James Piereson & the impact of conservative philanthropy

This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy is joined by political scientist and philanthropic leader James Piereson, who discusses his time at the helm of the Olin Foundation and William E. Simon Foundation. They also discuss the impact of conservative philanthropy since Reagan, the successes and missteps of conservative philanthropy during that time, what the future holds for the conservative movement, and what Trump’s ultimate influence will be. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This week on Givers, doers and Thinkers.
I talk to political scientistand philanthropic leader, james
Pearson about his time at thehelm of the Olin and William E
Simon Foundations.
We also talk about the impactof conservative philanthropy
since Reagan, the successes andmissteps of conservative
philanthropy during that time,what the future holds for the

(00:21):
conservative movement and whatthe ultimate influence of Trump
will be.
Let's go.
Welcome to Givers, doers andThinkers.

(00:49):
A podcast on philanthropy andcivil society.
I'm Jeremy Beer.
Great to have you with us.
Today is March 21, 2025, and Iam very happy to have as our
guest James Pearson, formerpresident and trustee of the
William E Simon Foundation,among many other things, as

(01:12):
we'll hear about, and prolificauthor on topics related to
American politics andphilanthropy.
James Pearson took his bachelorand doctoral degrees from
Michigan State University.
He is from Michigan, originallyRockford Michigan, just north
of Grand Rapids.
It may be fortunate that we'rerecording this now, because
Michigan State plays tonight inthe NCAA men's basketball
tournament and that may be ofsome interest to Jim.
He then taught at severalschools, including Indiana

(01:34):
University and the University ofPennsylvania, before going into
philanthropy.
As we shall see, jim's booksinclude Camelot and the Cultural
Revolution how theAssassination of John F Kennedy,
shattered Liberalism, theInequality Hoax and Shattered
Consensus the Rise and Declineof America's Post-War Political

(01:56):
Order.
Jim serves on numerous boardsand committees.
I won't go through all of them,but I'll note the boards of the
Thomas W Smith Foundation, thePhilanthropy Roundtable and the
New Criterion.
He is a senior fellow at theManhattan Institute as well, and

(02:18):
perhaps most importantly forour purposes here today, for the
last 40 years or so, jim ledtwo of the most conservative
foundations in the country mostimportant conservative
foundations in the country, Ishould say.
First the John M OlinFoundation from 1985 to 2005,
and then the Simon Foundation,which he led until, I think, it
made his last grant in 2023.
So, with that, how are youtoday, jim?

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Excellent, thank you.
Glad to be with you.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Thank you so much for doing this.
We appreciate it.
So we'll start a little bit atthe beginning.
After you got your PhD atMichigan State, you launched
into an academic career inpolitical science and you were
teaching at Penn, I believe,when you got derailed into the
world of philanthropy.
What happened?

Speaker 2 (03:02):
Well, I had embarked on a teaching career.
My first job was at Iowa State.
I then moved to Indiana andthen I moved to the University
of Pennsylvania.
We're now talking about the midto late 1970s, actually around
the time of the bicentennial ofthe Constitution in 1976.
And it's a good question why Idecided to leave.

(03:29):
I didn't like the future I sawas an academic for a couple of
reasons.
One, I had become somewhatdisquieted with the idea of
doing technical disciplinaryresearch which kind of had to do
with advanced and academia.
I was interested in broadersubjects constitution, for

(03:50):
example.
Contemporary politics andpolitical science was
increasingly a quantitativefield.
We had some people interestedin philosophy, some people
interested in history, but aminority.
So I had become a little bitdiscontent with the academic
world.
And at the University ofPennsylvania I got very

(04:15):
interested in the FoundingFathers because I lived next,
very near Independence Hall, andI would stop by there often on
my way over to classes.
Of course I taught the foundingfathers in my classes, I read
them and I got more interested.
In those years I was at Penn andI left Penn in 1981, 82, to go

(04:38):
to the Olin Foundation.
Someone on the faculty at Penntold me they were looking for
someone who knew something aboutacademia and it was a
conservative foundation.
And would I go up and talk tothem, which I did?
One thing led to another andthey offered me a job.

(04:58):
I didn't know if I reallywanted to take it.
I went on leave from Penn, tookthe job for a year and after I
spent a year there I decided Ididn't want to go back to Penn.
So I stayed.
Because we're now talking aboutearly 1980s, ronald Reagan as
the president.
When I went, I knew very littleabout charitable foundations

(05:20):
and not a lot about theconservative movement, even
though I myself myself wassomething of a conservative, was
one of the reasons I leftacademia because of the
direction I was headed.
But my conservatism was a kindof founding fathers'
conservatism, kind of atraditional conservatism.
And, of course, as I went tothe Olin Foundation, I learned

(05:41):
there are various stripes.
There are the free marketconservatives, there are the
national security conservatives,the National Review
conservatives, there are theneoconservatives, there's the
old right, there is the newrights.
There are a lot of differentstripes to it, which I learned

(06:03):
during the years I was there.
I was hired by a man by thename of Michael Joyce, who was
then the executive director, andthe president was William Simon
, and after about two yearsthere Mike Joyce left to go to
the Bradley Foundation aspresident of the Bradley
Foundation, which at that timewas a new foundation.

(06:24):
Right right, we're now talkingabout 1984, 85.
And when Mike left, I waspromoted to be executive
director and he left Milwaukeeand then, like a year later, I
was put on the board of trustees.
So it was a very interestingopportunity at that time.

(06:45):
Ronald Reagan as president, andthe conservative movement
so-called was then in theprocess of expanding, partly
because of Ronald Reagan, partlybecause of the backwash in the
1960s.
There are a lot of fairlydistinguished scholars and

(07:05):
thinkers who had becomedisappointed and unhappy with
what was happening on the campusas a result of the warriors
from the 1960s coming onto thecampus.
As faculty members you hadidentity politics coming in big
time.

