The Latest in a Life of Firsts: Carnegie President Louise Richardson Talks About Her Role
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Louise Richardson, Courtesy of the Carnegie Corporation.
Dame Louise Richardson was the first woman to lead the University of St. Andrews, the first woman head of Oxford University, and as of January 2023, the first woman president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Richardson came to the role after the death of Vartan Gregorian, who was Carnegie’s president for 24 years. Since Richardson served on the Carnegie Corporation’s board for a decade before being named president, she says taking the job was a bit like coming home. Born in Ireland, Richardson, who was first in her family to go to college, was a professor at Harvard for 20 years before being appointed principal and vice-chancellor of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She led Oxford University as vice-chancellor from 2016 to 2022.
Despite all the border crossings and 14 years in the U.K., Richardson still considers herself Irish. “I think you’re imprinted in your youth with experiences that influence your view of the world,” she said. “My academic field has been international relations, and that is entirely influenced by my sense of being a citizen of a small country, a country with a much-contested past. So my worldview is very much that of Ireland, but my home is where my family is, and right now, my husband and two of our three children are in the U.S.”
The Carnegie Corporation was created in 1911 by industrialist Andrew Carnegie; it is one of the oldest and most established philanthropic institutions on the planet. With over $4 billion in assets in 2022, according to Candid, the corporation’s largest funding area is education, while international peace and security, civic participation, and the social sciences and humanities are also priorities. Other program areas include voting and immigration, and African scholarship.
Andrew Carnegie, the wealthiest man in the world during his lifetime, has sometimes been called “the father of modern philanthropy.” Richardson considers it a privilege and a responsibility to carry on his legacy. “I have always admired Andrew Carnegie’s ideals and the fact that he resolved so long ago to simply give away all his wealth,” she said. “You’ve heard his famous line: ‘the man who dies rich dies disgraced.’”
Like Carnegie, who founded 2,509 libraries, Richardson is a champion of the humanities. She is on the board of the renowned Booker Prize Foundation, and is an avid fiction reader in her spare time. In 2022, when the Financial Times asked her if British universities should be educating fewer humanities students and more scientists, she replied, “I really regret the tendency to equate the value of an education with the size of the salary of the graduate. Our medics will figure out how to lengthen our lives, but it's the humanities that will make those longer lives worth living.”
In a recent conversation, Richardson talked about her new role, current and upcoming initiatives at the Carnegie Corporation, polarized politics in the U.S. and around the globe, and what it was like to be appointed Dame (her official title is Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), the female equivalent of a knight.
Can you talk about your decision to join Carnegie as president?
I really care about the institution of Carnegie and admire what Carnegie has sought to achieve. If you look at the three pillars of our work — promoting peace, advancing education and strengthening democracy — my academic work is all about international security and promoting peace. And I joke about the fact that I went off to university at the age of 17 and I only left last year. I’ve spent my entire career at university, so I care deeply about education. And then strengthening democracy — what could be more important these days? So in that sense, it was an easy decision. Having led two wonderful universities, I suppose the obvious next step for me would have been to come back to the U.S. and run an American university. But I thought, I've had two wonderful experiences; it's hard to top that, so let's do something different. Something that still involves education, that still involves the things that I care about.
What has the transition been like? Is the day-to-day work completely different from what you’ve done before?
It is utterly different from academia and different from running a university. Certainly, a university on the scale of Oxford is a much bigger entity; my annual operating budget was about $3 billion, there are 25,000 students, and 15,000 staff — you're managing a large, very very complex institution with a global footprint. And of course, you're constantly trying to forge partnerships and raise funds. Whereas coming to philanthropy, you're on the other side, it's focused on a more narrowly defined mission. We're in the extraordinarily privileged position where our job is to go out and identify people who care about the things we care about and support them to achieve their ends, which are also ours. And I do feel, because it's so privileged, a real, acute sense of responsibility to spend this money wisely, and to make sure we're getting the maximum impact for the resources we're spending. I see us as the stewards of the resources Carnegie made and entrusted us to spend.
Perhaps the biggest surprise for me is the way I spend my days. I describe it as, on the one hand, getting discouraged when you spend half your day talking about just terrible problems — whether it's state of public education, or the state of national security, or polarization in politics. And then you spend the other half of your day talking to amazing people who are trying to address these problems. The goal is to reduce the delta between the two, but that delta is really vast. We're not necessarily going to fix things, but we can make them better for significant numbers of people. And so the job is to maximize the number of people and to optimize the extent to which we can make it better.
Are you anticipating any big changes in the direction of the Carnegie Corporation or its priorities going forward?
We won’t be moving away from peace, education and strengthening democracy in terms of priorities. But the one area where I have pivoted is on the whole question of polarization. Having been outside this country for 14 years, to come back and see the polarization here and its pace of acceleration has been really quite shocking.
