Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Founded in the state of New York in 1905, with a $10 million gift by the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, the Carnegie Foundation had an original mission of providing pensions for retiring college teachers (organizing, in 1918, the groundwork for today's TIAA-CREF). Adding the phrase “for the Advancement of Teaching” to its legal name upon gaining a national charter in 1906, the Foundation (CFAT) quickly moved beyond the original pension funding interests of its founder and soon, under the leadership of its first president, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Henry S. Pritchett (who served from 1906 to 1930), aggressively sought to raise its national profile. Early in its history, CFAT, with significant funding from the Carnegie Corporation (1911), established itself as a leader in educational reform and standardization, with a particular interest in teacher education and professionalism as well as in the field of higher education.

Drawing its trustees mostly from among the well-known presidents of the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities, and bearing the intellectual and ideological stamp of the men who held the CFAT presidency (to date, no woman has headed the CFAT), CFAT represented a brand of organized philanthropic giving that emerged at the end of the 19th century—the foundation. In contrast to older forms of charitable giving, foundations were meant to be guided by scientific ideals, strove to be more efficient and effective in their work, and instead of offering temporary relief, sought to discern the underlying causes of problems in order to direct resources toward achieving broader social understanding and social improvement. If the rise of foundations such as CFAT in the late 19th and early 20th centuries represented a new optimism and confidence in the possibilities of deepening the academic community's knowledge base and thereby systematically improving education, the existence of foundations also raised questions about the sway of concentrated wealth and elite decision making in a democracy. Put otherwise, as Ellen Condliffe Lagemann explores in her history of CFAT (1983), contemporary and historical debate on the nature of philanthropy and the role of foundations has centered on whether these new philanthropic entities exercised or in fact could exercise, as their rhetoric suggested, “private power for the public good.”