(07:25):
You had government grantscoming in big time with the
government federal governmentexercising a lot of leverage
over the college campus.
Then, of course, you had allthe trashing of business, the
Constitution, free markets andthat sort of thing.
So we developed a lot ofopportunities at that time where

(07:50):
people were starting to come tous for help.
A lot of them some of them wereconservatives, a lot of them
were what you'd call anti-left.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
We don't like what's happening on the left side and
we are going to be prepared tojoin with the conservative and
over time they may have changed,but I think of the
neoconservatives were a littlebit like that.
We helped a lot of theneoconservatives.
Irving Kristol was an advisorto the foundation.
We worked closely with BillBuckley, who was a different

(08:23):
kind of conservative, andRussell Burt and we worked very
closely with the so-calledStraussian.
One of our really big grantswas to Alan Bloom at the
University of Chicago, who atthat time was a little-known
professor but we knew of him.
He was a very popular teacher.
A couple years later he wrotethis international bestselling

(08:46):
book and became very famous.
We didn't know that was goingto happen, but I would say that
I did learn that in this world alot of things happen by
serendipity.
If you're going to give money togood people, they will do
things that might surprise you,as Alan Bloom did.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
Was that already the strategy when you got there?
That, hey, we're going to fundscholars mainly here.
That's going to be a primaryemphasis of our grant making.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, I mean yes.
So I came up there because Iknew something about academia
and I was at an Ivy Leagueschool, even though I came from
Michigan State, right, but I didknow something about academia
and I knew a lot of where thebodies were buried, so to speak,
in academia and how to workwith.
But we were an East Coastfoundation.

(09:41):
Our trustees were all IvyLeague graduates Harvard,
princeton, yale, cornell.
John Olin went to Cornell.
He was still alive when I wentthere.
He died shortly thereafter.
John Olin was also on the boardof Johns Hopkins University and

(10:04):
had given a lot of money touniversities in that period, 50s
and 60s.
There are a lot of librariesaround the country named after
John Olin.
He paid for them.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
How did he make his money?
Where did John come from?

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Olin Industries.
The company made its moneyoriginally by selling black
powder to the United Statesgovernment in World War I.
Oh, wow.
It owned Remington andWinchester rifles.
It made fertilizers.
It was a large conglomerate youdon't hear about much anymore.

(10:39):
They made skis and John Olinwas a trustee at cornell.
When the trouble started incornell in 1969, some radical
students took over the studentunion brandishing machine guns.
You may have heard about that.
And uh, john olin decided atsome point in the 70s that he

(11:03):
would like to use his money tobolster the free enterprise
system in America and fightagainst the radicals that he saw
taking over the college andthat was the origin of the
foundation.
Okay, mike Joyce went there andthat was one of the reasons I
wound up there.
So, yes, in a sense we were anEast Coast foundation, so we

(11:26):
were oriented a lot to the eliteuniversity, so we did a fair
amount at.
You know the Easternuniversities and you know the
think tanks on the East Coast.
When we ventured outside theNortheast it was often at
University of Chicago orStanford or some such place.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
Was there anybody else doing anything like this at
the time?
Certainly on the right, butwere you mimicking something
you'd seen on the left or justkind of inventing this as you
went along?

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Well, you know, I'd say two things.
One the Ford Foundation hadbeen very active on the left.
One the Ford Foundation hadbeen very active on the left,
ceding money for advocacy groupsand college programs on gender
and race.
Many of the advocacy groupsthat were active in that period,
some of them still active, wereceded by the Ford Foundation.
They also created theselitigation groups.

(12:25):
So they were this is underMcGeorge Bundy, who came to Ford
in the mid-1960s, so they werekind of off and running on this
strategy.
So there was a thought that weneeded something on our side to
counteract this, maybe even tomimic on our side some of the
things they did.
So we did fund litigationgroups, public interest groups,

(12:46):
as they did.
We did try to fund academicprograms.
We did fund books, think tanksand that sort of thing.
So there was that.
In terms of conservativefunders, there were some, but
not exactly like us.
Scaife was very active at thetime.

(13:08):
They had a strong nationalsecurity focus and a free market
focus.
We had a little bit differentfocus in the sense we were
ordered a lot to theseuniversities but there was some
overlap.
And then the Bradley Foundationcame along and they overlapped
to some degree also.
But they also had a state andlocal focus Milwaukee and

(13:32):
Wisconsin.
So we were a little bitdifferent in the sense that we
didn't have any of those thingsand we were in New York City and
we would kind of get lost inNew York and we saw a lot of
people in New York.
So we set off to build aprogram.
John Olin wanted the foundationto sunset.

(13:54):
He said roughly 25 years aftermy death, but in any case during
the working lifetime of histrustees he died in 1982.
Then we closed in 2005.
So he came pretty close.
Yeah.
We were able to spend a lot ofmoney because when I got there

(14:17):
it was right at the time whenthe bull market started in 1982.
Yeah, in 1982.
Yep, so John Olin leftinitially 60 or 70 million
dollars to the foundation whenhe died and for the first couple
of years before I took over, wewere only spending two, three,

(14:39):
four million dollars a year.
I came in and looked at theassets they were in excess of
100 million dollars.
I came in and looked at theassets they were in excess of
$100 million and I said we canspend a fair amount of money
here.
Yeah.
Especially if we're thinking ofclosing eventually.
So I said we can easily go from$3 or $4 million a year to $10

(15:04):
or $15 million a year to 10 or$15 million a year.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
It's a big jump.

Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yes, the good part of it was nobody knew it.
Yeah, in other words.
I could.
I could pick and choose wherewe're spending it.
If you announced it to theworld, you'd be inundated with
proposals.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
Yeah, what were the first?
Some of the first big ideas youhad on how to spend that.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
Yeah, federalist Society was in there pretty
early.
The Collegiate Network was inthere pretty early.
Alan Bloom at Chicago was inthere pretty early.
A lot of economics programs wedid at various universities were
in there pretty early.
At various universities we'rein there pretty early.