I think prior to the pandemic, Britain was just about as polarized as the U.S. Brexit is a case in point; it was a major national act of self-harm if ever there was one. But post-pandemic Britain, I think, is much less polarized than the U.S., and I think one of the reasons for that is the existence of unifying institutions. The BBC, for example. Both the left and the right love to criticize the BBC, but throughout the pandemic, everybody in the country turned on their television at six o'clock to listen to the chief medical officer or the prime minister or one of the ministers tell us all what was happening. People relied heavily on that single, trusted source of information. The other institution was the National Health Service — the country’s health system. The NHS really creaked under the pressure of the pandemic, but it was absolutely, rigorously fair in its distribution of the vaccine — nobody got it before their age cohort, from the Queen on down.
I don’t think there are those kinds of unifying institutions here in the U.S. I think polarization is altogether worse here and it threatens everything we try to accomplish. So at Carnegie, I have sought to introduce polarization as the lens through which we look at our grantmaking.
One of the signature programs we’ve launched is a new focus for the Carnegie Fellows Program. We are going to fund 30 academics a year, for two years each, who are working on the issue of political polarization in the U.S. It is a way to mine academia for ideas about how we understand this phenomenon, and also how we mitigate it and rebuild the forces of social cohesion. And we hope to get ideas that will then influence our grantmaking.
We've also upped our contribution to teaching civics in schools. Through our education program, we've committed $1.5 million to civics education and we've committed $3 million to national service initiatives. Because I think today, there are fewer opportunities for meaningful interaction across race and class and regions, so we hope that having opportunities to work together will break down barriers. I also hope that it will encourage young people to value our democracy more. If you look at polls, young peoples’ attitudes toward democracy are really quite sobering. It's understandable, given the failures of democracy, but still quite sobering. I think if people have to contribute more to their democracy, they might appreciate it more.
We’re also participating in the Press Forward initiative to revitalize local journalism, again, to engage more people in their local communities.
So these are all different initiatives that come under the rubric of trying to rebuild social cohesion, and we intend to do more in the future. Also, when we look at our grants, we are asking ourselves for the first time, are we somehow unwittingly contributing to polarization in the things we're supporting? And if so, how do we prevent that from happening?
Are you worried about the survival of democracy in the U.S. and around the world?
Absolutely. There is a lot to worry about. But Antonio Gramsci had a quote: “Pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will.” That’s my perspective.
At St. Andrews and Oxford, you worked to boost admission for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and others who have traditionally been excluded from college. Will that be a priority for you at Carnegie?
Oh, absolutely. I see education as the cure to most of our problems. Getting access to education for the largest number of students has always been a priority of mine. I come from a family of seven children in rural Ireland. Two of my three brothers never finished high school, and their life experience has been so different from mine. That's certainly my story: I would never have gotten from where I started to where I am without the education I've had, and I want to make sure as many people as possible have an opportunity.
I think we want to refocus our education grant giving around two areas: education for civic participation and education for social and economic mobility. How do we educate young people to deal with the raft of information coming at them from all directions? How do they distinguish what's true from what isn't? This is only going to increase with ChatGPT. So we will be invested in helping students become more active, engaged citizens. That's one direction, and the other is a more traditional one of education as an engine of social mobility. That was certainly Andrew Carnegie's idea. He described education as a ladder, and he saw his role to provide a ladder for people who wanted to climb out of their current situation, as he did. He came to this country as an impoverished immigrant, he was a child laborer, he didn't have a formal education at all, but he borrowed books from a library that was owned by a local merchant and educated himself. So he believed in the power of education.
You’re the first woman to head Carnegie. You were also the first woman to lead St. Andrews and Oxford. What has it been like to be the first woman in so many roles?
It's not been an issue at Carnegie — there are so many wonderful and accomplished women in the higher echelons of philanthropy. And it’s been a great privilege to have these roles. But these jobs are lonely at the best of times, and perhaps as a woman leader, it's even a bit lonelier, because there are fewer peers around. I think there's more pressure on women; the evidence is overwhelming that women leaders are more likely to be criticized on social media, criticized for appearance and all the rest of it. I've always felt that you have to be a success as a female leader of an organization, because if you're not, there is no chance that you will be succeeded by a woman. If a man is not a success as a leader, his gender is considered irrelevant. If a woman is not considered a success, it's somehow because of her gender and she will never be succeeded by a woman. One of my personal goals is not only to be the first woman but to be succeeded by a woman. I've managed that. Actually, it's overstating it to say I managed it, because of course, I didn't choose my successors. But I was succeeded by a woman each time.
As an American with no experience of royalty and its traditions, I’m curious what it was like to be appointed Dame.
It’s a whole ceremony, but you don’t have to kneel down and get tapped on the shoulder with a sword. Instead, you have these absurdly large medals pinned to your chest. In my case, it was the King who did the investiture at Windsor Castle.
Coming from Ireland, I had to think a little about being given the title, because I’m Irish — and Irish through and through. But I felt, I'm living in Britain, I'm leading the oldest, most established British institution, so it would be churlish not to accept it. Also, you don't get these titles for what you do by yourself. The two issues for which I was recognized were my work on the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine [in 2020, Richardson negotiated a partnership with AstraZeneca to develop, manufacture and distribute the Oxford coronavirus vaccine] and for getting more disadvantaged students into both Oxford and St. Andrews. I didn't do either of those singlehandedly; there was a large team of people working very hard who were as committed as I was. So it was recognizing their work as much as my own.
