When the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) first started to fund Mexican higher education in 1940, it aimed to promote professional, full-time scholarship at rational, meritocratic organisations. Considered only from a financial perspective, the decision proved consequential for the humanities and social sciences in Latin America. Over the following 30 years, RF, the Ford Foundation and other American donors financed almost every major Latin American university.Footnote 1 However, the broader significance of philanthropic foundations for Latin American social science is either disputed or neglected. Rather than examining the changing motivations of donors, which ranged from the ambition to stem fascism and later the red tide to a sincere interest in raising the standards of Latin American liberal scholarship, much of the relevant literature oscillates between pillorying the military-sponsored Camelot Project, whose brief was to foresee and forestall revolutions, and shirking the question of external influence on universities.Footnote 2 More nuanced analyses do exist, but they focus on writers funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) rather than on universities paid by philanthropic foundations.Footnote 3 In the case of Mexico, the literature on universities neglects foreign donors. Instead, scholars have adopted a domestic perspective but they nonetheless fail to consider that universities were part of the Mexican state and staffed by the clients of political incumbents.Footnote 4 The only apparent alternative to political patronage was support from external donors such as RF, but this could arguably lead to foreign domination. Indeed, foundations have been pilloried for advancing US cultural hegemony and imperialism, both at home and in Latin America.Footnote 5 However, such sweeping claims regarding the ability of donors to control or even influence the disciplines they funded remain controversial.Footnote 6
My argument is that whereas universities and research centres were exposed to political patronage – a form of traditional domination – the science patronage granted by foreign donors subjected them to a purportedly rational domination. This is not the same as cultural hegemony. Even after recipients accepted the donors’ policies, science patronage had unintended consequences, either because donors based their decision on prejudice rather than on evidence and rational knowledge or because recipients eventually got around donors’ policies. Yet despite these and other shortcomings, foreign donors’ attempts to ‘rationalise’ research and teaching at selected universities, which the donors hoped would set standards for others, did fundamentally alter the history of Latin American social sciences.
To be more precise, my argument is that in the 1940s, as the Mexican state and its political patronage failed to sustain the Colegio de México, this fledgling research centre survived only thanks to RF science patronage. However, before RF stepped into the breach, the leaders of the Colegio were compelled to reformulate and partially relinquish the original project, which encompassed the natural sciences and stressed research rather than the training of graduate students. RF support for the Colegio, an ‘enterprise […] essentially liberal with regard to personnel and tendencies’, was channelled through its still-existing Centro de Estudios Históricos (Centre of Historical Studies, CEH).Footnote 7 Through these grants, RF sought to support the advanced training of students and liberal scholarship, practised according to formal rational principles such as autonomy, meritocracy, specialisation and full-time dedication. However, while RF endorsed CEH, it also declined to grant support for the Colegio's innovative Centro de Estudios Sociales (Centre of Social Studies, CES), which ‘closed’ in 1946 ‘for lack of funds’.Footnote 8
To understand the different trajectories of CEH and CES, it is necessary to look more closely at the workings of the donor, its internal organisation and its office holders. Officers within RF's Division of Humanities believed that Latin American politicians misused universities to reward loyal political clients with income and status, but they were nonetheless eager to grant some of them support of various kinds, as a means to fight these practices, which they perceived as problematic. By contrast, the officers of RF's Division of Social Sciences (DSS) and their US advisors nurtured insurmountable prejudices, which largely deprived Mexican and Latin American social sciences of RF support during the 1940s and 1950s. While the archival record showed that until the late 1950s RF generally refused to support Latin American social sciences, here I disclose how contested the DSS decision not to fund projects like CES was within RF and the invidious arguments raised by some RF officers.
This article focuses on the Colegio's CEH and CES. In the Latin American context, the Colegio stands out due to its early concentration on full-time research and advanced training. Its faculty and graduates subsequently occupied positions in other important organisations in Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Most conspicuously, the director of the failed CES, José Medina Echavarría (1907–77), whose Sociología: Teoría y técnica ushered in a new era in Latin American sociology,Footnote 9 was crucial in both the birth of a new subfield, the sociology of development, and for Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto's dependency theory.Footnote 10 In the 1940s, Mexico City was already a centre of intellectual and political influence, a publishing hub in Latin America and the seat of the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE), the single Spanish-language publisher of continental reach. In sum, the claims I make here – the result of my research in collections at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) and in other archives – have implications not only for Mexico but for the whole region.
The first section connects the preceding arguments to several bodies of scholarship, while the second reconstructs RF's Latin America agenda for the social sciences in the early 1940s. The following section summarises the political and intellectual circumstances influencing the Colegio's establishment. The fourth zooms in on RF's decision to support CEH at the Colegio, which in the fifth section is compared to an unofficial, preliminary inquiry sent to DSS about a possible RF grant to CES. In the conclusion, I describe the main implications of my findings.
US Philanthropic Foundations and Latin American Social Sciences
My argument engages with scholarship in several disciplines. Most immediately, it contributes not only to the growing literature on Medina's CESFootnote 11 but also to the history of social sciences and the humanities in Mexico.Footnote 12 By emphasising foreign science patronage, I aim at counterbalancing this mainly Spanish-language literature, which entirely overlooks the significance of funding for the social sciences. By contrast, several influential books have examined the abundant funding that medical research and health policy received from foundations.Footnote 13 There is no scholarship on foreign patronage of Mexican social sciences in the 1940s and thereafter that compares to the literature on foreign support for Latin American intellectuals and literary writers,Footnote 14 on the ‘Chicago Boys’ in ChileFootnote 15 or on the Ford Foundation in Brazil.Footnote 16 A number of articles have studied foreign-funded projects, such as Camelot, the Ford Foundation's Marginality Project of the 1960s, and the 1950s UNESCO project on race.Footnote 17 A recent book emphasises the centrality of knowledge for the earlier, imperial aspirations of the United States towards South America, but it leaves aside philanthropic foundations and Mexico as a whole.Footnote 18 In brief, Mexico is a lacuna in the historiography of US philanthropy and the social sciences.