(15:48):
We, I remember making somelarge grants to the public
interest, irving Crystal'smagazine.
You know we were prettygenerous with the Heritage
Foundation and you know, and sowe went from, I don't know that,
$3 or $4 million in 1984 toprobably $15 million by 1988,

(16:10):
1989.
Yeah, john Olin left another$100 or so million to his widow,
and when she died in 1993, thatmoney came into the foundation.
Wow, so we began to spend thatas well.
And when she died in 1993, thatmoney came into the foundation.
Wow, so we began to spend thatas well.
So at about the time we hadspent down John Olin's corpus,
we had that fund coming in.

(16:33):
Yeah, wow.
So you know we were prettyactive.
I would say that when westarted the conservative
movement was pretty small, thatwhen we started the conservative
movement was pretty small.
In retrospect I see that Ididn't realize it at the time
because I didn't know that muchabout it.
There are some giant peoplearound.
There's Bill Buckley and BillFriedman and Irving Kristol and

(16:58):
a few others who are around, butthe ranks are pretty thin.
We didn't have much on thecollege campus and you know we
didn't have much that would be apresence in the intellectual
debates around the country.
And I would say that one of thethings we did and other donors

(17:19):
helped in that 20, 25 years wasthat we kind of built up, helped
to build up, the conservativemovement to a fairly large
enterprise, which was the caseby the time we closed in 2005.
Many think tanks, many collegeprograms not all of them
supported by us, Autonomousthings.

(17:39):
Other donors came in the stockmarket, created a lot of donors
through our causes, a lot ofdonors to other causes too.
So that was a period where theconservative movement grew and
expanded quite substantiallythrough the donations of a few

(18:00):
foundations.
Now, the left always had waymore money than we had.
I think I calculated once thatif you threw in the seven or
eight or ten liberal foundationsand the three or four or five
conservative foundations, theyoutspent us every year 20 or 30
to one.
So we didn't have a lot ofmoney.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
That's not counting the university Resources as well
.
Yeah, I mean they had.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
A lot going for them.
Plus, you know they had the NewYork Times and the Washington
Post and the networks.
This was before cable TV andbefore the internet.
So I got up Every day and Iread the New York Times and the
Wall Street Journal and theWashington Post and I read
regularly commentary in the NewRepublic and National Review and

(18:49):
a handful of other magazines.
That's how I informed myselfand that's where the debates
took place.
Kind of on those pages it's alldifferent now.
Right.
But that was how it was then andthat was kind of the world we
dealt with.
So, uh, I think we spentprobably close to 400 million

(19:10):
dollars in that 25 years, almostall of it on conservative
causes.
We didn't waste a lot of it onother things a lot of
foundations get diverted becausethe trustees are interested in
this or that other charity.
But there's very little of that.
With the Olin Foundation I hada splendid board of trustees.
Bill Simon was there.

(19:32):
Bill Simon was a hard guy toget along with.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
Talk about Bill Simon for people who don't know who
he was.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
Bill Simon.
For people who don't know whohe was yeah, Bill Simon was a
legendary bond salesman in NewYork City in the 50s and 60s and
he had a great interest inpolitics.
He was very much involved inbuying and selling treasury
securities in that period.
Then he got to know GeorgeShultz, who was Nixon's Treasury

(20:04):
Secretary at the time.
And Schultz recruited him to goon to the Nixon administration
in 1971, and he was the secondenergy czar.
So in a period when there weregas lines and oil embargoes,
simon became the energy czar andthere was a lot of rascity to

(20:26):
gasoline.
You could only buy certainamounts of it and the prices
were very high.
And so, you know, simon, withthe advice of some economists,
said just let the market go andlet the market settle this and
the prices will settle and thesupplies will settle, because
what was happening is thatpeople are driving around with

(20:48):
three quarters of the tanksfilled.
Every time they saw a gasstation they pull in to fill it
up because they didn't know ifthey could get any more right.
So if you kind of get rid ofthat problem, you would
stabilize it.
He did in the middle ofwatergate.
George schultz said I want toget out of here, I want to
retire and go back to Chicago oreventually to the Hoover

(21:09):
Institution.
And Simon replaced him asTreasury Secretary in 1974.
And he became popular because hewent around the country talking
about free markets and howhorrible Washington was and how
terrible the Congress was andhow they're wasting taxpayers'
money and so on, and he wrote abest-selling book when he came

(21:30):
out All the Time for Truth.
But he was a notoriouslydifficult man, highly impatient.
He was doing a hundreddifferent things at once.
He didn't like to waste histime.
If you didn't get straight tothe point, you'd hang up the
phone on your teller, kick youout of the block, and so you

(21:53):
know you had to learn to bepretty precise and get right to
the point and get to the factsso he could make a decision on
it.
But you know, generally hebacked us up once he trusted us
and you know we all learned toget along with him all the staff
and so on.
There are plenty of laughsalong those lines Because he was

(22:17):
very eccentric in that way.
But he did protect us from theoutside world In other words.
you had a man of his staturetreasury secretary, bestselling
author sitting on top of theorganization.
People are going to think twicebefore they mess with it.
They know he can come at thempretty hard and that was

(22:40):
something that was a benefit toall of us.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
That's great.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
At the time and he did that.
Whenever there was acontroversy he ran out and
defended us and he held up theside and he usually gave more
than he got.
And you know people took alesson from that.
That you know you ought tothink twice before you tank with
this group.
And that was a good thing torun.

