The Betrayal of Founders: How Institutions Drift from Their Original Missions
A curious pattern repeats across philanthropy and education: institutions launched with one vision often evolve, or devolve, into something their creators would scarcely recognize. The Ford Foundation, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, and the University of Buckingham offer telling case studies of this ‘mission drift.’
Henry Ford and his son Edsel established the Ford Foundation in 1936. Henry Ford, the self-made industrialist and champion of free enterprise, viewed professionalized charity with deep skepticism. He favoured practical self-help over large-scale, top-down redistribution. Yet after the founders' deaths, the Foundation swelled into a multi-billion-dollar behemoth. Today it deploys hundreds of millions annually toward social justice initiatives, challenging inequality, and progressive causes that emphasise systemic change over individual enterprise. Henry Ford II eventually resigned in frustration, citing anti-capitalist undertones. The institution bearing the family name now often promotes ideas at odds with the rugged capitalism that generated its wealth.
Similarly, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation was created in 1961 by Ian Fairbairn, a pioneering financier who built M&G Investments and championed unit trusts, innovations of broad-based capitalism. Named after his late wife, it initially supported economic research and practical endeavours aligned with a market-oriented worldview. Its current priorities centre on improving the natural world, securing a ‘fairer future,’ racial and migrant justice, climate action, and impact investing that prioritizes social and environmental outcomes. While these are worthy in their own right, they represent a pronounced shift from the founder’s likely emphasis on economic opportunity through free markets.
Universities are not immune. The University of Buckingham, Britain’s first independent university since the 1970s, was explicitly founded to champion classical liberal ideas in higher education, free from state control, emphasizing academic freedom, market principles, and intellectual diversity. Early leaders like Lord Beloff embodied this ethos. Margaret Thatcher served as Chancellor. Yet recent years have seen internal tensions. The departure of outspoken classical liberal Vice-Chancellor Professor James Tooley, known for defending free speech and critiquing wokeism, and moves toward more bureaucratic or managerial appointments signal a potential softening (or worse) of that founding edge. Even institutions designed to resist conformity can drift toward conventional academic norms.
Why does this happen?
The journalist John O’Sullivan once commented that institutions that are not explicitly right will eventually become left wing. He seems to be right. But why?
It’s the Public Choice problem again. Founders die. Control passes to professional trustees, managers, and academics who bring their own incentives, cultural milieu, and priorities. Large endowments create perpetual bureaucracies less tethered to original intent. Funding pressures, prestige, and prevailing intellectual fashions pull organizations leftward or toward statism, directions often more congenial to elite non-profit culture than rugged individualism. Vague founding charters citing ‘public welfare,’ charitable purposes,’ offer little resistance.
This drift matters. Donors seeking lasting impact should consider sunset clauses, stricter governance with family or ideological successors, or clear legal mandates. Perpetual foundations risk becoming monuments to irony. Society loses when the engines of innovation and liberty fund their own critics.
Institutions, like people, have lifespans. Without vigilance, they outlive their principles. Founders’ wishes deserve better than quiet betrayal by bureaucratic evolution. If you want your foundation to do most good, put a time limit on it.
Dr Eamonn Butler