The reverse side of foreign support for academia is the political patronage of Mexican and Latin American universities; it is not well researched either. Political patronage within academia, i.e. ‘clientelism’, consists of awarding research and teaching jobs to political allies and denying them to disloyal individuals. This practice is characteristic of some forms of traditional domination.Footnote 19 In post-revolutionary Mexico, differences among intellectuals were due not just to ideological discrepancies but also to ‘the competition among clans and factions [dividing] those in power, and to the diversity of patronages and clienteles’, as François-Xavier Guerra has pointed out.Footnote 20 He noted this in his preface to Annick Lempérière's book on Mexican intellectuals, in which she concluded that political patronage was crucial in the literary milieu, in publishing and in the university sector.Footnote 21 In the words of a scholar of clientelism, what Lempérière's book did was to explore how intellectuals formed ‘alliances … fundamentally oriented toward the goal of career advancement’, as did many other professional groups.Footnote 22 Similarly, a book-length study of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) notes that for ‘ambitious politicians’, ‘patronage’ was among the ‘payoffs’ for controlling UNAM.Footnote 23 These hints from the scholarship on clientelism, intellectuals and the UNAM strongly suggest that Mexican politicians used academic positions to reward their followers. Despite appearances, there is nothing ‘culturalistic’ about this hypothesis. Until the late nineteenth century, research and universities were equally parts of the spoils system in the United States.Footnote 24 Nowadays, political patronage still affects university appointments in many European countries.
Part of the scholarship I intend to contribute to concerns not only Latin America but also the history of the social sciences. More specifically, I examine the claim that foundation money affected neither the development of sociology nor the methodological preferences of its US practitioners.Footnote 25 While I think it did, I am nonetheless sceptical about Gramscian claims that the foundations furthered the Western cultural hegemony of US elites during the Cold War.Footnote 26 My scepticism vis-à-vis these radical claims does not mean that I agree, as world culture theorists claim, that altruism and persuasion boost the diffusion of norms defining the proper way to practise science.Footnote 27 Quite the contrary, I do stress interest, policies, domination, resistance and unintended consequences as intrinsic to science patronage.Footnote 28
The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin American Social Sciences
RF was established in 1913, but the social sciences became a significant part of its purview only decades later. RF expanded its remit as it took over the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial foundation, which had moved from social work to supporting the social sciences.Footnote 29 To administer the large Memorial assets, the trustees restructured RF and established the DSS in 1929. By the late 1930s, RF was an efficient and formally rational organisation in terms of personnel selection and internal procedures and, to a lesser extent, in its goals.Footnote 30 Indeed, RF was about to achieve its resounding successes in public health and agriculture. However, it was far from being perfectly rational, as I will show later, not even from the perspective of formal rationality.
From 1939 to 1954, the DSS's director was Joseph H. Willits. Before coming to RF, Willits had created the Industrial Research Department within the Wharton Business School, part of the University of Pennsylvania.Footnote 31 He was committed to the training of young scholars and to excellence; he famously wrote ‘I would break any rule in the book for a chance to gamble on talent.’Footnote 32
Until the late 1950s, DSS favoured empiricism and economics, the discipline of Willits and his two predecessors. When allocating awards, practically relevant problems, or what we would call today ‘applied science’, were preferred. Examples include Simon Kuznets's pioneering attempt to measure national income, and other problems such as social security, the study of population, sampling for public opinion research, mass communication and race relations. Regarding organisations, Willits maintained and sometimes increased the DSS's massive support for economic research centres, allocating half of the DSS budget in 1943 to the Brookings Institution, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Industrial Research Department at the University of Pennsylvania, despite RF President Raymond Fosdick's misgivings.Footnote 33
For all the DSS's strong presence in Europe and the Far East, its programme focused on the United States and Canada. These emphases became extremely contentious towards the end of the 1930s. The US State Department orchestrated an effort to move philanthropic foundations to promote US culture in the rest of the continent.Footnote 34 In fact, during the last major programme review before WWII, ‘the possible extension of the social science programme to Latin America’ had been seriously considered.Footnote 35 On the surface, this appeared sensible, since ‘Latin America seem[ed] the logical place to extend our interest in promoting satisfactory international relations’, as one of its members acknowledged, but DSS eventually decided against it a year later.Footnote 36 Instead, it preferred to ostensibly rely on the ‘competent advice’ provided by colleagues from the International Health Division (IHD) to identify possible opportunities for the DSS in Latin America.Footnote 37 Besides this purported openness to IHD advice, DSS promised to cooperate with the Latin American governments on ‘social security’ but only via the International Labour Organisation in Geneva. Simultaneously, DSS excluded ‘major projects in a single country’. Instead, a few DSS measures in the United States and Europe were projected as though they constituted a Latin American programme. Among them were to pay for the training of Latin American civil servants either at the International Labour Office in Geneva or at American University in Washington.Footnote 38 Not by chance, when a request arrived years later for training funds from an IHD officer in Chile, DSS declined.Footnote 39 Generally, DSS was unwilling to extend its programme south of the United States.
If WWII had not begun a few months later, the demands placed on the DSS to expand its programme to Latin America by the president and other RF divisions might have ceased. With Europe and the Far East involved in fighting, the US government had to increase security on its southern flank.Footnote 40 For DSS, the war jeopardised its activities in Europe and the Far East, which several officers within RF thought an additional reason to turn towards Latin America. In February 1941, Fosdick called a staff conference ‘to consider [the] possibility of [an] extended program in Mexico’, after Henry A. Wallace, the US vice-president and a former secretary of agriculture, had approached Willits on the subject. According to Fosdick, Wallace contemplated ‘work primarily in fields of health, broader than that now under way, and in agriculture’.Footnote 41 In fact, his comments are credited with having sparked Mexico's ‘Green Revolution’.Footnote 42 RF was so determined to get involved in Latin American humanities and social sciences that Fosdick made this public in his ‘President's Review’.Footnote 43
Wallace's suggestion implicitly placed demands on DSS's budget. When RF landed in a country, several divisions became active simultaneously. Consequently, Fosdick and other RF officers expected DSS to provide resources for Mexico. During the staff conference first addressing these demands on Willits's budget, he spelled out the arguments that he would repeatedly use to reject those requests.Footnote 44 Some of Willits's reasons will be discussed later, but the bottom line was: ‘We [DSS] didn't feel it was our function to try to offset German propaganda in South America.’Footnote 45
As WWII raged, the pressure on the DSS to engage in Latin America grew, peaking in 1943, but Willits resisted. In 1941, he presented as a fait accompli the hiring of Roger F. Evans, a former businessman with extensive experience in China, but none in Latin America.Footnote 46 Willits further armour-plated his pre-existing decision by arguing that the reports of the US scholars sent by DSS to Latin America in 1941–2 had confirmed that opportunities for RF support were scarce.Footnote 47 Accordingly, when considering ‘the suggestions that have come to us, primarily from the scholars who have made trips to Latin America on RF grants’, Willits insisted in a note to Fosdick that ‘we [DSS] shall proceed of course on the exception principle’.Footnote 48 By that time, the reports had been distilled into a ‘digest’ of suggestions by one of Willits's collaborators, Marion Elderton, a labour relations expert from Wharton without previous experience in Latin America or relevant language knowledge. Her ‘digest’ removed context from the reports, leaving fodder for her readers’ prejudices.Footnote 49
In late 1943 and during 1944, DSS was scrutinised by RF's Interdivisional Committee on Latin America. As a defence, an ‘SS LA Policy’ was drawn from Willits's ‘Analysis of Program’, stating that Willits ‘would give work in that region lower priority than work in Europe or Asia’, something already known, but Willits now justified DSS's inactivity by referring to US agencies active in Latin America.Footnote 50 One was Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Willits also instructed one of his collaborators ‘to follow up general developments and upon the variety of sources for checking. An occasional visit may be in order.’Footnote 51 Not all departments within RF were satisfied.