(23:04):
Simon died in the year 2000 atthe age of 73, so we'd been
active for a long time and whenhe died we decided that we'd
spend the foundation out in fiveyears by 2005,.
Which is what we did.
And you know, in the latteryears we kind of spent the money

(23:24):
on our favorite programs Lawand economics was one, some of
our think tanks, heritage wasone, manhattan Institute was one
, so kind of.
You know, at the end, as weassessed what we did, we could
see that we played a big, largerole in building up the
conservative movement, helpingto create a lot of institutions,

(23:48):
young people who came alonginto the movement, and some real
phenomena, like you pointed out, in terms of books and ideas
and intellectuals.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
I'd love to hear more about Alan Bloom and Closing
the American Mind sort of howthat came about.
But also, I think, francisFukuyama, and the end of history
was something that you all wereinvolved with somehow and
Samuel Huntington as well andhis work on the clash of
civilizations.
I mean, those would be three ofthe biggest books to hit in the

(24:20):
last quarter or so of the 20thcentury.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, no, I think you're right about that.
So you know they wrote thesebooks after we didn't fund the
books.
They've kind of beenoutstanding authors and thinkers
and they wrote the books later.
So Arnell and Bloom you knowwe're aware of the Straussians
and Bloom was a legendaryteacher at Chicago and many

(24:50):
people studied with them and Idon't know.
One thing led to another MikeJoyce uh, there's some people at
Chicago and Alan Bloom came tous with this project and Alan
Bloom came to us with thisproject and the idea was to run
seminars where students wouldread these great books and then

(25:11):
you would bring in policymakersand talk to them to find out,
you know, what did you learnfrom the books and what can we
learn from the policymakers?
And so on.
And he had some terrific peoplein that program at Chicago Edwin
Schills, lester Kalakowskithere's a whole list of
outstanding people whoparticipated in that program.

(25:32):
Some of Bloom's students did goon become policymakers, like
Paul Wolfowitz.
I think, Wolfowitz came backand worked in the seminar, so
Bloom then wrote a long essayfor National Review in the late
80s.
What's the problem withuniversities?
And the problem with theuniversity, simply put, was that

(25:58):
liberalism had become sopervasive that nobody could
think outside of the boundariesof the left-wing liberals
anymore.
It was a kind of closing of theAmerican mind.
But luckily, one said, liberalsare always eager to hear other
ideas until they actually hearone and they're not so
interested in it Right.
So Bloom turned that articleinto this book called the

(26:24):
Closing of the American Mind.
Yeah, and one of our friends,roger Kimball, gave a good
review of it in the New YorkTimes.
It became a bestseller.
Yeah, Bloom became famous andit became rich and he went
around the country lecturing andhe was a fantastic talker.

(26:44):
There's no question about it.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
What was he like in person?
What was Alan Bloom like inperson?

Speaker 2 (26:51):
Well, you know, he had 10 ideas every second.
Okay, I mean, you could hardlykeep up with the ideas that he
said, okay, and you know theywould come spilling out of him,
and it was just a fascinatingguy, interesting.
I can see why the students kindof came and listened to him, um
, because it wasn't aperformance and uh, you know, uh

(27:14):
, he was friends with, um, thenovelist at chicago, saul bello,
saul Bellow.
Yeah, and Bellow wrote a novelseveral years later called
Ravelstein and it was based onAlan Bloom and you know his
best-selling book and that sortof thing.
Interesting yeah.

(27:37):
But he had a great influence atChicago and there are many
students who read that book, whowanted to go study with Bloom.
You know I talked to a lot ofthem and I wasn't eager to
encourage them down that pathbecause I was aware how
difficult it was to make yourway as an academic.
Right.
I mean, if you wanted to do thatfor the love of ideas, fine, I

(28:00):
wouldn't recommend that as acareer.
So you know, I think some ofthese young guys did go off and
become lawyers and that sort ofthing.
So no, ben Bloom died in 1992.
So like four years, five yearsafter this book was done Frank
Fukuyama it was kind of.
It's a different thing westarted a magazine called the

(28:23):
National Interest.
Irving Kristol had the PublicInterest, so this is going to be
a magazine about foreignaffairs Based on.
You know, let's look at foreignaffairs through the lens of the
American national interest, alittle bit like Trump is doing
now.
And so a man named Owen HarHarris was recruited to be the

(28:45):
editor, and he had been at theHeritage Foundation, he was
Australian and he'd written somestuff about how bad the United
Nations was in regard to America.
So he edited that magazine andhe would go around to
conferences, and the oneconference at the university of

(29:06):
chicago that bloom was puttingon he encountered this paper
called the, the.
What was it called?
The end of history the end ofhistory?
I believe yeah and he took thepaper, edited it, put, put it on
the cover of the magazine andit was, you know, one of these

(29:28):
sensations.
Yeah.
And it turned into a book.
Now, fukuyama said everythingyou had to say in the article.
You did not much more to say inthe book.
That was the best-selling book.
So, again, that was notanything we did.
We created the magazine and soon, but you funded the platform.
You know that that was notanything we did.
We created the magazine and soon.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
You funded the platform that made that possible
.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
And then Sam Huntington.
Because I had been in politicalscience, I knew who Sam
Huntington was.
He was a well-known nationalsecurity analyst at Harvard.
He had been president of theAmerican Political Science
Association.
I was aware of that too, so Iwent up to see him at one point

(30:09):
in the late 80s and we agreedwe'd set up this thing called
the John M Mullen Center forNational Security Study, and we
funded it, and Huntington had abunch of fellows who went on to
teach, and Hunnyden had a bunchof fellows who went on to teach,
many of them, you know, late intheir careers.
Now here we are, 35 years later,and you know he'd bring them

(30:32):
into Harvard to speak.
I went up there a lot to listento them and then he wrote this
book called the Clash ofCivilization, which I believe
may have originated as anarticle in Foreign Affair, and
then he turned it into a bookand it was a big discussion.
So that's true, all thesethings were done.
You know we weren't in any wayresponsible for them, but you're

(30:56):
right, we helped to pay for theplatforms that somewhat allowed
them to be written.
Sure but that was somewhat thepoint of the whole thing.
Right, we couldn't orchestrateeverything, but we could provide
the funds to create theplatform.
Right, and honestly, I didn'tknow enough to do all this sort
of thing.
I couldn't have written any ofthose books and suggested them

(31:20):
or anything like that, but youknow, I suppose we didn't know
enough to send the money topeople who could do something
with it, and a lot of them did.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
It was a real investment in ideas and
intellectuals thinkers, Do youthink, even as big as it is now
in many ways.
Do you think the sort ofcenter-right sort of funders
invest enough in ideas andthinkers, intellectuals today,

(31:51):
or should they be doing more ofthat kind of work?

