"How the Ford Foundation Created Multiculturalism"

FrontPage Magazine is starting a series on the Ford Foundation. I previously discussed the Ford Foundation's links with a UCLA report proposing voting rights for illegal aliens.

The first episode in their series is an older article from Heterodoxy magazine:

In an afternoon session entitled "Restructuring the University," spokespersons summarized the thinking of the workshops that had taken place earlier that morning. Robert Steele, a Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan, noted that his group was aware that coercion would be required to change the university: "People will not be quietly assimilated to multiculturalism by truth through dialogue." They will have to be bought off as well as brought along. Steele described the terms of the deal: "You get research assistants, you give mentoring." In other words, using the largesse of Ford and other philanthropic institutions, advocates of multiculturalism convince the hesitant to join up by paying for research assistants. These assistants - mentors of multiculturalism - must be women or people of color...

"The Foundation is a creature of capitalism," Henry Ford II said when he resigned in disgust from the foundation that bears his family name in 1977, adding that it was hard to discern any trace of capitalism "in anything the foundation does. It is even more difficult to find an understanding of this in many of the institutions particularly the universities that are the beneficiaries of the Foundation's grant program." The foundation, lamented Hank the Deuce, was ignoring the very economic system whose abundance made it and all other philanthropic foundations possible.

In talking to Henry II, former Treasury Secretary William Simon noted that by the late 1960s Ford was "engaged in a radical assault on traditional culture, under the rubric of the 'public interest' and 'systematic social change'.-Simon asked Henry Ford II how such a thing could have happened. "I tried for 30 years to change it from within to no avail," said Ford...

The ultimate target of all this energetic social transformation, however, is America's educational system, particularly its system of higher education. By the early 80s, Ford, whose activist staff was networked not just into the nerve centers of "progressive" politics but into the ganglia as well, saw that the university would be (that is, could be made to be) the battleground for an apocalyptic effort to force multiculturalism into the intellectual life of this country...

MultiCultiCult · Sun, 01/11/2004 - 20:47 · · Importance: 1