The Interdivisional Committee on Latin America sent its report to Fosdick in early 1944. It stated that ‘the majority of its members regrets the absence of a more vigorous Social Sciences program’.Footnote 52 Such a statement made concessions from DSS unavoidable. Accordingly, Willits opened his letter to Fosdick by admitting, ‘The [D]SS policy of low priority for Latin America is being questioned by so many thoughtful persons that the subject calls for re-analysis.’ These questioners included ‘Men such as [Henry A.] Moe, a prospective Trustee, [Carl O.] Sauer, a great scholar on Latin American culture, [Robert] Redfield, [and Lewis] Hanke’; all these leading scholars believed that DSS ‘should give Latin America higher priority than we do’. Nonetheless, Willits remained persuaded that ‘The level of development of the Social Sciences in Latin America is low.’Footnote 53 When, following WWII, the demands on DSS to expand its programme south of the US border ceased, Willits successfully implemented his restrictive policy towards Latin America.
Mexican Politics and Academia around 1940
The last two years of President Lázaro Cárdenas's term (1934–40) produced a conservative backlash in Mexico. Previously, Cárdenas had managed to enact a number of leftist economic reforms, most prominently allocating land to peasants and farmers and expropriating US and British oil companies in March 1938. In foreign policy, Cárdenas had turned Mexico into the staunchest ally of the fledging Spanish Republic. After its defeat, Cárdenas admitted about 20,000 Spanish refugees, among them intellectuals; some were communists, but many had links to the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, PSOE).Footnote 54 These decisions attracted the enmity of Mexican Catholics, the middle classes and the far right. Given the mounting challenge to his authority, Cárdenas picked a conservative successor, Manuel Ávila Camacho, who barely won the election.Footnote 55 The differences within the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (Party of the Mexican Revolution, PRM) itself were so bitter that some members of Ávila's government soon attempted to revert to Cárdenas's policies.
The UNAM was involved in politics during the Revolution and beyond. Politicians, who funded the university, tried to use it for their own purposes – ‘the UNAM was worth having’. Students also participated in politics, engulfing the university in the conflict for governing Mexico. One the issues raised by the students was that ‘professors’ were ‘being appointed through political patronage’ rather than merit and that similar criteria were used to award scholarships.Footnote 56 Since the university was enmeshed in political patronage, it is unsurprising that the deepest crisis between the state and the university (1933–5) centred on money. This crisis followed an attempt by the leftist politician Vicente Lombardo Toledano to impose Marxist education at the UNAM, where Catholics and right-wingers had a strong presence. Only the appointment of a new rector, Luis Chico Goerne, a moderate Catholic admired by Cárdenas, saved the UNAM. Rapprochement followed; the government had understood the political value of the university.Footnote 57
From 1940, social research at the UNAM was conducted at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales (Social Research Institute, IIS). The IIS is the second-oldest sociological research centre in Latin America, and has published the Revista Mexicana de Sociología since its establishment. Its first director, Lucio Mendieta Núñez, was a protégé of Manuel Gamio, the most important Mexican anthropologist of the post-revolutionary period and a client of President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–8) and of Cárdenas.Footnote 58 Gamio is the crucial person for understanding Mendieta's trajectory.Footnote 59 Gamio granted him a job within his Teotihuacán Valley archaeological research project when Mendieta was about to drop out of law school because of his father's financial difficulties during the Revolution.Footnote 60 According to Mendieta, this was the first of the four positions Gamio awarded him.Footnote 61 After almost 15 years, first at the population unit within the anthropology division Gamio established at the agriculture ministry and then at the research unit within the same ministry, Mendieta moved to the Instituto de Estudios Políticos, Económicos y Sociales (Institute of Political, Economic and Social Studies, the PRM's think tank),Footnote 62 and then to the IIS in 1939. Overall, Mendieta can be characterised as ‘an intellectual close to the regime’Footnote 63 whose career relied on alliances ‘based upon informal norms of reciprocity and loyalty’.Footnote 64 Hence, Mendieta repaid Gamio with devotion and unpaid work.Footnote 65
Mendieta's upbringing in post-revolutionary Mexican anthropology influenced his ideas about sociology. Like Gamio, he insisted that Mexico's most significant problem was that of the indígenas. Accordingly Mendieta carried out ‘a complete reorganisation’Footnote 66 so that the IIS could ‘find the courses of action appropriate to solve the most important social problems of the country’.Footnote 67 More specifically, he wanted the IIS to collect knowledge useful for Cárdenas's obra indigenista. This was Cárdenas's attempt to bring the living conditions of the indigenous, mainly rural population – as well as their knowledge of Spanish and access to education – up to the level of other Mexicans.Footnote 68 Mendieta's ambition of being useful prompted IIS's long-lasting emphasis on the problems of indigenous populations and the rural environment. An integral part of Mendieta's evolutionism was that these problems could be resolved.Footnote 69 Sociology, moreover, benefitted ‘culture’, which was characterised, according to Mendieta, by ‘higher aims and the absence of selfishness’.Footnote 70 Even more naïve was Mendieta's confession that his scholarship was based solely on ‘observation and frequently personal intuition’.Footnote 71 Unsurprisingly, Mendieta's distinctive sociological ideas are difficult to identify.Footnote 72
His activities as an editor are almost equally telling. Mendieta was receptive to a wide range of influences and ways of doing sociology. He published Robert Lynd and Pitirim Sorokim, ‘the eminent Russian sociologist’, in his sociology series, the Biblioteca de Ensayos Sociológicos.Footnote 73 In his journal, the Revista Mexicana de Sociología, Mendieta regularly included lavish illustrations, as he did in the proceedings of Mexican sociological congresses. These illustrations – expensive and unusual for a specialised sociology journal – were possibly part of Mendieta's attempt to reach a wider public of lawyers, social workers and anthropologists and to impress potential donors; they aimed to boost publicity and status rather than influencing specialists.Footnote 74
Mendieta's IIS was described by Earl J. Hamilton, a Duke University economic historian of the Iberian colonies. Hamilton had been commissioned to identify organisations conducting social research in Mexico that might deserve US support. In the section on the IIS, Hamilton wrote:
Aside from the Revista Mexicana de Sociología the Institute has accomplished very little. Mexican Indian tribes have been studied superficially and a few photographs of Indians collected. No real research has even been attempted. The staff, which seems to have been selected through favoritism, is weak and incompetent … many … have strong political and business connections.Footnote 75
Some of Hamilton's comments contradict customary accounts of the early IIS. What he perceived as favouritism has often been presented as a consequence of the absence of sociologists in Mexico, which reportedly compelled Mendieta to hire ‘professionals from other disciplines [law, criminology, medicine, anthropology], oriented towards the study of social problems, who were ready to dedicate part of their time to research’.Footnote 76 (Full-time professorships were unknown at the UNAM until 1946; in the early 1950s only about 20 existed.)Footnote 77 Most of those remained at the IIS for decades; Mendieta stayed until 1964, which explains the long-lasting hold on Mexican social sciences of a few individuals who ‘jeopardised the renewal of research’.Footnote 78 Mendieta shaped the IIS and other Mexican organisations, including the current Facultad Nacional de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales (National Political and Social Sciences Faculty, FCPyS) at UNAM. To sum up, thanks to Gamío and to political patronage, Mendieta controlled the IIS, a journal and a book series for two decades.
