Opinion Blog : Entries Tagged With 'business+ethics'
| November 4, 2008 02:30 PM |
Despite Joining Bailout, BB&T Says it Prefers Free MarketBB&T, which has donated over $30 million to colleges to teach free-market principles, says it opted to participate in the federal government’s $700 billion bailout of the financial industry because it was the right thing to do. “The Treasury is encouraging banks to participate,” says Bob Denham, director of corporate communications for the bank, which is based in Winston-Salem, N.C. “With the way the economy is, we almost have a business obligation to support the Treasury.” But Denham says BB&T’s decision to accept $3.1 billion in return for giving the federal government preferred stock “doesn’t change” the belief by John Allison, its CEO, in the philosophy of Ayn Rand that champions free markets and paints government as the nemesis of capitalism. “It’s all about helping the financial market, easing credit in the financial markets and creating liquidity,” Denham says. “We have regulators and it’s important that when they ask us to help solve a liquidity crisis, that we want to be at least viewed as a team player.” Allison reportedly struggled over the decision, trying to reconcile his belief in free-enterprise principles with his sense of obligation to support the government’s financial recovery plan. Denham declines to comment on details of Allison’s decision-making process but says BB&T was concerned the bailout would give ailing banks an unfair advantage over healthy banks like BB&T that have avoided financial trouble by refusing to make loans to unqualified borrowers. “We have an obligation to remain in business and maintain our competitive advantage, and from a business perspective, it simply makes sense to take advantage of the same low-cost capital costs as our other competitors,” Denham says. Banking industry insiders say the U.S. Treasury Department pressured healthy banks to participate in the bailout plan and has the power to punish banks that do not participate. Denham says the bailout plan actually hurts healthy banks like BB&T by, for example, increasing the premiums it pays the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect depositors, and increasing the costs it likely will pay the Federal Reserve Bank for overnight borrowing. “Now we are being punished by the bailout plan for having followed our values, and everyone else is being let off the hook,” he says. “The bailout plan is for the banks and investment banks that were poorly managed.” BB&T has been able to weather the credit crisis through years of putting into practice the moral values Rand spelled out in her novel Atlas Shrugged, Denham says. Under the leadership of Ken Chalk, who recently retired as chief credit officer at BB&T, the bank over the past 20 years has created a “conservative credit culture that really has shined for us these last several years,” Denham says. “And it really steered us through these crazy loans,” he says, “and we decided we were not going to make those loans, we were not going to be involved in that kind of crazy lending.” Among the principles championed in Atlas Shrugged is that of “trading” that creates a “win-win for both sides,” Denham says. “And the idea is that when we make a loan to a client, it needs to be good for them and it needs to be good for us.” Over the past 10 years, BB&T has donated over $30 million to over 30 colleges to support the moral study of capitalism, and has made it a condition of those grants that the schools require the teaching of Atlas Shrugged. “We absolutely believe that government has involved itself too much in this crisis,” Denham says. “We’re already too regulated.” But BB&T also needs to face the reality of the marketplace, he says. “We’re a business, and we’ve got shareholders and we’ve got employees,” he says. “We’re probably one of the strongest capitalized institutions in the United States. And here we are being hurt by a rescue plan that is actually a bailout for poorly managed financial companies.” As details of the bailout emerge, Americans will begin to see how reluctant players like healthy banks and unwitting players like taxpayers have been drawn into a massive financial gamble by the government. That gamble will pour billions of dollars into the financial sector that otherwise might have been used directly to address critical social problems we face. And those social problems, which are escalating in large part because of the financial crisis, are putting growing demand on nonprofits and private philanthropy.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| February 27, 2009 11:00 AM |
Selling Vs. Selling OutThe real question is not whether social investing will become real, or whether it will become a more important asset class. Social investment is growing, and its growth is in line with societal trends that are both on the rise in their acceptance and in line with the realities of limited environmental resources and economic transformation. Based on the trends I’m seeing, I’m declaring the question settled. Yes, social venture capital is both a valid emerging asset class and in the forefront in its ability to deliver scalable social impact at low cost and provide an actual financial return that helps support the mission and the enterprise. So the only question remaining is how are you going to manage exits? Nobody wants to end up like Ben and Jerry’s, where soon after a multinational acquired it, key facets of its social mission were cut from the company. What kind of social mission was lost? The ethical rule that Chunky Monkey would never have bovine growth hormone was kept under the Unilever regime; it was a value that consumers bought every time they bought a pint and was on the label. What was gone? Hidden charitable subsidization of a social mission through non-profit partner ice cream shops. At those shops, 40 percent of the