center for Corporate Citizenship Massachusetts Institute of Technology $884,620 Conservative foundations: $193,120 Liberal foundations: $691,500 Network on Inequality and Economic Performance University of Massachusetts $548,388 Conservative foundations: $0 Liberal foundations: $548,388 New England Center for Inclusive Teaching Smith College $509,500 Conservative foundations: $112,500 Liberal foundations: $397,400 Brown University $477,767 Conservative foundations: $232,370 Liberal foundations: $245,397 Brandeis $194,977 Conservative foundations: $49,977 Liberal foundations: $145,000 Wheaton College $175,000 Conservative foundations: $175,000 Liberal foundations: $0 Related Links The Foundation Center This organization, supported by philanthropies, tracks the activities of more than 1000 foundations. It also produces reports, available on its Web site, about trends in foundation activity. Media Transparency This site tracks "the money behind conservative media," but its data also includes plenty of useful information about conservative funding of educational institutions. Lots of commentary and articles as well. Discover the Network For right-wingers, this is David Horowitz's overview of the vast left-wing conspiracy. Guide Star This site tracks data on nonprofit organizations, and is an outstanding resource for researching the raw numbers.

NO TRAIL, NO TRANSPARENCY

"I can say, anecdotally, that particularly among younger donors, they want more control over how their dollars are spent," says Steven Lawrence, The Foundation Center’s director of research. "Instead of just funding institutions, donors are reflecting their interests."

And increasingly, those interests are political. "Public affairs/society benefit" has seen the fastest increase in grant dollars from foundations, jumping from $63.9 million in 1997 to $193.3 million in 2001.

That has led to considerable internal debate among university administrators and faculty over how much control to give up versus the value of the donation, says Lawrence.

But you won’t hear that debate, or its results, aired in public. Colleges are loath to make public the terms of a donation, or even the fact of it. Local colleges and universities contacted by the Phoenix, including Harvard, Tufts, Brandeis, Boston College, and Boston University, were unwilling or unable to provide a list of private foundations that currently provide grant money to them, let alone the conditions attached.

Some funders, notably the conservative John M. Olin Foundation, attach their names boldly to much of what they fund — you can find the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business at Harvard, and take classes with David Gress, the John M. Olin professor in the history of civilizations at Boston University.

But most keep it quiet. That’s often to keep the research independent and uncorrupted, says Pamela Thompson, vice-president for communications for the John Templeton Foundation in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, which funds research on how religious belief improves character, values, and civic life, including nine current projects at Harvard, Wellesley, Tufts, and Lesley in Massachusetts. Too much publicity about the projects could corrupt participating subjects, Thompson explains.

Fair enough, in some cases. But in most cases, the discretion more likely comes from a desire to maintain the appearance of objectivity. Why, other than the perceived gravitas of the college name, did the Scaife Foundation fund Rothman’s center at Smith, rather than having the research done at one of the many right-wing think tanks funded by the same group: American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Hudson Institute, and Media Research Center to name a few?

And the schools certainly wouldn’t benefit by publicizing potentially biasing sources of funding. The new research on "the economics of environmental regulation and policy" at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute might be taken more seriously if people don’t know that it is being funded with a $25,000 grant from the eco-friendly Bauman Foundation, which is on a "political left" hit list maintained by conservative watchdog David Horowitz.

Colleges and universities also don’t want controversy like that which embroiled the University of North Carolina earlier this year, when dozens of faculty members protested plans for a major grant for Western-civilization studies from the right-wing John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

So, most schools keep quiet about their sources of funding, whether it be the $50 million grant from the progressive Ford Foundation to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government a few years ago, or the $29 million in recently approved future grants from the conservative Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation to Wellesley College.

It’s hard to say how much sources of funding affect scholarship. But the fact is that if Rothman, at Smith, issued a report that ran contrary to the known ideological viewpoint of his funders, they could simply turn down his application next year and his center would be out of business. That can’t be good for the objectivity of his scholarship.

NO ROOM IN THE MIDDLE

Technically, all of these foundations are apolitical — as nonprofit charitable institutions, they are forbidden from direct political engagement. Many of them fund projects of many kinds, including plenty that are clearly agenda-free. And of course, bias is often in the eye of the beholder; a research topic that sounds neutral to a liberal might strike a conservative as blatantly political, and vice versa. In fact, when attention is drawn to "biased" funding, it often comes from those pushing their own biases — such as those at Hamilton College who raised a stink this year over the funding sources that brought controversial University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill to their upstate New York campus.

But don’t you want to know who is paying for your prof?

If you are a Boston College student and have attended any of the public lectures presented by BC’s Institute for the Study of Politics and Religion, did you know that those words you heard were paid for by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, one of the handful of conservative powerhouses at the heart of what some call the "vast right-wing conspiracy"? In the early 1990s, the Bradley Foundation spent more than a half-million dollars paying the American Spectator Educational Foundation to chase the Bill Clinton/Paula Jones story. (And another $12,000 to David Brock to write his book pillorying Anita Hill; Brock was also a "John M. Olin Fellow in Congressional Studies" before renouncing the right wing.) The conservative Richard Lounsbery Foundation, which regularly funds, for instance, an institute run by global-warming denier S. Fred Singer, gave Tufts $42,800 in 2002 to fund a conference on finding "A New Start in Undergraduate Education."

In addition to $3 million for a new parking garage, the money coming to Wellesley from the Davis Foundation will pay for scholarships, faculty, financial assistance, and "various scholarship programs." The extent to which those programs and scholarships represent the Davis Foundation’s openly conservative leanings remains to be seen. Will the Davis Foundation approve each scholarship and fellowship applicant? Will it comb over the essays, looking for any remnants of liberal thought? Those details are not available.

Earhart sponsors faculty and students at dozens of campuses, including many in Massachusetts: $20,000 for Celia Wolfe-Devine of Stonehill College’s philosophy department to write an article titled "Affirmative Action: Con," for instance, and $10,000 to Paul Franco of Bowdoin College’s department of government and legal studies to write a biography of British conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Recipients of Olin and Bradley Foundation grants are also teaching or studying at many local schools.

This follows a longer effort by conservatives, dating to the early 1980s, to influence campus life and political culture. The Scaife, Olin, and Earhart foundations funded conservative publications at campuses across the country, and paid for conservative speakers. They also fund think tanks that work to influence academia, including the National Association of Scholars and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. Representatives of right-wing foundations have argued that they are merely trying to level a playing field that liberals have been tilting for years. The Ford Foundation, for example, although originally a more conservative organization, has for years been a reliable funder of progressive college programs — programs that arguably helped women’s studies, postcolonial area studies, and other fields become mainstays of the modern American campus.

Again, bias is often in the eye of the beholder. But we will never get our eyes on it as long as decisions to take millions in grant money and disperse it throughout the campus and curriculum are mostly being made out of sight.

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com.