The Rockefeller Foundation, the Colegio and the CEH
El Colegio's predecessor, La Casa de España, was established in 1938 to do for Spanish refugee scholars what New York's New School for Social Research had done for German and Austrian émigrés. The idea of providing the refugee scholars a place to resume their intellectual work came from Daniel Cosío Villegas, the liberal maverick and cultural entrepreneur who founded FCE, the state-owned publishing company. He studied law at the UNAM and economics in the United States on a fellowship from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial in 1926, the only Latin American social scientist to do so, and he then began a career as a diplomat and civil servant. Eventually, he became a historian and editor of a multi-volume Historia moderna de México, funded by numerous RF grants.Footnote 79
From 1937, Cosío encouraged Cárdenas to establish the Casa de España and to allocate a subsidy that was generous for the time. Cosío succeeded because he was friendly with his fellow economists at the Finance Ministry and the central bank, and with progressive members of Cárdenas's cabinet.Footnote 80 The second step in Casa de España's consolidation came when Alfonso Reyes, a former diplomat and five times nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, was appointed as its president.Footnote 81 According to Cosío, Cárdenas designated Reyes to this position and assigned a subsidy for the Colegio to reward Reyes for ‘services rendered’ during his diplomatic mission to Brazil.Footnote 82
In a ‘major reversal’ for Reyes and Cosío, Cárdenas's successor, Ávila Camacho, named Octavio Véjar Vázquez as secretary of education in 1941.Footnote 83 He was ‘reputed to be ultraconservative’, and even to harbour some far-right sympathies, according to the director of the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National School of Anthropology and History, ENAH) Alfonso Caso, who added that the new secretary was not enthusiastic about ‘professors … from the Spanish Republic’.Footnote 84 Indeed, Véjar cut the Colegio's subsidy for 1942 to MX$200,000 from Cárdenas's MX$350,000 (c. US$651,000 and US$1,139,000 in current dollars, respectively).Footnote 85 Although Mexico's central bank and the UNAM occasionally subsidised the Colegio, a year after Cárdenas's term ended Reyes and Cosío experienced the downside of political patronage: its reduction when the patron was out of office. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the Colegio sought the support of RF.
Unlike DSS, which relied on IHD to identify opportunities in Latin America, RF's Division of Humanities (DH) had hired a scholar of Hispanic America as early as 1937. Irving A. Leonard was sent on extended survey trips to obtain first-hand knowledge of Latin American scholars and academic organisations. His diagnosis was not flattering; he perceived
slight interest in research, and no conception of the seminar method. A perfunctory lecture is droned by an uninterested and poorly paid professor. There are no contacts between the student and the professor. Latin America scarcely conceives of the full-time professor. A small retainer is given to some prominent man, or friend of a governmental official, for which he delivers a few lectures.Footnote 86
RF aimed instead to support scholarship based on principles such as autonomy from political patronage, meritocracy, specialisation and full-time dedication. RF strategy was to look for distinguished scholars who could exclude politics from academic organisations, both in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Through this strategy, RF officers had spotted opportunities south of the border before the war and added ENAH to its Mexican portfolio,Footnote 87 since ‘the eminence of its director [Caso]’ and ‘[t]he security of the Institute [ENAH] from political interference’ were ‘warrants for the proposal’. For this and for its fellowship programme, ENAH became a crucial precedent for the Colegio.Footnote 88
Political patronage and scholarly eminence remained central topics in the interactions between RF and the Colegio, and in the internal debates within RF that led to the first grant to the Colegio.Footnote 89 In his first meeting with Leonard, Reyes apparently argued: ‘Though some financial support is received from the Mexican government the institution is autonomous and more removed from political influence than other institutions such as the National University of Mexico, which … is only nominally autonomous.’ Although Leonard reacted to Reyes's plans for transforming La Casa de España into a centre of study ‘above university level and more completely divorced from political influence’ by telling Reyes ‘that he saw no present possibility of RF interest’, in his diary he noted that his ‘feeling’ was that Reyes's plans ‘might well deserve study by the RF’.Footnote 90 However, in September 1940 Leonard resigned; he was succeeded in January 1942 by William Berrien, an expert in Spanish literature, who in 1944 became a professor at Harvard.Footnote 91 In May 1942, Berrien encountered Reyes and Cosío, who won him over to the cause of the Colegio: it seemed possible to support the Colegio based on principles favoured by RF. Berrien was convinced that Reyes's and Cosío's prestige, like Caso's, could be used in a new attempt to restrain political patronage of science in Mexico. He thought Reyes and Cosío were among ‘the very best’, a ‘feeling’ allegedly shared with Henry A. Moe, the officer for Latin America at the Guggenheim Foundation and, later, as mentioned above, a ‘prospective trustee’ of the DSS.Footnote 92
Berrien was soon convinced of Reyes's and Cosío's seriousness, but he still had to match their intentions to RF policy. Reyes and Cosío wanted an endowment for the Colegio.Footnote 93 Since RF rarely gave money for endowments, Berrien asked Reyes and Cosío in a letter what else could help secure the survival of their Colegio. At the same time, Berrien felt the need to state that he was not offering ‘assistance toward the realisation of a project or a piece of research, the nature of which is determined beforehand outside Mexico’. The record shows that Berrien did, however, suggest every major plank in the final application. The first is the most prominent: ‘It occurs to me [Berrien] … that we might be of assistance in maintaining for a period of two or three years your fellowship program for study under Sr. [Silvio] Zavala and his associates’, that is, for CEH. This is not a casual statement: training academic researchers had long been an RF goal ‘greater’ than research itself.Footnote 94 The model Berrien used to justify his proposal for CEH was RF's programme of scholarships for ENAH anthropologists. Delegating the ability to assign fellowships to the grant recipients like ENAH was unusual.Footnote 95 Had the trustees not approved this delegation to ENAH earlier,Footnote 96 CEH would not have obtained the prerogative to selects its grantees.