workforce was composed of at-risk youth who learned from social workers and job supervisors how to have a bank account and to complete a high school equivalency exam. Exit is what matters now. The question is no longer can you build the second generation of socially responsible business, enterprises that bake their social mission into their business operations. The question is not even can those businesses make enough money to pay off investors. The question is, can the social mission survive the exit of the founders and the sale to new owners? Can it do so while still rewarding the people and the investors who took the risk to build a big business that delivers scalable social impact along with profit? Judy Wick of White Dog Café has recently sold her iconic Pittsburgh restaurant but retained the rights to the brand and the ability to swoop back in to take over if she feels the mission is being compromised. While there’s a lot to like in that approach, we at Good Capital have come up with something with our portfolio company Better World Books (BWB) that has a lot to commend it. We have created a new social impact model which carves out a 5 percent ownership stake for the company’s key literacy partners and grants stock options based upon the non profits’ ability to hit their stated literacy targets and increase the volume and quality of books collected in book drives that provide BWB with its inventory. Here’s a slide presentation on the details All the stockholders have to be satisfied if BWB sells. That means Books for Africa’s interests will have to represented at the table when the company negotiates with a buyer, if that should happen, say, five years from now. Unlike Ben and Jerry’s, where the private philanthropy of the owners was stripped away after the sale to the multinational, we will have set a price on a non profit’s meeting its literacy goals. That price will be equated with shares in BWB that have a financial value. The mission can’t really go away in this company after a sale. If BWB ever does sell to a larger company, the mission has been baked in, and the social return will be directly convertible to a financial investment. We have aligned the interests of the social mission and the financial mission in a way that has rarely been done before, perhaps never in the context of a private, for-profit company. How this will exactly play out will be determined by a mix of market conditions, BWB’s ability to execute as a fast growing business, and the ecosystem of goodwill, partners, and advisors it continues to accumulate around itself. But in this deal at least, selling should not result in selling out. The non-profits and the social mission are going to be counted in a way they’ve never been counted before.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| March 6, 2009 11:34 AM |
Remix CultureAs the recent copyright woes of Obama poster artist Shepard Fairey show, there’s a war raging over what some now are calling a new art form in the emerging Web 2.0 culture—remix. Broadly defined, remix is collage, a recombination of existing, reference images or music and video clips from popular digital culture, elements of which are mashed up into something new. As thousands of people share and produce their own mashups and remixes online, an urgent question is emerging across today’s cultural landscape: Should remix be outlawed as a violation of an artist’s or photographer’s copyright or—as long as the remix is significantly altered from the original—should remix be permitted by law to be shared freely, via social media, across the Web and in popular culture at large? At the New York Public Library last week, remixer/street artist Fairey, copyright scholar Larry Lessig, and author Steven Johnson all argued for free expression, saying remix is a form of self-expression and free speech that should be allowed to flow mostly unrestricted across today’s burgeoning digital world. “Remix is literacy in the 21st century,” Lessig said. The chief of Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, Lessig is the author of Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. He said that failing to legally protect remixes as original forms of art and expression “will make pirates of our children…We cannot kill this form of expression; we can only criminalize it, drive it underground. We can’t make [remixers] passive, we can only make them pirates.” For his part, Johnson, author of The Invention of Air, a new book about the history of information flows in American and British society, said remix has “deep roots in the Age of Enlightenment and among America’s Founding Fathers.” He said that Thomas Jefferson, no less, remixed the Bible to produce his own underground version of it; Johnson refers to that effort as “the original American remix.” Said Johnson: “Where do we think innovation and creativity come from—protecting ideas or setting them free, allowing them to circulate freely?” Fairey rounded out the talk, citing remix as one of the early 21st century’s most popular forms of free political expression. Fairey said his most “potent” remix is not his iconic, 2008 Obama Hope poster [over which he is being sued by the Associated Press and is countersuing for the right to have made it]—but his 2005 remix, Greetings from Iraq, a reference to a 1930s-era, WPA-produced Yellowstone Park tourism poster. “This referenced something that advertised a geyser to go see; I’ve made that geyser into an explosion, figuring it as something to go run from,” Fairey said. “...Remix is all about making references; references are how you establish a point of view in popular culture, and they are crucial to my work as an artist.” What do you think? [Fairey’s 2005 remix, left; the original Yellowstone poster, right]
Here are some of Lessig’s examples of popular remix, which he included as part of his talk:
What do you think? Protect remixes or crack down on them?
