Columbia University's Historical Russell Sage Foundation Connection Revisited

Did Columbia University.-linked Russell Sage Foundation get its "charitable" grant money, historically, by investing in corporations that exploit workers and from a foundation with Israeli investments?

The Russell Sage Foundation--whose board of trustees former Columbia University Provost and Columbia World Politics Deputy Director in 2024, Ira Katznelson, chaired between 1999 and 2002--claimed, historically, to be a “non-profit” institution (despite it having, historically, an endowment of over $350 million in assets in 2019).


But, according to its Form 990 financial filing for 2018, between Sept. 1, 2018 and Aug. 31, 2019, the Russell Sage Foundation collected over $15.5 million in total revenues, including over $11.5 million from its net investment income; and also including over $1.3 million from a “charitable” contribution it received from Bill Gates’s Gates Foundation (which—besides including former Columbia U. President Shafik on its board in recent years—in 2022 invested $9 million in an Israeli biotechnology company, Eleven Therapeutics, whose COO and Co-Founder is a “mission commander in active reserve duty” in the IAF and a former “F-16 co-pilot” and “IAF Major”, according to the Eleven Therapeutics website.) during this same time period.


In addition, according to a financial statement that was posted on its website, historically, in 2020 the Russell Sage Foundation had total revenues exceeding $52.5 million. Yet “the Foundation is exempt from federal taxes,” “is classified as a private foundation” and “the Foundation is further classified as an exempt operating foundation, and is therefore exempt from federal excise taxes;” although “the Foundation is subject to income taxes…on income derived from private equity partnership investments.”


According to the same 2020 financial statement, less than $27 million, of the over $350 million that the Russell Sage Foundation endowment had, historically, then invested in stocks and bonds of for-profit corporations that exploit workers and consumers around the globe, was then, historically, invested in “private equity partnership investments.”


But over $328 million of the Russell Sage Foundation endowment was, historically, then invested in either a domestic equities fund, an international equities fund, a commingled international equities trust fund or mutual funds--which produced dividends and interest income for the foundation, yet was apparently not then, historically, subject to federal income or federal excise taxes.


So, for example, the “philanthropic” Columbia University-linked Russell Sage Foundation paid, historically, its then-president, Sheldon Danziger, a total annual compensation of between $594,000 and $623,000, and gave him an expense account of over $84,000, between Sept. 1, 2018 and Aug. 31, 2019; and, during the same period, it then paid, historically, over $686,000 to firms like BlackRock and Silchester International Investors for “investment management services.” Yet the main tax that the “non-profit” Russell Sage Foundation (whose headquarters building is located at 112 East 64th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side) paid, historically, between Sept. 1, 2018 and Aug. 31, 2019 was just a real estate tax of less than $30,000.


The Russell Sage Foundation, incidentally, “was started with a $10 million [equal to around $280 million in 2021] bequest by Mrs. Sage in 1907,” as G. William Domhoff recalled in his 1970 book, "The Higher Circles: The Governing Class In America". But “philanthropist” Mrs. Sage was the second wife and widow of a long-time business partner of 19th-century U.S. Robber Baron Jay Gould: Russell Sage. And, according to Gustavus Myers’s "A History of the Great American Fortunes", Russell Sage “had the reputation among the knowing of being an old hand at political and financial corruption.”

Was Columbia University-linked Russell Sage Foundation started with inherited wealth of Robber Baron Jay Gould's business partner?

The Russell Sage Foundation--whose current president is a former Russell Sage Foundation "Visiting Scholar" and a former Harvard U., Princeton U. and Columbia University Professor named Bruce Western--is named for a super-rich U.S. capitalist who, by the time of his death in 1906, had accumulated an individual fortune of between $70 million and $100 million [equal to between $2 billion and $2.9 billion in 2021 U.S. dollars], by economically exploiting U.S. railroad workers, small farmers and, U.S. taxpayers, as well as by engaging in corporate stock and bond manipulation, in partnership with 19th-century U.S. Robber Baron Jay Gould.


As Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais indicated in their "Labor’s Untold Story" book, by the late 1880’s, Jay Gould and Russell Sage “had owned and pillaged the Union Pacific, the Wabash, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas, the Texas-Pacific, the Western Union Telegraph Company,…and a number of shorter Eastern railroads;” and it was their “practice to gain control of ruined railroads, usually through stock manipulation…, make a pretense of profitable operation, and then sell stocks and bonds based on that pretense before getting out just as the property failed again.”


