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What earns respect for Carnegie is its pinpoint giving. In 1924 it called the first U.S. conference on adult education. In the 19305 it got Sweden's Gunnar Myrdal to produce An American Dilemma, the first real study of U.S. Negroes.
To popularize fine arts, it supported a little study that sparked the moderniza tion of museums across the country.
A master at unleashing human talents, Carnegie financed the early makers of ap titude and achievement tests. In 1948 the corporation helped start the Educational Testing Service, now the country's leading testmaker. In 1952 it helped expand the Princeton program that became the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which foots the cost of graduate study for prospective college teachers.
Foresight & Influence. "It's impossible to give us credit for anything except fore sight," says Carnegie President John W.
Gardner, 49, a deceptively casual Californian who took his doctorate in psychol ogy at the University of California at Berkeley. A prewar teacher at Mount Holyoke, Gardner is himself an example of Carnegie foresight. The corporation spotted him when he was a Marine Corps captain assigned to the OSS, and by 1955 he was president. One of the few top "philanthropoids" to rise through foundation ranks, Gardner is also one of the few with a gift for words. Gardner chiefly drafted the Rockefeller Brothers Fund's famed The Pursuit of Excellence, followed it with his own thoughtful book, Excellence, wrote the education report for President Eisenhower's Commission on National Goals, and last year edited President Kennedy's To Turn the Tide.
At Carnegie's modest Manhattan office on Fifth Avenue, Gardner heads a staff of just 36. including the telephone girl. What makes this small force highly effective is constant scouting trips and close contacts throughout U.S. education. An instance lies in Gardner's simultaneous presidency of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The foundation's board consists of almost every key university president in the country. What they report about education's headaches influences the Carnegie Corporation, which then typically commissions an outside expert to find answers.
Carnegie-supported books have stirred action on everything from business schools to junior colleges and graduate education. But sometimes Carnegie has to create the experts, as in 1947, when it started sending "Jeep-sized" teams of U.S. scholars to Africa, prepared them for the coming problems of crumbling colonialism. In 1948. Carnegie gained immeasurable ''lead time" for the U.S. by starting Harvard's Russian Research Center. Soon due at another major university is an equally precedent-setting center on Communist China.
Nothing Ordinary. Thinking ahead, Carnegie in 1956 supported pioneering school math reforms. It launched James B. Conant on his key studies of U.S. high schools (TIME cover, Sept. 14. 1959). and in 1958 it got public campuses to set up honors programs for gifted students. In the past year, Carnegie underwrote everything from courses in Chinese at a private school in Massachusetts to helping Denver parents teach their kindergarten children to read, plus a significant $300,000 grant to Notre Dame for the first big study of U.S. parochial schools.