Speaker 2 (31:53):
Yeah, it's a very good question.
You know, our thinking was that.
Our general thinking was thatthe American people were roughly
on our side but they didn'thave people articulating the
ideas in influential places.

(32:13):
They weren't with the FordFoundation, in other words, they
weren't with us, but theyneeded to have some people
articulating the ideas in placesof influence and communicating
them to policymakers.
So they would have, you know,the ideas and the framework to
start telling the voters about.
But if you don't have that, youknow you're kind of lost, and I

(32:38):
think in the 1960s and 70s wedidn't really have that and we
did help to build it up.
Now I think you could ask thequestion do ideas play a similar
role in our lives today as theydid in the 1980s and 90s,
before the internet age?
we all read the papers.
We're all reading magazines.

(32:59):
Ideas really didn't matter.
If there were good ideas, youcan get them into the discourse.
Or ideas really didn't matter.
If they were good ideas, youcan get them into the discourse.

Speaker 3 (33:07):
They matter as much today, when everything changes
day by day.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Yeah, and things seem a little bit more sober.
Are people really buying andreading books anymore,
especially books of ideas?

Speaker 1 (33:22):
Yeah, but who you influence, right?
Someone like jd vance, uhclearly shaped, would have gone
in a totally different directionhad he not encountered certain
ideas and books uh out of theconservative political uh
tradition, the catholic umintellectual tradition, and now
he has is in position ofextraordinary influence, right?

Speaker 2 (33:41):
so yeah's true, and he is a thinker.
Yeah, I don't think DonaldTrump is.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
Right, I mean.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
I realize there are different types here that we're
talking about.
So of course he had abestselling book about his
background.
Yeah, I just don't know if theand of course we're kind of shut
out of the universities.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
Yeah, did you think Olin could actually keep that
from happening?
Are you surprised at howrefractive the universities have
been?
We tried, we tried, we couldn'tstop it.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
Yeah, so you know.
If you ask me today, could youstart an Allen Bloom Center or a
Sam Hynes?
Center or any of those thingstoday?
Well, I think it would bedifficult.
Yeah.
Not as close to it now as I usedto be, but I'm not sure you
have the people in place to dothat.
Yeah, now, you know, in termsof the university, we did a lot

(34:41):
of stuff to try to stop it, butthe race and gender stuff was
too powerful.
We were aware of it, we foughtagainst it and they just kept
building up strength and so now,to some extent, they're paying
the price for that.
You look at Columbia.

(35:02):
Yeah, now to some extent they'repaying the price for that.
You look at Columbia.
Yeah, that is the colleges havebuilt up these way left-wing
faculties and they're to somedegree stuck with them.
So at Columbia the presidenttries to enforce the rules and
arrest all these people, whichlast year they did but the
left-wing faculty revolts andsays we don't want you to do

(35:25):
that.
You've got to let them all goand we're going to fire the
president.
That's the faculty they have.
Columbia would be a muchstronger institution if 20% or
25% of the faculty weremoderates or conservative.
But they're not and that'sbecause they drove the law out.
I mean, if you look at, youknow some of the curriculum they

(35:51):
have at Columbia, they'regenerally insane.
The women's studies program isabsolutely clinically insane.
Yeah, if you look at thecourses they teach and you know
if they had moderate orconservative people, you know it
might not have happened.
But in any case they're stuckwith the system they built.

(36:12):
They're out of favor inWashington.
Washington is coming down hardon them, pulling out their funds
and so on.
It is interesting in the sensethat they built up the diversity
industry using federal muscle.
If you don't fire our people,our diversity people, we'll pull
our money out of the university.

(36:33):
Now they were pushing againstan open door because they're
happy to do that.
Donald Trump is now comingalong and saying wait a second,
all this diversity stuffviolates the Civil Rights Act
and if you keep doing it, we'regoing to pull out our federal
money.
And now you're upside, and sothey do have a crisis.

(36:54):
But back to your large questiondo ideas matter that much
anymore than they used to?
I generally think not.
Okay, I don't have a firm viewon that.
I haven't thought it through.
I think you know there's somuch out there.

(37:16):
There are so many people whowrite now because of the
internet.
Yeah.
And every day it changes A newset of writers out there and
they're out there.

Speaker 1 (37:26):
no gatekeepers anymore in that way so if you
wanted to invest in somethingtoday, if you were back, if olin
were still around and you'retrying to make the smart
investments, um, what would youinvest in if not ideas?
Would you invest in particularplatforms or more popular
thinkers, or podcasts or substacks?
Actually, I'm still in thebusiness because I'm inviting

(37:47):
the time Right Too enough yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
And we're not large.
Maybe we spend $10 million ayear.
You know, we do try to spend alot of it on people who write
stuff which we think isinfluential Heather McDonald's a
fellow, for example.
John Yoo at Berkeley someone wesupport.

