The Ford Foundation has named Heather Gerken, dean of Yale University Law School and a former Obama campaign adviser, as its next president.
Gerken, the law school’s first woman dean, will replace longtime president Darren Walker in November.
In addition to serving as an Obama campaign adviser in both the 2008 and 2012 elections, Gerken clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter.
Gerken is recognized as one of the country’s leading experts on constitutional law and election law. A founder of the “nationalist school” of federalism — which often emphasizes the importance of state sovereignty and the protection of state interests against potential overreach by the national government — she has focused her work on federalism, diversity, and dissent.
“I am deeply grateful for this opportunity and look forward to working with Ford staff and the Board of Trustees to protect democracy and the rule of law and further our mission to create a more just and fair world for everyone,” Gerken said in a statement.
Walker, who announced plans to step down last July, has led the Ford Foundation for 13 years and focused much of the foundation’s giving on the pursuit of equity.
The Ford Foundation is the one of the largest private foundations in the United States, with an endowment of $16 billion.
A Bold Choice
The selection of Gerken comes amidst an attack on progressive civil society organizations and institutions with large endowments from the Trump administration. In the first days of Trump’s second term, the White House released an executive order that attempted to snuff out diversity, equity, and inclusion programs run by federal agencies and contractors and directed federal agencies to report “illegal” DEI programs run by organizations with large endowments, including private foundations.
The administration has threatened to revoke the nonprofit status of grant makers that do not hew to its political agenda, and leaders in the White House, including Vice President JD Vance — who called the Ford Fondation “a cancer” on society — have made clear their antipathy toward large, progressive foundations.
By selecting a leading scholar in the field of democracy and constitutional law, the Ford Foundation has shown “it knows what time it is,” wrote Ian Bassin, president of Protect Democracy in an email.
“For an organization like Ford, that is already in the Trump Admin’s crosshairs, to make clear democracy and the rule of law are our sacred obligation to protect, I hope it sends a signal to every other American boardroom — from academia to philanthropy to Wall Street — that preserving our republic must be a non-negotiable priority.”
Nicholas Turner, president of the Vera Institute, a criminal justice nonprofit that has seen its federal funding yanked by the Trump administration, serves on a Yale Law School leadership advisory board. He credits Gerken with taking a broad, strategic approach to increasing diversity among students by focusing on reaching out to veterans, first generation college students, and Pell grant recipients.
Turner said that Gerken, who in 2009 published a book called The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System Is Failing and How to Fix It, is an ideal leader during a time of unsettling chaos in U.S. politics.
“We find ourselves at a moment where the Constitution is under siege, where the commitment to rule of law is under siege, where well-established commitments to a truly inclusive society are under siege and being disparaged,” Turner said in an interview. “Heather is a scholar and a practitioner who is committed to the protection of all of those things.”
Michael Waldman, president of the the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and who served with Gerken on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, said her expertise on finding practical solutions and her in-depth expertise on democracy law and federalism will serve the Ford Foundation well.
“It can be easy to be mesmerized by what’s going on in Washington or by what’s going on in the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said. “But so much of what goes right or wrong in government and law and policy takes place in the states.”
Nonprofit Expertise
Gerken, who serves on the board of the Mellon Foundation, founded and runs a local government law clinic, the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project. Law students in the clinic, who partner with staff from the City Attorney’s office, participated in the landmark case that paved the way for legalizing same-sex marriage in California, won settlements from opioid manufacturers, and filed suit against gift card scammers.
At Yale, she offered the first full-tuition scholarships for students from low-income backgrounds, increased veteran student representation from 1 percent to 10 percent, and significantly improved the number of students who are the first in their family to attend college, according to a statement from the Ford Foundation.
The Ford Foundation statement also said she led the withdrawal of major law schools from the U.S. News and World Report ranking in response to concerns that the ranking’s methodology negatively impacted support for public interest law careers, need-based aid, and recruiting students from working-class backgrounds.
Amir Pasic, Eugene R. Tempel Dean of the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, said that Gerken’s willingness to push for change in school rankings suggests she is willing to fight for new ideas — a talent that may be especially important as the role and structure of civil society organizations comes under increased scrutiny.
“Given her style of embracing change and moving forward, my sense is that Ford is getting ready to participate in remaking what rules and norms [govern] the future of our philanthropic and nonprofit sector,” Pasic said.
Michael Hartmann, senior fellow at the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank focusing on philanthropy, doesn’t expect much change.
In an email, he called Gerken’s pick “disappointingly unsurprising” in its adherence to the status quo. Gerkin’s Ivy League pedigree and her association with the Mellon Foundation validate critics of progressive “Big Philanthropy” who say foundation leaders are drawn from the same pool of leaders of swanky institutions, he said.
“It sure doesn’t seem as if the search was ‘casting a wide net,’ or at least one wider than would have been expected by skeptics of Big Philanthropy’s insular elitism,” he wrote.
Note: The Ford Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