In his letter, Berrien also addressed a second element that still characterises the Colegio – its continental ambitions and character: ‘Would you be interested in extending this training on the basis of fellowships to certain Central American countries or even the countries of the northwestern section of South America?’Footnote 97 He thus brought into the Colegio ideas that RF had already implemented at ENAH: introducing foreign research and teaching methods in Mexico, which would attract Central and even South American students. Berrien also hinted at further items, including ‘library development’, on which RF spent large sums of money in the subsequent decades. In brief, by labelling this or that as feasible, Berrien told Reyes and Cosío what and what not to request from RF.
Upon receiving the letter, Cosío grudgingly accepted its content.Footnote 98 Rightly so, because before writing to the Colegio, Berrien had carefully discussed its compatibility with RF policy with the DH director, David H. Stevens.Footnote 99 Their take on the Colegio was not to imitate the Collège de France or the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, two models that Cosío and Reyes had actually dreamt of, but to turn it into a US-style liberal arts college, as stated in the grant action in favour of the Colegio.Footnote 100 Stevens's and Berrien's take also clarifies Reyes's and Cosío's decision to get rid of the natural sciences laboratories and staff. By accepting Berrien's letter, Cosío abandoned the ambition of getting an endowment from RF, admitted that they could focus ‘only’ on ‘a share of our programme’, and then most crucially conceded, ‘There is little doubt that the best thing we have to show in order to obtain support would actually be our Centre for Historical Research [CEH].’Footnote 101 Although Cosío implemented most of Berrien's ‘suggestions’, he also discarded one – paid visiting professors – and even dared to add one – political science courses. By and large, Cosío made Berrien's plan his own.
For a variety of reasons, Berrien decisively backed the Colegio. One was that he perceived similarities between CEH and the pre-war Centro de Estudios Históricos (Centre of Historical Studies) in Madrid.Footnote 102 Berrien referred to its successes in front of Stevens and RF officers and trustees. This Spanish centre, to which Reyes (1914–21) and the Mexican historian Silvio Zavala had been affiliated (1931–6), had brought together luminaries such as Nobel Prize for Literature nominee Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Américo Castro from Princeton and Claudio Sánchez-Albórnoz, one of the rare Spaniards to obtain support from the RF programme for refugee scholars. These were the men with whom wunderkinder such as Amado Alonso, soon to be at Harvard, had learned the ropes in pre-war Madrid. According to Berrien, CEH offered the refugees an opportunity ‘to contribute towards the development of techniques and methods and attitudes in the country which has received them’ and to introduce ‘modern methods of instruction’ in Mexico.Footnote 103 However, ‘Though the Center in the Colegio de Mexico is no servile copy of the Centro in Madrid, the idea back of both [sic] is very much the same’, Berrien later reflected.Footnote 104
A further reason was the harsh circumstances of the moment. According to Berrien, the Colegio needed ‘help and encouragement at the present time to enable it to continue … that part of the … program of greatest interest to the humanities (i.e. the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas [CEH])’; Berrien believed that CEH ‘offers the best all-around training in history and related subjects’.Footnote 105 More precisely Berrien pleaded for significant and rapid help ‘through a bad year or two’, because he would ‘regret’ it if ‘the good work and possibilities of the Colegio [had] to go into eclipse’. He believed that ‘the Colegio should grow most logically for humanities, with social sciences later’. The final goal was to strengthen the Colegio so that it could set ‘standards’ and become influential across Central and South America.Footnote 106
Eventually, Berrien convinced RF to grant substantial aid. Five months after he first met Reyes and Cosío, RF trustees approved the first of many grants to the Colegio: US$29,340 (current US$430,000), which covered half of CEH's costs for two years.Footnote 107 It included salaries for scholars, stipends for graduate students and books, plus a research fund for Reyes. The award included the restrictions in Berrien's letter, which in general corresponded to RF policy, but a few additional restrictions resulted from doubts about the ability of Reyes, Cosío and their friends to attract steady political patronage in the future.Footnote 108 Nevertheless, additional grants to CEH, ENAH and the Centro de Estudios Filosóficos (Centre for Philosophical Studies) at UNAM were made. RF ultimately financed the humanities at the Colegio for two decades, but the next section shows why RF's flow of funds was closed to the social sciences until 1960.
The Centro de Estudios Sociales and the Rockefeller Foundation
As mentioned earlier, the existing accounts of the social sciences during the Cold War emphasise local explanatory factors and neglect foreign science patronage. This lacuna has led to bewilderment among otherwise well-informed observers. One instance is José Reyna's praise for CES, where ‘a sort of “revolutionary” curriculum which is still as valid for the present generations as it used to be 50 years back’ was taught. But praise is followed by ignorance as to why ‘this new part of the institution [CES] was the shortest lasting of the Colegio’.Footnote 109 In other words, why did RF regularly approve generous grants to CEH but refrain from supporting the ideas and people at CES?
Inaugurated in 1943, CES offered a graduate degree, combining the best contemporary European and US social sciences. As noted above, its director was José Medina Echavarría, the Spanish exile who, apart from authoring Sociología: Teoría y técnica, co-translated and published Max Weber's Economía y sociedad.Footnote 110 Weber's volume was part of the sociological series that Medina edited for FCE, which became a resounding success across the Americas. In the 1950s, Medina carved out a place for a historical sociology of development within the UN's Economic Commission for Latin America in Santiago de Chile; in the 1960s, he inspired the Weberian traits of Cardoso and Faletto's dependency theory.Footnote 111 Despite Medina's promise as scholar, editor and administrator, CES closed in 1946, deprived of RF support.
