In April 2021, Samsher Singh Gill, who goes by Sam, became the third president of the Doris Duke Foundation, leaving his post as senior vice president of the Knight Foundation to head the $2 billion-plus grantmaker established by the last will and testament of the namesake tobacco heiress and socialite.
Almost exactly two years later, Gill joined five other top philanthropic leaders in writing an op-ed arguing for “pluralism” in the sector, in part to stave off supposed threats to funders’ freedom. Their argument immediately ignited a firestorm of conversation, more than any piece of sector commentary in recent memory.
When I was invited to speak to Gill recently, it felt like a good time to check in. I had lots of questions for him, such as how his foundation was handling the payments on the bonds his predecessor had issued during COVID. (Short answer: “It’s gone well.”)
But I particularly wanted to hear about that op-ed.
I wanted to understand what led him to be so sure, as the op-ed put it, that “We behave as if the foundations and individual donors who take stances with which we disagree are also committed to the betterment of society.” I wondered, as the writer and popular sector critic Vu Le pointed out at the time, how he could extend that assumption to funders backing climate denial and voter suppression.
I was curious, to paraphrase the response of Phil Buchanan, the president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, who, exactly, he thought was threatening the freedom of a sector that wields more than $1.5 trillion in — to borrow Gill’s words during our interview — “effectively unaccountable capital?”
For me, the op-ed called to mind another, by Libra Foundation’s former leader, Crystal Hayling, for IP: “Hey, Philanthropy: Division Isn’t Our Biggest Problem.” To use Hayling’s formulation, and to be frank about my own views, I felt the co-authors had made, at best, a misdiagnosis. My colleague Philip Rojc came to a similar conclusion at the time. But I wanted to understand Gill’s perspective on such critiques.
Last month, Gill and I had a chance to speak at length about both the piece and several other questions. In the interest of space, I’ve limited this account to his responses to criticisms of the op-ed.
Obviously, Gill “can’t speak for the other authors,” as he put it when we spoke. After all, the piece’s headline was “We Disagree on Many Things, but We Speak With One Voice in Support of Philanthropic Pluralism.”
At the end of our hour-long chat, Gill invited me to visit the offices of the Doris Duke Foundation next time I’m in New York City, or to meet up the next time our paths cross, an offer I hope one day to accept — not least to ask him the follow-up questions I overlooked in this interview.
“Inside Philanthropy provides a platform for a lot of the most trenchant critique of what foundations are doing now — and I think that’s an indispensable part of this broader charitable enterprise,” he said. “I think every question you’ve raised is a really important question that our field really needs to grapple with. The worst thing that we can do is try to run away from these questions.”
Read on to hear about the connection Gill sees between the cure for sickle cell anemia and philanthropic pluralism, what the reaction to the op-ed taught him, and why, if you disagree with what he has to say, you should still consider sending Doris Duke a grant application. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity, with links added for context.
You were one of the co-authors of the Chronicle of Philanthropy op-ed on pluralism that has attracted a lot of discussion, a lot of criticism. What did that reaction teach you, or tell you?
Beyond that we’re all learning every moment, I don’t know that it taught me anything unique. I was excited to write the piece precisely because I knew that it wasn’t the universal view. The piece actually anticipates many of the objections that were mounted — and so it certainly gave me some insight into who feels those objections most keenly, and with respect to what issues. I still feel very strongly about the piece.
The American experiment, on the one hand, doesn’t work if words like pluralism are a defense for the toleration of profound injustice and the subjection and subjugation of part of the population. But the American project also doesn’t work if there can only be one dogma, one ideology, one right way to see every complex issue. It is really important to figure out what ought to be beyond the bounds of competitive rivalry and negotiated compromise, but there still needs to be a space for that. As others have said, if not pluralism, then what?
The question of what that means in philanthropy is a somewhat different one. That our society allows philanthropy to exist is a really extraordinary thing. This is conceived as effectively unaccountable capital allocation broadly directed toward the public good. That’s an oxymoron in our democracy. We allow it to exist precisely because it sometimes stands outside of the prevailing and dominant opinion in a given sector or field.