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| April 2, 2009 09:57 AM |
When More Mission Equals More MoneyI’ve got an investment thesis for the kind of business that I think will work best under current economic, climactic and social conditions. I’m seeing a new opportunity for a spectrum of businesses that will produce more revenue at higher margins by being more tied to their social and environmental mission. More mission focus, more margin more sustainably. Here are the foundational assumptions behind my current thesis. As I’m using the word, it means more than a hypothesis, but not proven enough to be called a theory. Assumptions:
We are not going to recreate an economy based on collective financial and cultural deception that pretends we can grow beyond the carrying costs of the planet. Deep and structural changes are underway in our economy and our culture. It’s not that we have become suddenly wiser. It’s that we suddenly have less money because we have been collectively complicit in an economic system that has lied to us about the true costs of our actions. The culprit is not Madoff or the men from AIG. They sold us the growth story we wanted to buy. It was a collective, participatory deception; markets are co-created realities. We are now reaping the fruit of the lies we all wanted to be true. But I am far from pessimistic. A dose of reality in time is a lot better than riding a false myth down the tubes. The good news is that I think the economic system we will build next will be one in which environmental and social costs will no longer be externalities; costs that get pushed off the balance sheet. The cost of doing business to the planet and at least the human costs of climate change will now be factored in. For someone whose main motivation is to see the market become a tool to fight poverty and injustice, that is good news. It means that poverty is now closer to getting onto the balance sheet. At the micro level, that means that where I work as a professional investor I am looking for businesses that make more money in times when customers have less money to spend, when buying patterns are factoring in the truth that we won’t all be able to have more things and have new things all of the time. That means I am interested in businesses that make more margin when people effectively share scarce resources: non profit and for profit businesses like Zipcar and City Car Share, where people rent a car or truck for just the hours they need them. Other models include coworking, where entrepreneurs share space and resources. Examples include coworking sites like Ned in Portland and non profit shared garden projects like Alemany Farm. At the heart of these new models that involve cooperative use of finite resources is a sharing dynamic; to maximize their efficiency, there needs to be an incentive to get over old ideas of single person, single business or nuclear family ownership of things like cars, offices or gardens. The best way to enable efficient sharing, I believe, is to encourage allegiance to a cause or a movement. That’s why I like the global network of coworking sites linked to The Hub (the-hub.net). It’s coworking for social entrepreneurs, or, as they call them in order to avoid getting stuck in the definition wars, social innovators. If you do it right, the way they do in the Hub’s network, the more you are true to the mission, the more aware and in tune the operators and hosts are in creating the proper social dynamic that facilitates match making and sharing; the closer social entrepreneurs want to be to each other within the work space; and the more they talk to each other about what they are working on and who the person next to them should meet who could help them. If you manage that hosting magic right, if you listen to the community well, that equals a higher density of usage of the space, which maximizes the revenue per square foot. So the more true you are to the mission, the higher the margin, all based on the sharing of resources that we now realize are scarcer. And by sharing space, buying it in cell-phone-like plans of 20 to 100 hours per month, the entrepreneur cuts her costs while lowering her businesses carbon footprint by up to two thirds. There are more than a dozen affiliates in The Hub’s network, from London to Johannesburg to Cairo to Sao Palo to Amsterdam. We’re launching the first US member of The Hub’s network in San Francisco. And I’m working with a team from the green MBA program at the Dominican University to find other businesses where effective sharing equals more revenue at higher margin. So here are the two pillars of the model, as I see it emerging: You build your business based on sharing scarce resources in a time when your customers have less money, and you dedicate your business to serve a movement where sharing comes easily. Then you build your revenue model to reduce financial and environmental costs for your customers (individual and collectively) while increasing your margins as a provider. The more you focus on your mission, the truer you are to your community’s mission, and the higher your margins. That’s the model that makes sense to me these days.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| June 22, 2009 09:24 AM |