Medina's aim at CES was to combine Keynesianism in economics with the Weimar Republic's social democratic state theory and Max Weber's historical sociology. Although he himself lacked practical experience with surveys and statistics,Footnote 112 he had long understood their importance and promoted courses taught by an eminent Mexican statistician, Miguel Gleason Álvarez. The CES faculty included senior Mexican scholars and experts, as well as young Mexicans and Spanish refugees with graduate studies in politics or economics from either the London School of Economics or German universities. I will not dwell any longer on the CES curriculum and its faculty because, as I will try to show, RF – without carrying out a fair assessment of its merits and shortcomings – decided not to fund CES.Footnote 113
Initially the Colegio had contemplated offering political science courses rather than creating a fully fledged centre for social research such as CES. The original idea was mentioned in the letter dated 29 July 1942 in which Cosío asked Berrien whether financial support would be available for ‘a project, which although limited is of great interest to us … a series of courses on political science, a discipline that has never been dealt with in any form at the University [UNAM]’.Footnote 114 Cosío's project would last for at least three years and cost around US$12,000 (current US$181,366), half of which would be provided by RF. As explained in the previous section, RF welcomed Cosío's inquiry as far as CEH was concerned but remained silent about the political science courses.Footnote 115 However, Cosío persevered. Right after CES initiated activities in early 1943, he announced to Berrien that ‘Alfonso Reyes and I intend to appeal for the support of the Foundation for this new undertaking.’Footnote 116 At the same time, Cosío asked Berrien to forward a leaflet describing CES to the DSS; Berrien gave it to his colleagues in April.Footnote 117
In September 1943, Cosío again discussed CES with RF. He explained the reasons for and purposes of CES in a memorandum emphasising that social sciences in Latin America were taught only in Brazil. This was despite the great many social problems plaguing Mexico. They deserved to be studied by ‘scientifically equipped research workers’ who could offer ‘guidance’, not only for Mexico but also for the rest of Latin America. To fulfil these aims, US$40,428 (current US$575,906) were necessary over three years: US$9,476 yearly for fellowships and US$4,000 for ‘incidental expenses (especially books and periodicals)’.Footnote 118 The letter accompanying the memorandum boasted about an agreement recently made among three Mexican institutions to fund an institute for economic research at the Colegio: ‘[A]ll that is lacking is the drawing up of the legal contract.’ It is possible but unlikely that such plans were about to be approved at the time. What is sure is that they came to naught. Cosío possibly mentioned them because he surmised that this ‘act of confidence’ by the Mexican institutions, as he put it, would dissipate RF's doubts about the quality of the work being done at the Colegio.Footnote 119 In reality, he confused both allies and sceptics within RF as well as the external reviewer, Carl Sauer.
In late October, Berrien forwarded Cosío's ‘personal and informal letter’ to his colleagues with other documents on CES and an explanatory note. By doing so, Berrien, who wanted the Colegio to move into the social sciences, inadvertently prompted a debate that would doom CES.Footnote 120 Berrien's explanatory note pointed to the alleged novelty of an economic research institute, which further disoriented the DSS's deeply sceptical officers. Wondering whether CES would conduct economic or sociological research, Willits carefully scrutinised Cosío's documents and juxtaposed them with the reports that RF-funded US scholars had written on Latin American social sciences. If Medina's CES ever had a chance of being fairly treated by RF, it was not that October. Just two days before Berrien's note circulated, Willits had finished a report insisting on a policy of favouring Europe and Asia and of non-involvement in Latin America or, to be more precise, a policy restricted to supporting individual scholars and US students of Latin America.Footnote 121 Willits also asked Carl Sauer to write a review of CES, which happened to be critical of the Colegio. In early December, Cosío and Reyes got word that ‘to have a formal request come forward at this time would not be indicated’.Footnote 122
Precisely because DSS declined to fund CES, this ‘negative case’ of foreign science patronage warrants careful scrutiny, as per Pierre Bourdieu's remark that ‘cutting off research funds [is] the most brutal censorship’.Footnote 123 Thanks to a complete archival record, we can reconstruct the reasoning of the officers and of the reviewers they chose. On a summary of Cosío's communications with Berrien, Willits and other DSS members left handwritten remarks commenting on the academic and political background of both the émigré and the Mexican scholars involved in CES.Footnote 124 This summary also confirms that Cosío's rushed remarks on an economic research centre made it more difficult for DSS officers to understand CES's well-rounded curriculum and gave them ammunition to criticise the project.
A crucial and revealing part was played by one of the scholars who had travelled to Latin America on RF grants, Carl Sauer. An influential geographer and head of the department at Berkeley, Sauer was the US founder of ‘cultural geography’,Footnote 125 a historicist approach to the disciplineFootnote 126 and purportedly ‘one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century’.Footnote 127 Be that as it may, ‘uncommon warmth and mutual respect’ bound Sauer and Willits.Footnote 128 His note asking Sauer for his opinion on Cosío's ‘informal and personal letter’ betrays the DSS director's scepticism about CES.Footnote 129 Some of Willits's reasons appear to be sound, such as the large amount of money that Cosío's proposal assigned to the library and ‘incidental expenses’, the independent administration of fellowships by CES, the scarcity of adequate personnel (and students) and the probability of state interference into economic research.Footnote 130 However, Willits also mentioned the refugees, a remark that was far from innocent. RF officers had extensively discussed whether the Spanish refugee scholars were as deserving of RF support as were the Germans; the answer was negative in almost all cases because ‘they are not, comparatively speaking, first-rate men’.Footnote 131 In brief, Willits's request was full of hints about what he expected from Sauer.
Willits's letter did not need to make explicit his scepticism to the recipient. Two years earlier, when Sauer was departing for South America on an RF grant, Willits had explained to him the DSS policy on Latin America: ‘If Britain wins the war, we will receive huge demands from the impoverished scholars of an impoverished Europe – demands that cannot be ignored.’ Had DSS committed its resources to Latin America in the meantime, support for Europe would have to be taken from the US operations, something Willits wanted to avoid: ‘Hence, from our point of view, the interest in finding the real needs, the modest needs, rather than the “grand schemes”.’Footnote 132
Accordingly, in his ‘Andean Letters’, which were widely read within the RF, Sauer recommended modest grants to aid numerous Latin American scholars, including amateurs in provincial cities, towards whom he displays generosity.Footnote 133 This attitude contrasts with the views expressed in his unpublished missive on the Colegio and CES. It deserves to be quoted extensively:
I seem to lack the background material. I do not have the descriptive pamphlet, and I have never talked with Cosío Villegas. Also I know nothing of the background from observation or hearsay when in Mexico. I don't even know how the Colegio de Mexico [sic] has developed. When I knew something about it it was only as to its Center of Historical Studies, which then was a group of Spanish refugees constituting a Notgemeinschaft [emergency self-support group].
