Ford's Legacy

The Ford Foundation, with assets of some $500 million bequeathed by Henry Ford and his son Edsel, is the world's biggest private philanthropic enterprise. Its objectives are even bigger: "to reduce [international] tensions" and "to increase maturity of judgment and stability of purpose in the U.S. and abroad." Last week, just before Foundation President Paul Hoffman began a leave of absence to help run the Eisenhower campaign, he reported on the first year's operations.

Hoffman's report listed 37 widely diversified grants totaling $22,331,000. Some of them betrayed the inevitable influence of intellectual do-gooders, e.g., a $75,000 project to study "the basic resemblances and differences . . . among the principal patterns of thought and life that are now important in the human community." But the bulk of the money went for more practical projects. The main grants:

P:$6,550,000 in technical aid, especially for training schools and scientific farming instruction in India, Pakistan and the Middle East. Sample project: a $500,000 college of agriculture at the American University of Beirut.

P:$11,900,000 to improve educational practices in the U.S. through a dozen projects ranging from college fellowships to a plan for "more mature" television.

P:1,309,500 to strengthen the Free University of Berlin.

P:$1,000,000 to the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) to further its relief and rehabilitation work in Israel, Italy and Japan.

P:$785,000 for aid to refugees from the Soviet Union.

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