Doing the right thing is job one for nonprofitsNonprofits need to raise their sights, move beyond their panic-driven goal of simply surviving for one more day, and start leading America out of its economic crisis. Because that crisis is rooted in a widespread breakdown in ethics across the government, for-profit and giving sectors, nonprofits need to lead by example in doing the right thing. That is the view of Tim Delaney, the president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, who says nonprofits can best serve their mission and communities by “focusing on their core missions and then acting with purposeful attention to ethical leadership.” The first step, he says, is for nonprofits to “see the broader context in which they operate” and then set high ethical standards and build them into their thinking, planning and operations. Speaking last week to a lunch ‘n’ learn workshop in Charlotte, N.C., sponsored by the Philanthropy Journal, Delaney said a widespread “moral meltdown” led to America’s current “economic meltdown.” To show the context in which massive ethical failures have eroded public trust, he cited dozens of recent headlines about scandals in all sectors, often involving groups “previously seen as pillars of community values.” To help America rebuild its economy, Delaney says, nonprofits need to lead the way in “rebuilding the public’s trust that has been breached.” Rebuilding public trust, he says, starts with organizations intentionally gearing themselves to make sure they always do the right thing. Delaney suggests 12 steps for creating a responsible ethics program. Those steps range from recognizing the need to set ethical expectations, naming an ethics officer and assessing the current state of the organization’s ethics to involving all stakeholders in developing an ethics policy, continually monitoring compliance and tweaking the policy, and making sure the organization’s leaders serve as ethical role models. In the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, nonprofits face rising operating costs, growing demand for services, and the fear that individual donors, foundations and corporations will cut back their giving. Instead of panicking and worrying only about the survival of their own institution, nonprofits can best serve their missions and communities by setting high ethical standards and organizational aspirations, Delaney says. By doing the right thing and truly practicing what they preach, nonprofits can help lead America out of its moral and economic mess and move on to the job of addressing the symptoms and causes of our most urgent social and global problems.
Posted by Jason Chua
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| February 28, 2010 10:26 AM |
Donor, DearestTimes are tough for old-line causes, but let’s be frank. It’s not just the economy that’s beating up today’s traditional charities. Donors are, too. Truth is, donors have never been so fickle, nor so ambivalent. Now more than ever, they want details about the impact their money is having but don’t want to pay charities to do the analysis that will tell them. They’re loving the instant gratification they’re getting when using new click-and-donate forms of online giving [text-messages during the 9-day campaign by the Red Cross to engage mobile supporters brought in $26 million,] but surveys show that many younger donors, especially, would rather spend $10 a pop now (because they can) versus committing to higher amounts later. And despite all the talk about collaboration in the sector today, many donors still would much rather give their $10 to a Haitian quake victim than to the middleman charity administering those donations, just to keep the lights on. And that’s not all. As the use of the Net and social networks in fundraising are encouraging micro-giving – donations in smaller increments—it’s getting harder for some organizations to pinpoint who, precisely, their donors really are. A recent survey of six progressive nonprofits shows that at least one-third of their text-donors unsubscribe from charity text-messaging lists shortly after a campaign, partly due to concerns over the cost of incoming messages. Governments aren’t helping. According to New York Times journalist Stephanie Strom, there is rising sentiment in the states and on Capitol Hill that maybe charities (perhaps in part due to the chronic pay and charity fraud scandals in recent years) no longer deserve all of the tax breaks they’re getting. “As states and localities contend with dwindling tax receipts,” Strom told a recent NYU philanthropy conference, Charities on Trial, “they are looking at the tax preferences enjoyed by the nonprofit sector and are beginning to ask whether those preferences are good public policy.” [Not convinced? Pennsylvania recently tried to impose a small payroll tax on nonprofits; Kansas is considering reducing nonprofits’ tax exemption from sales taxes in that state, and many other states are eyeing the property tax exemption.] But perhaps one of the most unsettling behavioral trends by today’s donors, says Strom, is their willingness to switch alliances to for-profit causes, apparently favoring the end results over the means. Newer forms of philanthropy have been quick to promote the use of for-profit models for social good, and the case they make is persuasive, Strom says. “Why shouldn’t GE get some sort of tax break for creating a system that better enables the management of health records, a system that would benefit nonprofit hospitals? “ she said. “When Citibank provides mortgage financing to low-income families, why shouldn’t that portion of its operations be eligible for the same tax treatment as a local community loan bank gets?” Trouble is, Strom told the NYU conference, some of the projects seeking funding on some of the new online giving sites—such as Global Giving, for example—are corporate programs. Donors