Berrien's note indicates that the new Center also is mainly composed of refugees, plus some people trained in the London School of Economics, whoever they may be. I know almost nothing about the quality of social science in Spain, my slight impression being that philosophy, jurists, and history would be the preoccupation of Spaniards, rather than what we should call economics, political science, and sociology … I just don't know anything as to who is in this picture. That is the all-important question. I don't even know … Cosío Villegas … The Hispanic mind, moreover, has never been preoccupied with statistics … They have said this thing about themselves many times.Footnote 134
In this note, a subservient Sauer delivered what he knew Willits needed, even if he prefaced it with disclaimers. The allusion to statistics was useful, since it confirmed the prejudice among RF officers and their coterie of consultants that statistical prowess was non-existent in Latin America: ‘Statisticians will never start anything in the Universities. Sociology is speculative metaphysics … there is going to be a national census in Argentina next year, but nobody knows how to go about it.’Footnote 135 This prejudice endured for decades and later benefitted scholars with ‘positivist inclinations’, like Gino Germani, the dominant figure in Argentine sociology.Footnote 136
Both Willits and Sauer must have been conscious that the latter lacked the necessary acquaintance with Mexican social sciences. Sauer had previously been to Mexico City but apparently just for hurried visits.Footnote 137 At the end of his 1942 trip to South America, he had admittedly taken ‘a brief look at Mexico City’, where he had met anthropologists and art historians affiliated with ENAH and UNAM's Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (Institute of Aesthetic Research), but nobody from the Colegio.Footnote 138 In brief, Sauer knew almost nothing about CES but expressed the categorical negative judgement that Willits needed. Willits acknowledged all this:
I am grateful for your comments on the Colegio de Mexico project. I felt pretty sure of the answer; but it had apparently rolled up enough momentum so that I felt I should check with you before declining. We are declining it.Footnote 139
In reality, the right person to fairly appraise CES was Hamilton, the economic historian specialising in the Iberian colonies. He had prepared the reports on research and training opportunities in Mexico quoted earlier.Footnote 140 While preparing them, Hamilton systematically visited all social science centres in Mexico City, including UNAM's IIS and the Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas (Institute of Economic Research), the Pan American Institute of Geography and History, ENAH and Gamio's Instituto Indigenista Interamericano (Inter-American Indigenist Institute), in addition to the Colegio, on which Hamilton had prepared an additional report.Footnote 141 Compared to Hamilton, Sauer had a much narrower vision of Mexican academia, which is visible in his portrayal of anthropology as if it encompassed all social sciences. An additional reason why Willits should not have asked Sauer was the latter's adversarial attitude towards Hamilton regarding an on-going discussion about the convenience of establishing ‘regional’ study centres in the United States.Footnote 142 In sum, Hamilton was the person to consult, but Willits – and Sauer – already knew Hamilton's opinion:Footnote 143
The Colegio de Mexico is one of the most promising institutions for higher education and research in Latin America … Without an exception, its staff is able, earnest, and distinguished. Apparently politics and wealth have had nothing to do with the selection of professors. Only efficiency has counted.Footnote 144
Hamilton's greater familiarity with the Colegio did not prevent Sauer's indictment from shaping Willits's decision. As Willits and Evans summarised the different aspects of Cosío's inquiry, they included first Hamilton's and Berrien's assessments only to then overrule them with Sauer's conjectures.Footnote 145
For his decision, Willits relied on someone who not only lacked first-hand experience of CES and full access to the written record, but someone who exhibited inconsistencies. In his review, Sauer belittled the Casa de España as ‘a group of Spanish refugees’ despite having previously written to Willits that the ‘fine lot of Spanish refugees’ in Bogotá were ‘a grand lot of fellows, competent, and, in the local setting at least, balls of fire’.Footnote 146 Willits failed to appreciate this contradiction and was not bothered by Sauer not having received all the documents on CES,Footnote 147 for which Willits was responsible. He admitted as much when he sent Sauer ‘the list of courses offered in the Center of Social Studies’. When forwarding this background material to the reviewer, Willits added that they had ‘of course, rejected the application’.Footnote 148 Later Willits let Sauer know that the inquiry was ‘quite informal and not formal’.Footnote 149
At the end of the day, Cosío's ‘personal and informal letter’ had been treated as a formal application. After Berrien, who had been kept out of the loop, found out about Willits's letters to Sauer, he left a note on the file that is unusual both for its tone and for openly questioning steps taken in another division: ‘In spite of JHW's [Willits's] error in putting the query on a formal basis, I wish to have steps taken to prevent a record of a formal declination … Sauer's letter of November 15 discloses a lack of knowledge of recent developments and contains irresponsible references to the Colegio and its personnel.’Footnote 150 In a remarkable instance of intellectual friendly fire, Sauer, the spearhead of historicism in US geography,Footnote 151 denigrated Cosío and delivered the pretext that would lead to the fall of Medina's CES. Cosío as FCE editor and Medina as translator and teacher played major parts in introducing historicism to Latin Americans.
Of the vagaries of RF's decision, Reyes and Cosío learned nothing. The latter admitted that the rejection had caused ‘desolation’ at the Colegio; prescient, Cosío understood that the vague explanation implied that CES could not expect future grants.Footnote 152 Its faculty, full of Spanish sociologists, political scientists and economists, could not invoke a distinguished predecessor like Madrid's Centro de Estudios Históricos; they also lacked a pre-war record of achievement comparable to that of their fellow historians and philologists. Thus, the Spanish refugee scholars, who were an asset for CEH, turned into a serious drawback for CES. Two years later, Cosío explored the chances for RF support, if not for CES, then at least for Medina, but the latter did not apply, possibly because Cosío had offended him.Footnote 153 Other exiles had been dismissed from CES overnight.Footnote 154 In summer 1946, CES closed and Medina left Mexico City. With him, sociology, political science and economics disappeared from the Colegio for 15 years.
Conclusion
The Colegio was established by an act of political patronage, but without RF science patronage it would hardly have survived, let alone thrived. Footnote 155 In current dollars, RF contributed between US$203,000 and US$233,000 annually from 1942 to 1949; in the same period, the value of the government's subsidy (MX$200,000) declined in real terms from current US$655,000 to US$260,000.Footnote 156 This subsidy would have barely sufficed to pay for a few salaries; certainly not to carry out a research and teaching programme. In 1959, Cosío admitted that RF, which he dubbed la gran dama, ‘the grande dame’, had always financed Colegio centres like CES ‘on the usual fifty-fifty basis’.Footnote 157 All the evidence indicates that, during its first two decades, the Colegio received between one-third and almost one-half of its income from RF.