(38:12):
Steve Moore writes stuff in thefree market, someone.
We support George MasonUniversity and some of their
programs.
We support Christopher Ruffo.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
Right we support.
There's a good example ofsomeone who's sort of operating
at the intersection of ideas andmedia.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
That is an interesting phenomenon, the
Christopher Ruffo phenomenon,yeah, in other words, someone
who is both familiar with thethinking.
He wrote a pretty good bookactually a couple of years ago,
the Roots of Wokeism, I think itwas called A good book.
But he's an activist as well.
He's advising Trump on how toclose the education department,

(38:54):
how to get rid of DEI, so he'sboth an activist and a thinker.
You know, we haven't had reallypeople like that quite so much,
so that's the kind of thingthat I would like to kind of see
more of.
That's interesting.
And he's a young guy.
So you know he's not, I think,our old guys interested in ideas

(39:21):
.
They're debating ideas withpeople.
You know he's got these ideasand he wants to take them
straight to government.
Now it is interesting becauseTrump is also a different kind
of figure than the Republicanpresidents.
We've had To say the least yes,so that you know, if you wanted
to close the educationdepartment with George HW Bush,

(39:43):
I don't think you could get inthe door.
We can't close the educationdepartment with George HW Bush.
I don't think you could get inthe door.
We can't close the educationdepartment.
Or if you wanted to killaffirmative action and diversity
, you couldn't get in the doorbecause there'd be people
telling Bush no, this is a goodthing, we got to keep it, and so
on.
So Trump, when he hearssomething he likes, he's ready

(40:05):
to go out and run with it.
And that's new.
We've never had a presidentlike that.
So I think I'm not sure if itwas Rufo, or maybe it was Larry
Ard at Hillsdale who, when Trumpwas president, the first time
they came out, the New YorkTimes came out with the 1619

(40:27):
Project and Larry Arndt orsomebody came out with the 1776
Project to counter it.
Well, Trump saw it on Fox Newsand said I'm going to create a
commission, Larry Arndt runningit.
George Bush would have neverdone that.
Now Fox News didn't exist atthe time either, so it's a

(40:50):
different kind of circumstance.
Did I ever think that we couldget rid of DEI?
I never thought we could getrid of it.
Trump comes along and I thinkhe's going to get rid of it
Because one he's put the weightof the government behind this
and it always thrived becausegovernment was behind it.
Democrats mostly, we're goingto take your money away if you

(41:15):
don't do it.
So it also.
They can't wait him out.
You know he's going to be therefor four more years.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
And the first time around they kept him so much on
the defensive he wasn't able todo anything.
And in past years they wouldsay whenever they make Bush or
Reagan or whatever made feintsagainst them, gingrich, they
would tenaciously say they'll begone before too long and we can
go on as before.
But I don't think Trump's goingto let him get away with that,

(41:49):
so I think he may wind up reallykilling DEI and turning it into
a very unfavorable idea andbecause of the federal funding,
all these schools are going tohave to go along with it.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
And the school.
Speaking of schools, that issomething just to pivot quickly
here at the end of ourconversation to the William E
Simon Foundation.
K-12 education is one of theareas I believe you guys
invested in heavily at the SimonFoundation.

Speaker 2 (42:20):
A lot of scholarships , school bonds, charter schools.

Speaker 1 (42:23):
That was a big area for us.
Yeah, what did you?
What was most promising aboutwhat did you find?

Speaker 2 (42:32):
most promising in terms of the grant making you
did there On the education side.
Well, I mean, I think we and wegot into the that that movement
at Olin to some degree in the1990s because it was being up,
but it wasn't a big factor AtSimon it was a much larger
factor.
We were focused mostly on NewYork and we did do some national

(42:52):
thinking about charter schoolsand school choice, supporting
those programs.
But if you want to reform theeducational system, public
school is a pretty hard thing toattack because they're run by
the unions.
Right.

(43:12):
And it's pretty hard topenetrate them.
You kind of have to try to doit and run around them.
So that led to charter schoolsand vouchers.
You know we did do somecurricular stuff.
Cultures you know we did dosome curricular stuff.
And the standards we didsupport some of the standards

(43:35):
but that didn't work very wellin the public schools because
one, they could always find waysto take the curriculum because
they're.
Two, in the teaching they canmanipulate the curriculum.
I mean, it's kind ofinteresting because a lot of
state legislatures have toldcolleges they have to teach
courses in American government.

Speaker 1 (43:51):
Correct yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
But what good does it do if you have a left-winger
teaching the course?

Speaker 1 (43:56):
Personnel is policy right.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
You know, we kind of had that problem.
So charter schools had a prettybig success, I would say In New
York City.
They tried to cap them andclose them down but there are a
number of good networks.
Success Academy is a terrificnetwork in New York City.
The KIPP Academies have beenvery good.

(44:21):
Programs like this are bubblingup all over the country, partly
by parental demand, and a lot ofparents are disappointed with
the kind of teaching andcurriculum.
That it got worse in the lastfive years.
Now you have these other issuesthat are coming in, like
transgenderism.
A lot of parents look at thatkind of thing and say you know,

(44:43):
we don't want our son ordaughter coming home and wanting
to change genders and that sortof thing.
Right, and maybe we ought toreconsider the schools.
So I think those have been alarge factor.
So you know, school choice.
Looking around the country, alot of states are signing on to

(45:03):
school choice in one way oranother, an option for parents,
because the public schools havegotten so bad in many areas.
Probably not true.
So much of the suburban, someof the suburban schools where
the parents are active and wherethe parents move there from
schools.
But look, the unions arepervasive in many states.

(45:24):
The unions are pervasive inmany states and so it's not
clear to me why and I'd have tohave somebody explain to me why
the unions want to water downthe standards and why they want
to introduce all of these novelconcepts into education.
Not clear to me why they'rewedded to those things.

(45:47):
I get the union collectivebargaining right, right, not
that yeah, but why?
why all these newfangled ideasthat don't necessarily work,
which turn off periods?
Why?
Why have they done that?
Is that due to the alliancewith the education schools?