You don’t just have to look at the most controversial issues. Some of Doris Duke Foundation’s most exciting and important funding in medicine has been to support researchers who had different ideas about the way that diseases worked or about the way that diseases could be treated.
An example that’s getting a lot of attention right now — that we were a big part of — is the cures that now exist for sickle cell disease, which had been orphaned as the result of racism, and the fact that it disproportionately affected Black Americans. Two of the researchers we funded were directly involved in the cure that was announced last year and is now being rolled out to patients, and many of the researchers we funded sort of shaped the science that is a part of a bunch of the new treatments.
That was unpopular. It was an unpopular thing to do in medicine and that was not seen as the most promising area to fund. The fact that we could have a different opinion enabled that to happen. It’s easy when we think about the question of pluralism to only think about it in the context of the most incendiary and controversial aspects of some of these big social problems. But that’s an example where our pluralism allowed us to take on one of the tentacles of racial injustice that shapes life for so many people in this in this country, and that had been sort of laundered away, such that we weren’t really paying the attention to it that it deserved, and thinking as creatively about it as our science enabled us to.
I want to run some of the critiques by you. Many people addressed a sense that the statements in the op-ed applied to all foundations. Take Vu Le’s critiques: philanthropic dollars back climate change denial, hate groups and voter suppression. Are those funders with the best intentions and committed to the betterment of the society, as the op-ed suggests?
No, the op-ed doesn’t suggest everyone’s committed to the betterment of society. That’s not what it argues. There were a lot of critiques that were wanton in not really reading the piece or engaging with it all that critically — and that’s always the case with criticism. That’s the nature of the public sphere.
The piece articulated a set of principles that we thought people might think about employing. One of them was: Feel free to critique whoever you want and criticize them as vocally as you want to. Consider acting as if rejecting someone’s view isn’t the same thing as questioning their right to exist.
There are a lot of people who advocate things that I think are morally wrong. They still have a right to advocate those things — and still have a right to associate in this society. We have a right to push back, argue back and contain — and to draw lines between association and action in the society. I think we need to do those things.
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We have to be very careful, though, in a liberal democracy, about when we decide that one set of views disqualifies someone from the right to speak, the right to associate, the right to participate in the society.
The response to the civil rights movement in the South in the ’50s and ’60s was one of violent disqualification. It is essential that people — not enough people, but just enough people, perhaps — were able to defend procedural constraints that allowed people in the civil rights movement to associate, to make their voices heard, to appeal what was regionally a very unpopular case — and, frankly, nationally a fairly unpopular case — until people actually saw the violence and the repression.
It’s hard to know what side of the debate you’re going to be on and who is going to have the reins of power at any given moment. That feels to me clearer now than it’s been at almost any time in my life. We are facing an election where I am really hopeful that some basic protections for the right to dissent, to organize, are not imperiled over, potentially, the next four years.
Another critique: Do you believe that the freedom of yourself and other leaders of endowed multibillion-dollar foundations is under threat?
It’s clearly threatened. There are elected officials in office today who basically argue that private foundations have become the instruments of organized political movements. If that becomes the dominant view, it is hard to argue for the social value of leaving this capital as independent as it is.
The op-ed didn’t mention that political role strongly. Why not? Is that the primary threat you see, or are there others?
I can’t speak for other authors, but I see in some foundations threats to the idea that there is any scope for pluralism.
One example is an issue that I worked on at the Knight Foundation: the question of how to manage digital tech, these quite powerful and ubiquitous technologies like social media and e-commerce. There has been a very strong movement to resuscitate and revisit things like antitrust and competition law to scrutinize these companies. But the traditional antitrust and competition law was built when businesses looked very different. We need new ones. Knight Foundation funded academic and think tank scholars across the political spectrum who were interested in this question of competition.