Unlike CEH, CES closed for lack of funds.Footnote 158 Among the wide-ranging consequences was that Medina's historical, Keynesian and social democratic take on social sciences disappeared from Mexico, an episode reminiscent of the demise of Weberian historical sociology in the United States.Footnote 159 How consequential Willits's decision was seems to be confirmed by comparing CES and the Escola de Sociologia e Política (School of Sociology and Politics) in São Paulo, which received a series of RF grants, because of, among other reasons, the presence there of Donald Pierson, a Chicago PhD endorsed by Robert Redfield and Herbert Blumer.Footnote 160 Not only did the Escola survive WWII, unlike CES, but it also became the training ground for Brazilian sociologists such as Florestan Fernandes, planting the seeds for the flourishing of sociology at the Universidade de São Paulo. After Fernandes's student Cardoso returned to São Paulo in 1968, he began conducting research at the Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (Brazilian Analysis and Planning Centre, CEBRAP). CEBRAP received funding from the Ford Foundation, just like Guillermo O'Donnell's Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad (Centre for the Study of State and Society, CEDES) in Buenos Aires.Footnote 161 The social sciences in Mexico and Latin America would have looked different if Medina's CES had received RF support as long as did the Escola, or if CEBRAP and CEDES had not obtained funding from Ford. Perhaps the most consequential decisions taken by the patrons of science are the rejections.
Like it or not, science patronage is a relation of domination. Even authors who emphasise partnership must admit that control and ‘dependence’ are intrinsic to external funding.Footnote 162 Echoes of RF's clear-cut policies – the statutes of rational organisations – can be heard beneath Berrien's kindly tone and good intentions. Cosío could either accept RF preferences or let the Colegio go under. As a rational scientific entrepreneur, he chose to pursue the interests that the Colegio and RF shared, placing CEH and full-time work at the Colegio's core. However, in addition to shared interests, science patronage may also entail resistance. In fact, resistance to RF may have been facilitated by how the foundation operated at the time. Once grants were made, RF only expected a few receipts, biannual accounts and reports. This attenuated domination, but there is no denying that, in addition to Cosío's, the Colegio had Berrien's fingerprints all over it.
Even in a relation of domination, recipients may enjoy some leeway, which raises the question of whether RF actually achieved the ‘rationalisation’ of Mexican higher education that it sought. Perhaps the prerogative of grantee selection conceded to the Colegio, as previously to ENAH, is what permitted Reyes and Cosío to practise sub-patronage, turning employees and grantees into their own clients. This suspicion is supported by events within the Colegio, including personal affronts by Cosío and the arbitrary dismissals he had decreed, as well as the numerous internal hires in the following decades. Personalism characterises clientelism as a specific form of traditional domination.
The demise of CES contains two final lessons for both sociology and the history of social sciences. First, not only foundation policies but also foundation officers shaped the history of the social sciences, and of its methods: for example, Willits eschewed Latin America despite demands by RF's president and trustees as well as the US vice-president that DSS should get involved in Mexico. The explanation may be that Willits was more loyal to US fellow economists than to RF and the US government. This ability to override RF policies defies accounts in which ‘altruistic’ scientific organisations, sometimes known as ‘rationalised others’, advance similarities among schools, universities, governments etc. These ‘isomorphisms’ supposedly reveal a ‘world culture’.Footnote 163 In reality, rather than a ‘world culture’, they exude the winners’ agenda. This ability of RF officers to advance their personal agenda is firmly established for the natural sciences;Footnote 164 it furthermore casts doubt on Platt's claim that foundation money never shaped the history of sociological methods because no foundation pursued a change towards more quantification as a policy; such aspiration to promote quantitative methods would have been only officers’ ‘intellectual tastes’.Footnote 165 Willits's scuttling of CES shows that officers’ ‘tastes’ do matter. As early as the 1930s RF officers routinely favoured statistical prowess and an allegiance to positivism as criteria to distinguish deserving from undeserving projects.
Second, different RF divisions followed mutually inconsistent agendas, making accounts of the foundations as instruments of US hegemony unconvincing.Footnote 166 As the negative decision on CES shows, RF failed to combine specialisation across divisions with the principle of unity of action, two basic traits of a rational organisation. In fact, Willits flouted not only both these traits, but also standard hierarchy principles and RF's procedures; he furthermore ignored both experts’ reviews and the factual knowledge preserved on file. Put differently, Willits replaced Hamilton's factual knowledge with Sauer's bias, fragmenting RF policy as a result. Discarding knowledge and resorting to prejudice characterises traditional domination. But if foundations do not decide as rational organisations, one can hardly consider them fool-proof instruments of US cultural hegemony and imperialism. In this respect, I agree with Hugh Wilford and Patrick Iber, who emphasise that donors do not always achieve everything they want and sometimes obtain the opposite.Footnote 167 At the Colegio, RF officers fostered liberal scholarship, but little is known about whether they raised standards elsewhere in Mexico, let alone Latin America. Possibly, as RF officers delegated to Cosío the assignment of fellowships and other resources, they also fostered, as sorcerers’ apprentices, the clientelism they aspired to counteract. But if we conclude, as do Wilford and Iber for their respective cases, that donors failed to achieve cultural hegemony, then the crucial question is what the concepts are that can help us to identify under which circumstances donors dominate recipients and when scholars resist and pursue their own agendas.
Acknowledgements
In its different incarnations, in Spanish and English, this paper was presented at the Ann Arbor Sociology Workshop, Northwestern Sociology Workshop, Columbia University Latin American History Workshop, Seminario de Historia Intelectual (UAM-Cuajimalpa), Institut für Interkulturelle und Internationale Studien in Bremen, Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin, NYU-CNRS Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Seminario de Investigación en Ciencia Política (ITAM), Seminario Permanente México–España at El Colegio de México, and at the International Studies Division – CIDE in Mexico City. I am thankful for the valuable comments of the participants and, in particular, to Carlos Bravo, Ezequiel González and George Steinmetz. I also received most valuable feedback from Gerardo Maldonado, Tom Rosenbaum, Aurelia Valero, Eduardo Weisz and Nuria Valverde. While doing the research for this article I was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University. The final revisions were made when I was a Wolfensohn Family Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Last but not least, I also acknowledge the useful criticisms of three JLAS reviewers and the editor.
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