There was a tizzy of speculation in January 2008 when Luis Ubinas
was named the new (and ninth) President of the Ford Foundation.
His résumé seemed to be of the garden variety: he was young and
Hispanic, born in the Bronx, educated at Harvard, an Obama
contributor, married to a professor of Human Sexuality Studies at
San Francisco State. He seemed to have punched most of the
tickets, eh? What set off the speculation was that Ubinas also
held an MBA and had spent 18 years as a management consultant
with the pin-stripe firm of McKinsey & Co. (Some of his most
important clients were newspaper companies, which, coincident
with, but presumably unrelated to, his consultancy, plunged into
death spirals.) Ubinas’s management background seemed to suggest
that Ford might be changing course and preparing to adopt a more
businesslike approach to its vast philanthropy. It also suggested
that Ford might be trying to rehabilitate the “MBA mystique” —
the 1980s conceit that a skilled manager can manage anything and
thus needs no grounding in the particular industry under his
management. Ubinas was a textbook example of the type. He had no
experience in grantmaking, but he had just been installed as the
most influential grantmaker in the world. Both of these
suggestions caused a frisson of disquietude to pass
through the upper echelons of Ford and the pack of likeminded
foundations that have traditionally padded along behind it.
When Ubinas arrived at Ford’s rosewood palace in New York, he
assumed the lowest of all possible profiles. He announced almost
immediately that he would spend the next year meeting staff,
touring Ford’s international offices, communing with grantees
current and prospective and, generally, thinking large thoughts.
A listening tour, if you will, scaled to dimensions that would
excite even the record keepers at Guinness. And then off he went,
rarely to be seen or heard outside a tight circle of Ford
associates. (At an annual salary of $675,000, some Ford
executives were heard to express the preference that he flash a
bit of his much-hyped chops as a quick study.)
Somewhere along the world tour, word began to filter back to
headquarters that Ubinas had experienced an afflatus. He had seen
the future of grantmaking, it was rumored, and he had begun to
draw the blueprint for the next great iteration of Ford
philanthropy. Excitement simmered and then boiled. Nothing warms
the bureaucratic blood like word of The New Plan. With roll of
drum and trill of horn, the Ubinas vision-thing was released last
month. The details were leaked, atavistically, to the New
York Times, so we quote from the story by
the Times’ excellent beat reporter, Stephanie Strom:
The overhaul will bring additional focus to what Ford calls
“lines of work,” which are individual initiatives managed by
individual program officers that have at times numbered more
than 200, by condensing them into 35 new lines of work handled
by groups of program officers around the world. Those teams
will report to a director with responsibility for several of
those 35 areas. Thus a single line of work devoted to advancing
and supporting Native American arts and culture has been melded
into a new, broader line of work supporting and promoting
native, indigenous and minority contemporary artists.… the
overhaul has not included a staff reduction.
There’s more, but trust us, not much. Kudos to Ms. Strom for
keeping a straight face. What Ubinas has given his colleagues is,
yes, the old McKinsey Shuffle. In the world of management
consulting, this type of an org-chart makeover has conventionally
served three purposes: a) it has bought time for hapless
management; b) it has asserted temporary authority over a
restless staff and c) it has disguised the absence of an
organizing principle behind a blizzard of boxes, graphics, pie
charts and squiggly lines. The opinion is firming up that Ubinas
managed to hit all three birds with the single stone. (The New
Plan, we note without surprise, has met with a deafening silence
inside Ford itself, a silence owing on the one hand to a sense of
anticlimax and on the other to intramural anxiety. The real power
in a nonprofit bureaucracy is the power to decide who reports to
whom and Ubinas has just moved everybody’s cheese.)
It is said by Ubinas’s supporters, of course, that since he’s
been on the job only eighteen months he still deserves the
benefit of the doubt. Perfectly reasonable, but he is off to a
slow start, a career-cloudingly slow start. Indeed, there’s only
one bright spot for him at this point: he has developed a new and
fervent political following. By restating Ford’s mission as
“social justice,” he has begun to tilt Ford away from his
predecessor’s centrist-liberalism and back toward the hard-Left
policies of an earlier generation of Ford leadership.
Two of his rare public appearances have excited special
attention. Asked by one interlocutor what motivates him as a
philanthropist, Ubinas replied that it was his sense of the
“creeping unfairness” of American life. What kind of
philanthropist, you might ask, would look out over the vast
stretches of human misery — the continental swaths of disease
and illiteracy and hunger and strife — and single out for
priority attention the problem of American “unfairness”? Only a
man in the grip of ideological fever, the Left seems to hope.
Another interviewer asked Ubinas about his special interest in
the Census. Was his interest just residue from the consultant
gig, a technocratic fascination with economic trends and social
patterns? Or an interest in psephology, perhaps? No and no. As
Ubinas explained, “If there is any single thing a community
foundation can do right now to benefit the people they are
supposed to be serving, it is to make sure that every one of
those people is counted because every one of those people comes
with thousands of dollars in Federal entitlements.” Ah yes, the
Census as a tool to max out government welfare spending. If you
don’t recognize it, folks, that’s ACORN talk. And the hardcore
“community organizers” think they’ve just received a secret
handshake from the President of the Ford Foundation.
Buckle up. This could be a long, sad chapter in the checkered
history of the Ford Foundation.