making gifts to support those projects “are, effectively, underwriting corporate social responsibility,” Strom says. “In other words, companies are using gifts for which a donor has received a tax deduction to finance their corporate philanthropy – something they used to have to fund out of their profit streams.” Meanwhile, she says, the Gates Foundation, among other private grantmakers, are starting to devote a small portion of some of their grants to partnerships with for-profit companies ranging from MTV to JPMorgan Chase and Merck, Strom says. Is this right? Should American taxpayers be co-funding some of these corporate programs? Charities, in reaction to some of these trends, Strom says, feel like they need to “look more like business in analysis and evaluation of their impact. … Fundraisers, consultants and experts are now appropriating the language of business to try to explain what nonprofits achieve. What is social investing if it’s not philanthropy? And is SASIX, the South African Social Investment Exchange really a capital marketplace? Its Web site (www.sasix.co.za/) says SASIX ‘makes carefully selected social development projects available as investment opportunities with a social return.’ It sounds a lot like the materials I just got from Charles Schwab.’” Is Strom correct? As the philanthropic landscape continues to shift and redefine society’s approach to social problem-solving, it’s clear that our notions of philanthropy – and the decades-old regulations that govern it —also need to change. But how much change is too much? Donors —not just the charities, themselves — need to be a greater part of that conversation.
Posted by Samantha Penabad
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| January 31, 2006 12:41 AM |
Money Laundering & Moral LeadershipHave charities become money-launderers, knowingly accepting stolen goods? So far over 80 federal and state legislators who took funds from indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff have rushed to send “suspect money” to charities. While some of these funds fittingly went to Native American organizations—since tribal officials were the source of much of the corrupt thieves’ wealth—the Boy Scouts, Salvation Army, American Heart Association, Pentagon Memorial Fund, Christian missions, veterans organizations, hurricane relief agencies, animal shelters, social service groups and more have benefited from the hasty unloading of campaign contributions and other compromising lobbyist largesse. Does dedicating the fruits of crime to a charitable purpose cleanse them of their taint? Does it absolve those who profited from the original crime and might even have been complicit in its commission? Does it conveniently bring the matter to a speedier close in the public’s mind, taking some of the heat off possible unindicted coconspirators? Does it remove an obligation to make whole the victims of crime, no matter how needy and na?�ve they might be? So it would seem! While I have heard some argue that there is little “clean money,” it’s hard for me to believe that so many nonprofit organizations have failed to draw some lines here. Too few (beyond the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy) have called for inquiry into how Abramoff was able to go unchecked in his use of nonprofits and foundations as active components in his corruption machine. Now, too many abet politicians trying to scramble out of the mud in their desperate stretch to find higher ground. Aren’t charities supposed to be grounded in the best of values? Beyond services, shouldn’t we expect moral leadership from the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, particularly in times when other public and private institutions fail us? Shouldn’t we insist on it? Posted by Mark Rosenman
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| March 27, 2006 01:27 AM |
Day for Night for America’s CharitiesSo many pigs, of late, sidling up to the charity trough. In a post ironically titled The New Philanthropy, my colleague at Philanthropybeat counts up the number of recent cases of those who took advantage of the tax code and lax IRS oversight to enrich themselves and their families. Add to that list, perhaps, the case of Edwin A. Buckham, senior advisor to former House Whip Tom Delay, who received more than a third of the $3 million he collected for the U.S. Family Network, a charity created by Buckham to advance “pro-family” political causes in Congress. This case, involving Jack Abramoff and other Republican operatives, is still under investigation by the FBI, so perhaps it’s too early to say oink, oink. At the glory end of the shame-glory continuum we have philanthropists like Tracy Gary, a Pillsbury heiress who at age 21 inherited a $1.3 million trust fund from her parents. She subsequently gave the bulk of her fortune ($1 million of it) to charity and committed an additional 70 percent of her annual salary as a philanthropy consultant to worthy causes. Ms. Gary recently launched a new initiative, Inspired Legacies, to provide “a , space in which donors, nonprofits, advisors, and citizens can meet to transform themselves, philanthropy, and society.” Fellow philanthropy blogger, Phil Cubeta, has been helping Tracy get her new venture up and running. Stories like Tracy’s and those of the hundreds of thousands of people who toil selflessly in philanthropy’s fields seldom make front page news. These people do their work in broad daylight, yet by a trick of the media lens, appear to be surrounded by an impenetrable gloom. Their light thus obscured, the charitable sector makes easy pickings for the wolves who have a much greater feeling for scandal than for the great good that the sector inspires and produces. _____ This entry is cross-posted at White Courtesy Telephone, a blog covering nonprofits, foundations, and philanthropy. Posted by Albert Ruesga