According, for example to Gustavus Myers’s "History of the Great American Fortunes":


“Sage testified that he himself had begun buying Union Pacific stock in 1868 or 1869. One of the railroads that Gould, Sage…and their accessories bought as individuals, and then sold to themselves as directors of the Union Pacific, was the Kansas Pacific…Its chief assets were an issue of Government bonds, and a land grant of 3 million acres in Kansas and Colorado…In the juggling exchange of stocks and bonds and the fraudulent diversion of funds, they stole…more than $20,000,000 [equal to around $431 million in 2021 U.S. dollars]…The frauds of the Union Pacific Railroad Company, under the direction of Gould, Sage…were truly gigantic.


“Millions of acres of public land were stolen outright. No less than seven million acres were sold without any patent from the Government. Coal lands of inestimable value were fraudulently seized. Millions of dollars were fraudulently shuffled from one corporation to another…


“The Texas Pacific was one of the four main lines that Gould and Sage obtained control of by their well-known methods…Another of their lines was the Wabash, composed of…68 originally separate little railroads…Within 5 years of the time they gained hold of the Wabash, Gould and Sage had obtained a great series of privilege from various States, looted the railroads of millions of dollars, and then had thrown it into bankruptcy…Each new haul gave Gould and Sage a still greater supply of resources with which to manipulate other railroads and other public utility systems into their control…”


In addition, as the Internet Accuracy project noted, Russell Sage was also “a director of several New York banks, was a founding director of the Fifth Avenue Bank of New York City, and was president of New York's Standard Gaslight Company;” and he “was one of the largest stockholders of” of the “Manhattan Elevated Railway Company, Metropolitan Elevated Railway Company” and “many others.”


Gustavus Myers’s "History of the Great American Fortunes" book also recalled that, after holding a government position during the 1840’s in Troy (as an alderman of the Troy Common Council, until 1848) and occupying the Renssalaer County treasurer position in Upstate New York between 1844 and 1851 (before also being elected as an Upstate New York representative in the U.S. Congress between 1853 and 1857), Russell Sage had “gathered in his first notable amount of money.” He did so by “a transaction in which as a public official he betrayed the city of Troy into selling to himself for a small sum a railroad line” which “he later, according to a prearranged plan, sold to the New York Central consolidation at a very large profit.” And “there is nothing vague or conjectural regarding this…transaction” because “the facts are inscribed” in the “public record.”


At public expense, the City of Troy had built the 21-mile-long Troy & Schenectady Railroad in the early 1840’s to connect Troy, NY to Schenectady, NY. But later, in the late 1840's and early 1850’s, then-Renssalaer County Treasurer Sage persuaded the Troy Common Council (of which he had recently been a member) to sell its railroad line for $50,000 [equal to around $1.7 million in 2021 U.S. dollars] down, to a company headed by Sage; who then soon “sold it for $900,000 [equal to around $30.7 million in 2021 U.S. dollars] or so to a group of capitalists forming the New York Central Railroad combination.”


And Russell Sage also gained part of his excessive wealth from being a large stockholder in the 1860’s and 1870’s of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company that “obtained by bribery” large U.S. government subsidies “for carrying the mails between San Francisco and Asia via Honolulu,” according to "The History of the Great American Fortunes".

Has Columbia University.-linked Russell Sage Foundation given "charitable" grant money to its current or ex-trustees, historically?

The Russell Sage Foundation [RSF]—whose board of trustees was chaired between 1999 and 2002 by 2019-2020 Russell Sage Foundation “Olivia Sage Scholar”, former Columbia University provost and later Columbia World Politics Deputy Director Ira Katznelson--and whose board of trustees chair in 2023 was then Columbia University Professor and former Russell Sage Foundation "Visiting Scholar" Jennifer Lee —had a “Conflict of Interest Policy” posted on its website in 2021.


