Extract from FrontPage Magazine How the Ford Foundation Created Women's Studies By Kimberly Schuld...
The Ford Foundation’s financial support of liberal groups and causes has been well documented on this site and by others, such as the Capital Research Center. A 1994 analysis by Althea K. Nagai, Robert Lerner and Stanley Rothman reported that during 1986 and 1987, the Ford Foundation awarded 262 grants to projects of the Left, resulting in a final dollar ratio of $28 to $1 between liberal and conservative projects.Women’s Studies professor and feminist author Susan M. Hartmann credits the Ford Foundation with being a substantive force that created the feminist movement. In fact, Ford’s support of women’s studies and feminist causes is so extensive that it cannot be summarized in an article of this length. The subject is ripe for a full-length book. It is safe to say that without the Ford Foundation, feminism would not have been successful in gaining such a strong foothold in academia, and by extension, politics.
The Ford Foundation doesn’t simply lean to the Left and pour money to its followers. The foundation has been actively engaged since the early 1960s in creating entirely new areas for research and political activism. When asked how she measures success, Ford president Susan Berresford responds that there are three measures she uses, “The first is when the foundation helps people build a whole field of knowledge—demography in the past, women's studies more recently.”
The creation of the Campus Diversity Initiative in 1990 took Ford in the direction of curriculum change. The grants given from this category are directed to sex-specific academic programs and departments in addition to other identified victim class groups. Of course, sex-specific really means women’s studies—no Ford executive would ever consider white male students in need of anything other than sensitivity training.
One outgrowth of this effort was the Women’s Studies Area and International Studies Curriculum Integration Project (WSAIS), coordinated through the National Center for Research on Women (NCRW), which has be lauded by feminists as spurring the growth of women’s studies from classes about women to viewing all issues through the prism of gender. The NCRW described the WSAIS project as seeking to infuse gender concerns into international and area studies, and to internationalize the women's studies curriculum. Ford was instrumental in taking women’s studies from the fringe and making it inescapable for faculty and students alike. The promotion of feminist ideology made possible by Ford on everything from privacy issues to ridiculous sexual harassment charges oozes through the entire university.
Former women’s studies professor Daphne Patai underscored the compelling evidence that the battle to retake our universities must be fought and won. She wrote in her book Heterophobia, “My own observations of students in women’s studies classes have led me to believe that years of exposure to feminist-promoted scare tactics have succeeded in imbuing many young women with a foreboding sense of living under constant threat from predatory men.”
The Ford Foundation has thus skewered not only the academy, but the lives of young women caught up in the grasp of feminist professors. Because of its vast resources, we cannot count on the Ford Foundation to reform itself in response to shifts in American public opinion or changes in political directions. The spotlight must be turned onto Ford so that all taxpayers supporting public universities and parents paying tuition can make informed decisions about the culture they want their students subjected to. The capitalism that built the Ford fortune and is now so despised by the foundation should be used to turn it away from our schools.
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