Democracy in serious trouble, says Rajiv Vinnakota, and he is upending the mission of the 75-year-old Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation to respond.
Originally created at Princeton University to draw G.I.s returning from World War II into academia, the organization has provided academic scholarships to more than 27,000 fellows. It also played a substantial role in developing the field of women’s studies and funded several scholarship programs to support Black scholars.
In November, the fellowship’s board voted to remove Wilson’s name, following several programs at Princeton, where the former U.S. president served as president for eight years. The institute said in a statement that Wilson’s “racist policies and beliefs are fundamentally incompatible with our organization’s values and work.”
The nonprofit will now be called the Institute for Citizens & Scholars. The name change isn’t just the removal of an aspect of the organization’s racist legacy — it also points toward the organization’s future. Vinnakota, who took over as president in the summer of 2019, would like to create a new field of research and grant making dedicated to making Americans better citizens.
Before he took over the institute, which has a $13 million annual budget, he spent a year meeting with foundation leaders from across the political spectrum. He believes that the political divide in America, made clear during the election, requires big foundation investments to mend.
What really worries me is our inability to find common ground and the tone of the rhetoric being used.
Vinnakota has spent his career focused on K-12 education, first as co-founder of the SEED Foundation and then as executive vice president for youth and engagement at the Aspen Institute. He recently spoke with the Chronicle about his plans. His remarks, which were made before the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol, have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Before you took over as president of the foundation, your career focused on K-12 education. Why did you switch to civic engagement?
I’m an immigrant. I was born in Switzerland, and I moved here when I was 8. My family came because we believe in the ideals that are at the core of what our nation is about. And those things are now up for debate.
There are serious questions about the strength of our democracy. What really worries me is our inability to find common ground and the tone of the rhetoric being used. At its core, a constitutional democracy like ours is dependent upon norms and behaviors — the ways in which people interact with each other. It’s dependent on the ability that I have to walk up the street and interact with people who come from very different backgrounds or have different political ideologies and know that we’re all in this together. Those things are breaking apart. They have been for a while, but now it is just staring us in the face.
Clearly, civic education doesn’t seem to be having the effect that foundations that had invested millions of dollars over time were hoping that it would have. So I wanted to find out what the major tensions were, what possible opportunities there were for the major players. I want to get a sense of the landscape.
How should foundations support civic education differently?
When we talk about civic education, we look at it way too narrowly. We should really call it citizen development. When you think about how we develop citizens in this country, it goes beyond civics or government class. It happens in high school, but it also happens in higher-ed, and it happens in community organizations and religious institutions. It happens at home. It happens online. You learn how to be a citizen in multiple locations and through different experiences.
Citizen development requires more than teaching American history and how government works. It’s not just knowledge acquisition. It involves social and emotional learning, character development, and service. So citizen development is so much broader than the way that we usually think about civic education in this myopic, narrow sense.
We need to make much more sustained, deep, long-term investments in our democracy.
So I started to use the term civic learning to talk about this field in a much broader sense. Not education, but learning, which is much broader and has more dimensions.
You brought together several dozen grant makers in 2019 to map a path forward. Are foundations on board?
This space is severely undercapitalized. There are many players who want to fund something very specific and discrete as opposed to thinking about broader development.
Some of the foundations I brought together to discuss civic learning were more conservative organizations like Koch or Walton, Daniels or Templeton. And some were progressive like Mellon, Ford, Carnegie, and Hewlett, as well as some of the more recent major funders in education like Bloomberg Philanthropies and Jeff Bezos.
There are areas in which we disagree, but there’s also a set of projects that we may want to take on to build the field. We want to develop young people who are well-informed, productively engaged for the common good, and hopeful about democracy in America. We want to build a new narrative and identity that put citizen development at the center of education so that citizen learning becomes as important as STEM.
How did the pandemic and the election shape foundation interest?
The idea was that these foundations would all step up once we identified the goals that we wanted to achieve collectively. Because of all the real-time challenges of the pandemic that required foundations to pivot and because of the election, we’re only now engaging in those conversations.
Since the election, the number of calls I’ve gotten from foundations and individual donors has gone through the roof. People are definitely ready to engage.
We need to make much more sustained, deep, long-term investments in our democracy. We have a divided nation that fundamentally thinks about issues in different ways, sometimes even pulls from different facts and doesn’t have many shared experiences like the greatest generation with World War II or the next generation with Sputnik and focusing on getting a man to the moon.
So how do you get people to share a sense of purpose, even if their experiences are different or they are using different sets of facts?
You try to find the common ground. Even if you don’t agree with norms and behaviors on the other side, there are things that we agree on. There are certain aspects of the American ideal that we all believe in. Things like children and their future that we all believe in. And so you use that as a starting point.
There are many more organizations that do this work really well. What I’m trying to do is to create a field so we can figure out which approaches actually work.
How does changing the organization’s name fit into the new line of work?
We have to go fundraise for our work every year, and we have to go fundraise for each of our projects. So we’re being very clear about what our North Star is in terms of how we think about ourselves. And I think that that clarity helps in this moment. If we want to move forward in civic engagement, we need to first look at our own house.