And according to this 2021 “Conflict of Interest Policy”, among “the requirements” governing “the activities” of its Trustees, the Trustees “may not be Visiting Scholars, Principal Investigators of a funded project, Authors/Editors of a Foundation book, or compensated participant in a funded project;” and “the Foundation may not approve or engage in any…arrangement that would constitute an act of `self-dealing.’” In addition, in an April 2, 2021 email to this writer, the then-Russell Sage Foundation President, Sheldon Danziger, stated the following:


“The Russell Sage Foundation Board of Trustees has a robust Conflict of Interest Policy and a Conflict of Interest Committee to ensure that the Foundation serves its mission to strengthen the methods, data and theoretical core of social sciences in order to better understand societal problems and develop informed responses. The Foundation and Committee take seriously any conflicts of interest and address them consistent with New York law and the laws and regulations governing exempt operating foundations.”


Yet, according to the CV that a then-Russell Sage Foundation Trustee and Yale University Professor Jennifer Richeson posted on the internet, the Russell Sage Foundation gave this RSF trustee a grant of $163,531 to "study" the “Sociostructural and psychological factors supporting the misperception of racial economic equality” in 2020-2021; although Professor Richeson [whom a page posted on one of the RSF websites currently seems to indicate might now be the RSF board of trustees chair] had been sitting on the Columbia University-linked Russell Sage Foundation board of trustees since 2019.


In response to an email query asking why a grant of $163,551 was apparently awarded by the Russell Sage Foundation to Russell Foundation Trustee Richeson in 2020-2021 for a funded project, if, according to the foundation’s “Conflict of Interest Policy”, Trustees “may not be Visiting Scholars, Principal Investigators of a funded project, Author/Editors of a Foundation book, or compensated participant in a funded project” and “the Foundation may not approve or engage in any…arrangement that would constitute an act of `self-dealing’”, the Russell Sage Foundation's then-president, Danziger, in his April 2, 2021 email, replied:


“You have only quoted part of the Russell Sage Foundation’s Conflict of Interest Policy. The Policy provides that trustees `may not be…Principal Investigators of a funded project…unless such activity was initiated prior to his or her appointment’ as a trustee. The grant to Jennifer Richeson was initiated before she was invited to join or elected to the Board and was awarded without any input from her whatsoever.


“Furthermore, Ms. Richeson is not the Principal Investigator (PI) on the grant but a co-PI and receives no salary support under the grant. The proposal received very high reviews during the roughly six-month review process involved in approving such grants (which involves input from a panel of expert, independent evaluators), and the Board approved the proposal without the input or participation of Ms. Richeson. As a result, there was no conflict of interest, no financial benefit to Ms. Richeson, and no-self-dealing.”


Yet then-Russell Sage Foundation Trustee Richeson had also previously been a Russell Sage Foundation “Visiting Scholar” in 2004, a member of a Russell Sage Foundation Working Group between 2010 and 2014 and a member of a Russell Sage Foundation Advisory Committee between 2016 and 2019; before joining the foundation’s board of trustees in 2019—and afterwards receiving a $163,531 “charitable” grant from the historically Columbia University-connected Russell Sage Foundation (whose headquarters building is located at 112 East 64th Street in Manhattan).


And, in addition to then-Trustee Richeson being given the $163,531 grant by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2020 (in which the Russell Sage trustee is described as a “Co-Principal Investigator” with M. Kraus PI, according to this then-trustee’s posted CV), Russell Sage Foundation Trustee Richeson had previously been given a grant by the “philanthropic” Russell Sage Foundation of $197,524 between 2002 and 2005 to "study" the “intergroup contact: interpersonal and situational influence of dyadic interactions;” a grant of $174,953 between 2013 and 2014 to "study" the “public views about inequality, opportunity and redistribution: evidence from media coverage and experimental inquiry;” and a grant of $114,316 between 2015 and 2018 to "study" the “inequality, diversity and working-class attitudes.”


Besides receiving all this “charitable” grant money from the tax-exempt “philanthropic” Russell Sage Foundation since 2002, Russell Sage Foundation Trustee Richeson had also previously been given a $500,000 individual “genius grant” by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation in 2007. And, coincidentally, a former Columbia University provost and former Russell Sage Foundation board of trustees chair and longtime trustee—Claude M. Steele—and a then-Russell Sage Foundation trustee in 2021 [and current Carnegie Corporation of NY foundation trustee and chairperson of Boston's PBS/NPR station's GBH/WGBH board of trustees]--Martha Minow—had also been sitting on the MacArthur Foundation board of directors, historically, between 2008 and 2021 and between 2012 and 2021, respectively.