One of the things that people said was: “Why are you funding such diverse viewpoints? We know the answer. We know that these companies need to be broken up.” I did feel clarity that there were concerning signs and that these companies had too much power. But I don’t think we really knew what the answer was. What we needed was what policy researchers and scholars do well: analyze the problem and have debates and discussions about the answers.
I see that kind of threat to philanthropic pluralism. Often, foundations do their best work when there is incredible urgency and clarity about an issue, but there isn’t clarity about what, exactly, to do about it.
Another example: One of the most misinterpreted progressive slogans of the past five or six years is “Defund the Police.” I have never interpreted it as a literal: “Let’s no longer fund the police as a public safety function.” I have always interpreted it as an imaginative call to say: “If you started today, with a clean sheet, would you organize public safety differently? Would you accord police with all the power — and equip them with the weaponry — that you do now?”
It’s a provocation to us to rethink the architecture of the public safety system in order to prevent the grievous wrong and enduring harm of police violence, principally — and certainly disproportionately — against communities of color. There is absolute clarity that we have to rethink the public safety function. The evidence is clear. You have a reason to be afraid of the police, depending on what you look like in this country. Exactly how to do that is where there’s an enormous amount of contentious debate — within progressive movements — about what police accountability looks like.
If foundations decide ‘there is only one answer to all these questions, now let’s go fund,’ I think the society loses something, if all foundations decide that.
How do you evaluate what falls into that category of challenging each other’s views — which I feel your two examples fall into — versus that broader challenge to philanthropic freedom? Doris Duke was able to go forward and fund those various projects related to digital platforms as you saw fit, right?
But Michael, that’s not really how the public debate works, right? There are some people who would say, in a discussion about how the public safety function should be reorganized: ‘Look, we got to agree to disagree.’ There are also plenty of people who say, with conviction: ‘If you believe that, then you are endorsing racism. Then you are going to be complicit in racism. That will lead to racism.’
The same thing could be said about competition. Some people might say, look, ‘I think view X is right, you think view X is wrong, and we’re just gonna have to agree to disagree.’ Other people will say, ‘If you truly endorse view Y, then you are endorsing unfettered corporate power over consumers.’ That’s the nature of the public debate.
By the way, that’s not always analytically wrong. Those are the stakes. If two people have competing solutions for how to solve the problem of police racism — or corporate consolidation and coercion — those are the stakes. The stakes may really be the actual abundance of that harm in the society.
That’s the humility that animated my desire to be a part of and contribute to the piece — that it’s impossible to know with certainty. One of the values of the deliberative space in democracy is that we can actually have a discussion over time — and we can actually see what approaches work better and worse. That doesn’t mean you resource every approach equally, or that you say at the end of every debate: ‘Let’s try everything.’
There are people in this country whose faith doctrines lead them to conclusions that I find fundamentally offensive. I think they have the right to worship and associate. I am nauseated by some of the things I hear them say — or imagine they say — and that I actively work against in my personal life and probably Doris Duke Foundation works against some of the things they’re trying to bring about.
The op-ed was not arguing that we should fund those groups or those ideas. It’s just asking us to think very carefully about when we should say they have no right to exist or associate.
As a reporter, I see a huge gap between the critiques leveled in private of foundations, their approaches and the ways they fund versus what’s leveled in public. The op-ed seemed to suggest there exists a level of critique that, to me, isn’t reflective of what I see. There’s a lot of general critiques, but there’s a lot more said outside of the public sphere.
Some of that might be said in public to us. There was nothing after the op-ed was published that I haven’t had said to my face. One thing I learned is that writing this helped to bring out views that maybe weren’t being made publicly enough. That’s a great thing. Hopefully, it will encourage and embolden others.
We have a lot of criteria that we apply to figure out who we should fund and how. One of them is not that they need to agree with us about anything. I really believe in that — and saying it isn’t enough. You’ve got to back it up and show you are committed to it. Hopefully, our piece — that calls for the power of debate and discussion — will embolden people to take that entreaty and invitation seriously.