(46:08):
I don't know.
I've never had a good answer towhy they have to do that.
It's a good question well, whydoes the democratic party have
to do it?
Yeah, it makes even less sensefor them because they want to
cobble together a majority ofvoters, but but nonetheless they
do it too.
Yeah, and my answer to thelatter is because of the

(46:29):
influence of their groups.
Their groups seem to be able topunish people who stray off
their reservation.
Sure, and you know, voters onlygo to the polls every two or
four years.
The groups are there every day.
That's right, and you know, thesame is a little bit true of
professors at the colleges.

(46:50):
If they wander off thereservation and say some
critical things about the groups, the diversity groups, the
gender groups, the race groups,they will be denouncing them in
the student newspaper the nextday or they'll be marching
around their office the next day.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
Right.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
And of course nobody wants that.
Pretty big disincentive yeah sothat's a large consequence of
the politicization of theschools and higher education.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
We.
I'm going to wrap this up here.
I'll ask you one last question.
I guess.
What are you?
What would you say are thebiggest two-part question,
biggest mistakes conservativefunders or philanthropists have
made in the post-Cold War eraand the biggest successes If you
have one in each category,maybe whatever you want to say I

(47:42):
don't know if I could answerthat.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
I mean, I can, you know, think of a fair number of
successes that Olin and otherswere involved in.
I'm trying to think of somemissteps that we made, and there
were missteps.
I don't know if they were somemissteps that we made, um, and
there were missteps, I don'tknow they were strategic
missteps.
You know, we were funding a lotof student newspapers and they
were.
Some of the students wouldwrite things they shouldn't have
written.

(48:20):
We weren't responsible for itnecessarily, but then we got
tagged with it.
So we had to find a way out ofthat, which eventually we did,
because you know we didn't wantto be responsible for everything
.
A student newspaper wrote Right, and you know I'd have to think

(48:41):
on that question.
I mean, you know we made grantsthat didn't work, but you know
those that was for moreindividuals, yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
Everybody makes grants that don't work.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
I think I don't know if it's a problem with the
conservative foundations.
A lot of business peopleinvested too much in business
schools.
I would say.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
Okay, that's an interesting answer.

Speaker 2 (49:15):
Yeah, and we did a little bit about that.
And you know, one of theproblems there is, the business
schools are kind of under thegeneral influence of the
university and they go alongwith a lot of things the
university did.
So there's some of that.
I don't know if that was amistake.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
It's a learning at least.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
But it's a good question.
What mistakes were made Now?
I mean, if you go back to theearly part of the conservative
movement, some people, like BillBuckley, would say that getting
behind Senator McCarthy, josephMcCarthy, was a problem.
Sure that, you know.
There's nothing wrong withanti-communism, but the tactics
that you used there turn peopleoff and defeat the purpose.

(50:04):
You know, was there somethinglike that that we got involved
in?
Turn people off and defeat thepurpose?
Yeah, I, you know, was theresomething that we got involved
in?
I think.
I think that in handling therace and gender and diversity
issues, it required somedelicacy and a degree of you

(50:26):
know, sophistication as to howto handle those you can't right.
It wasn't.
If you make the analogy toMcCarthy, you just couldn't come
out there and denounce the idea.
Yeah, because you know youcould look bad and it was not
easy to oppose.
So you know we did have somepeople who got out there on that
and got on the wrong side of itand were.
You know we did have somepeople who got out there on that

(50:47):
and got on the wrong side of itand were you know, somewhat
embarrassed by some of thethings they wrote and said yeah,
I don't want to mention anynames there.
So, you know, as that movementwent on one of the things it
kind of became more and moreaggressive until more recently,
when they adopted the DEIbusiness, it became extremely

(51:09):
radical.

Speaker 1 (51:10):
Yeah, it became much easier to target actually, Right
.

Speaker 2 (51:13):
And because they went so far off to the left, it made
it easier for us to attack.
But before that, when they werejust saying we want to expand
opportunity now, they were doingmore than that, just saying we
want to expand opportunity now,they were doing more than that.
They did have.
They did have an agenda and itwas a left-wing agenda, but they
did cover it by saying we justwanted to be an opportunity for

(51:36):
groups that haven't hadopportunity.
So I'm not sure we necessarily,and we got into trouble a little
bit somewhat, somewhat, onthose issues and you know there
were parts of conversationsabout how to handle it.

(51:58):
The biggest successes I wouldsay that we had was we just
built the platforms for theconservative movement.
We built the think tanks, thecollege programs, the magazines,
got those ideas out there intothe world.
You know, you've got theFederalist Society, you've got
the student newspapers, you havethe whole infrastructure of the
conservative movement that isjust now very mature.
I mean, the Federalist Societyis very interesting.

(52:21):
I remember when they came to ouroffice in 1982, and these were
kids, students, law schoolstudents, not kids and they had
just put on a conference, Ithink, at Yale.
They were Chicago, yale andHarvard law students and we
wanted to create this society,federalist society, and I
thought, okay, it'll be a campusmovement of law school students

(52:43):
at these three schools, maybesome more.
And they said we want to createa national office and we want
to hire somebody.
Our response was why do youwant to create a national office
?
You're a student.
So we gave them somebody to doit and they hired Gene Meyer and
they created a national officeand they were off and running
and they did things over aperiod of time and they became

(53:05):
more influential as time passed.
It probably took them 20 yearsto develop a full head of steam.

Speaker 1 (53:11):
The lesson there too.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
Yeah, they finally really come into role when they
start picking Trump's judges.
Yeah, while federalists decide,judges will go on the federal
banks of the US Supreme Court.
Now, did we anticipate that westarted 30, 40 years ago?
No, the one thing we did knowis this we don't have anything

(53:37):
in the judicial area.
The liberals own the wholeConstitution.
We don't have anything there.
We've got to start something.
This is as good as anythingelse.
So let's see what we can do,and that was our attitude with a
lot of things.
Give them some money and seewhat they can do.
If they can do it, give moremoney.
If they can't put the moneyelsewhere.