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| October 10, 2006 06:34 AM |
The Sham of ResponsibilityIt seems we’ve come to a point where the notion of personal responsibility in public life evokes little more than nostalgia among the elderly for a time when there were more operant values – be it in government or the nonprofit sector. House Speaker Dennis Hastert “accepts responsibility” but sidesteps what appears to be his complicity in covering up the salacious and inappropriate behavior of a colleague, seemingly preferring the partisan maintenance of a Republican majority over the protection of young congressional pages. Yet for Hastert, accepting responsibility means nothing – it has no cost and serves no purpose; he maintains his position and pays no price! In something of a parallel failure of personal responsibility in the nonprofit sector, Louise Bryson maintains the board chair of the J. Paul Getty Trust after its president resigns in disgrace and the California attorney general confirms that that was the right thing for him to have done – financial misdeeds, misjudgments and what some might see as his own sophisticated version of salacious behavior, all on Ms. Bryson’s watch. Not only is there no substantive mea culpa heard from the board’s officers or members, they even refuse to reveal details of the misdeeds though the broad outlines are known, still keeping the wagons circled in their own variant on partisan protection. And the Getty folks are not alone in the nonprofit sector. The charitable community may not approach the soulless depths of politicians, but I fear we have the potential to spiral further down. The public officials who brought the world the Iraq debacle model the worst by continuing to try to lie their way out of personal responsibility for that human, political and economic catastrophe. Yet, with increasing public attention to the real and perceived abuses of charitable privilege by hospitals, philanthropies, disaster relief groups, religious organizations and others, unless nonprofit and foundation leaders are more willing to speak the truth about their own mistakes and those of their colleagues, we may soon find ourselves swirling around in just such a flushing vortex. To maintain the public trust and confidence, the nonprofit sector must be accountable for – and beyond – what laws and regulations require (as a resource, see Independent Sector). That necessitates personal responsibility by volunteers, staff and especially the board. When we fail to meet basic standards of vigilance and due diligence, of conduct, when we fail to behave ethically, it is appropriate to feel embarrassment, and it is appropriate also to act on that feeling, to make it manifest and real. A failure of responsibility must have consequences or it is a sham. To pull a facile Hastert is to continue to fail the public whose stewardship we are to serve as nonprofit volunteers, staff or board – or as public officials. Accountability, woefully, sometimes requires shame – and shame requires action.
Posted by Mark Rosenman
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| March 19, 2007 05:00 AM |
Exxon Mobil, Stanford, and the Rescinded GiftThe question of “tainted money” has been around since at least the middle ages, when charitable donations were often made with the explicit purpose of shortening one’s time in purgatory. The old question arose in a dramatic way right here at home last week when an influential donor to Stanford, Steven Bing, withdrew his own promised $2.5 million gift to the university after seeing a TV ad in which Exxon Mobil proclaimed its concern for the environment by announcing that it “has teamed up with Stanford University to find breakthrough technologies that deliver more energy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” The claim was based on a 2002 commitment by the company in which Stanford will receive up to $100 million in grant money over 10 years to support climate and energy research. Bing’s action raises a host of interesting ethical issues about giving and receiving: Does the source matter in receiving donated funds? One critic, Jennifer Washburn, worries that “Stanford is allowing its academic brand name to be distorted by its outside relationship with corporate donors.” How close can universities and corporate funders get before the university is seen to be selling its name? And how much influence should any donor have, including Bing in this case, in steering university policy?
Posted by SSIR Editor
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Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of 
Kevin Jones is a cofounding principal of 
Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for 
Bruce Sievers is a lecturer and visiting scholar at Stanford University, and the former executive director of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund. His work in philanthropy has included serving on the board of directors of the Council on Foundations and participating in Council on Foundations delegations to the Soviet Union and the Baltics. He continues his professional involvement in philanthropy as senior fellow with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and as consulting director with the Skirball Foundation.