Speaker 1 (53:57):
Pretty simple strategy.

Speaker 2 (53:59):
Yeah, and I didn't pick and choose among the
various groups theneoconservatives, the free
market people.
I didn't pick and choose amongthe various groups the
neoconservatives, the freemarket people.
I didn't know enough, and thatwas a good thing.
Yeah, one of our virtues was wewere aware we didn't know
everything, so don't pick andchoose.

(54:20):
Get the money out to people whocan do something with it and
then watch it.
Right.
And kind of let it go.
That's kind of what we did.
It was successful, I think, butwe didn't really know what we
were doing as we were doing it.
Right.
Maybe it's a little bit like abusiness that starts out with

(54:43):
the small and builds on itselfand eventually has something
worthwhile.
Yeah.
Right.
So you know we had a greatstaff, all friends about six of
us small staff are these people?
I look at some of thesephilanthropies with a hundred
people on the staff.

(55:03):
Yeah, that doesn't make a lotof sense to me.
A lot of turnover.
So we had a staff that waspretty stable for 25 years at
Olin.
The same thing in Sunday waspretty much the same and that

(55:24):
helped.
So you know it's an interestinghistory.
John Miller has written a bookabout the Olin Foundation, which
I should point out, is rightbehind me here called.

Speaker 1 (55:37):
A Gift of Freedom for people who want to look it up
by.

Speaker 2 (55:38):
John A Miller.
It's on Amazon and he's writtensome shorter pamphlets and
there have been newspaperarticles about all the things we
did.
And you know, occasionally insituations like this I get to
kind of look back and talk aboutit.
But 20 years ago the OlinFoundation closed, yeah, 2005.

(56:02):
So I'm quite a bit older andthat's kind of receded in the
history.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
But it's a very important piece, though, of um
american philanthropic history,uh, I think and that's why I
wanted to have you on thispodcast to discuss it because
it's uh played a huge role inthings like Federalist Society
and in very important books likeAlan Bloom's, and in creating a

(56:29):
counter structure of fundingfor America's sort of
center-right thinkers.

Speaker 2 (56:37):
I think we did show how it could be done.
I would say this we haven't hada lot of people who've tried to
emulate us.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
Yeah, which is surprising to me, interesting
yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
Now I'm kind of doing that with the Thomas W Smith
Foundation.

Speaker 1 (56:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
And we do have Bradley out there doing good
things and the Scape out there abit.
You know, the BradleyFoundation.
People came around to talk tous in 1985.
Because they knew about us,they were just starting the
Bradley Foundation.
People came around to talk tous in 1985 because they knew
about us, they were juststarting the Bradley Foundation

(57:16):
what are you doing and how areyou doing?
And they met us and so on, andthey kind of started out in
somewhat the same way.
I'd be hard-pressed to name anyother group that tried to do
anything like that.
Yeah, why name any other groupthat tried to do anything like
that.
Yeah, yeah, why?
Well, I have a few thoughtsabout that, which is that when

(57:37):
people want to give their moneyaway, they want to give it away
in a manner that will makepeople pat them on the back.
You're doing good work, you'redoing good work, you're a good
person, et cetera.
Conservative ideas peopleeither like you or they really

(57:58):
dislike you.
Controversial yeah, that's whatwe had at Olin.
We had a lot of people whothought we liked us.
On the other side, we had a lotof people who really disliked
us.
New York Times wrote any numberof negative and hostile
articles about us over the yearsand you know, when people want

(58:19):
to give their money away, dothey really want to get into
that?
Do they want to see their nameblasted over the front page of
the New York Times saying you'redoing this, that and the other
thing?
Right.
And when we had controversiesthat were on the cover of the
New York Times, it did causetrouble, because we have

(58:39):
trustees.
The trustees have families,yeah, they have children in
school.
They have neighbors.
They belong to clubs.
I say clubs, yeah, yeah.
I say clubs, yeah, right, yeahaway to maybe the local school

(59:04):
or the local charities or theRed Cross.
Good things like that will beapplauded.
So I would say that is a factorin the whole thing, I think
you're right.
Yeah, it didn't bother John Olinbecause he'd been through it

(59:24):
and he was older.
It didn't bother the Bradleypeople either, but a lot of
people it bothers.
But you know the Bradley thinghas been controversial in
Milwaukee.
It's not been an easy road forthem either.

Speaker 1 (59:37):
Yeah, because of teachers' unions, among other
things, teachers' unions andother people, so why don't you
spend all this money locally?

Speaker 2 (59:44):
they would say you know that's been a tough thing
too, for them.
Yeah and although they've doneit very well, so that would be
one answer, maybe the mainanswer People are going to the
charitable world to be attacked.

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
Well, let's consider this an invitation for someone
to do that Set up the next 20,25 years of something like the
Olin Foundation.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
I think Tom Smith wants to do it.
Okay, and he's doing it.
Yep, and you know we have otherfriends.
I didn't mention the SearleFreedom Trust.

Speaker 1 (01:00:19):
Yeah, also spending down.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
Yes, and you know they've been active in this
world as well.
Dan Searle did this 25 years orso ago, so you know there is
some of it, but there weredefinitely not as much as I
thought there might be, you know, five years ago.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
Well, James Pearson, thanks so much for spending some
time with us and talking aboutthis history and sharing your
thoughts.
Really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
Actually, Jeremy.

Speaker 1 (01:00:51):
Yeah, thank you.
And, as I said before one moretime, if you want to read a
little bit about this history, AGift of Freedom by John J
Miller is very much worthgetting.
So thanks, and we'll talk toyou soon.
Thank you, hey.
Thanks for joining us fortoday's podcast.
If you enjoyed it, we inviteyou to subscribe and or rate and
or review us on YouTube, Apple,Spotify or wherever you listen
to our podcasts.

(01:01:11):
Thanks a lot.