IWL SHINES on Maggie Nettesheim Hoffmann’s Research into the History of Philanthropy and How to Transform Graduate Training in the Humanities
This Q&A is part of a series called “IWL SHINES” — an inclusive research series highlighting research conducted by faculty, grad students, and staff at Marquette. IWL stands for the Institute for Women’s Leadership at Marquette. IWL is a network whose mission is to advance women’s leadership locally and globally through pioneering research, innovative programming and collaborative engagement. Read more IWL SHINES Q&As here.
Maggie Nettesheim Hoffmann is the associate director of career diversity at the Humanities Without Walls Consortium and a doctoral student studying American history in the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences.
Here in a Q&A, Nettesheim Hoffmann explains her research interests, academic motivations, and hopes for the future.
What is your research about?
My research explores the historical development and transformation of philanthropy in the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive era, a period historians date from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s to the 1920s. I’m particularly interested in the establishment of philanthropic foundations formed by wealthy industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Their foundations constructed formal, legal institutions tasked with the planned, professional distribution of wealth into American society.
My research also examines political critiques leveled against foundations that suggested the distribution of private wealth into American society posed a “menace to the national welfare” since “philanthropists” acquired their wealth via the exploitation of laborers or through the extraction of high costs on consumer goods. Politicians and bureaucrats including Senator Robert M. La Follette from Wisconsin viewed “philanthropists” as threats to democratic norms, arguing that foundations represent an additional way industrialists and capitalists monopolized wealth in the nation. For a brief period, for instance, the board of regents at the University of Wisconsin banned grants to the university from foundations including the Rockefeller Foundation following a controversial grant to the university in 1925. My research aims to unpack the significance of these critiques, reintroduce them to the historical conversation, and propose lessons about the power modern foundations wield through their endowments.
While the above is my formal academic dissertation research, I also have become a researcher in relation to my professional work dedicated to reforming graduate training for graduate students in a methodology referred to as “career diversity.” Advocates for career diversity programming (including the American Historical Association and their Career Diversity Initiative for Historians project) support broad career outcomes for advanced degree holders and argue there are a variety of job opportunities beyond the tenure track for those who earn doctoral degrees. In 2020, I received a $1.3 million grant from the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop career diversity programming for the consortium and our university partners.
How did you decide to focus on this research interest? What led you to it?
In 2008, my partner’s great aunt passed away after a long professional life directing a local Milwaukee area foundation. While going through her personal belongings, we discovered her papers and foundation paperwork detailing the twenty years she worked as the director of this foundation including grant paperwork that outlined the projects the foundation supported, annual budgets and operating expenses, and trust paperwork which formed the foundation. The paperwork was literally sitting in cardboard boxes in the basement of a flower shop, and we rescued the boxes before they were thrown away. Reading about the philosophy establishing the foundation and that guided its mission intrigued me and led me down this now decade long research endeavor. It is the family’s goal to donate those records to the Marquette University archives since the foundation she directed was formed by a notable Milwaukee businessman and Marquette benefactor.
As for my work with HWW, I have always been interested in thinking through a variety of potential career pathways I could develop based on my research interests. Could I connect my research to a future career at a nonprofit organization or foundation? As such, I’ve always thought about careers beyond the tenure track or teaching. What was more difficult was to think about how I could develop a career that looked different from the traditional academic standard which maintains that the only outcome for a PhD is a tenure track position. How could I manage that career development while still prioritizing my research? In 2017, I had an opportunity to spend three weeks in Chicago exploring my options as a HWW Predoctoral Career Diversity Fellow. Following that experience, I grew committed to bringing those methods back to Marquette and partnered with Marquette’s Graduate School and HWW to develop career diversity workshops assisting graduate students on campus.
What do you hope others learn from your research?
I hope that those interested in my research learn to push back against assumptions about how or what society defines as “good.” Older histories of philanthropy in the United States focused almost exclusively on the proposed good conducted through philanthropic donations and these narratives tended to further a myth about American exceptionalism. Those myths proposed a unique quality within the American national character that lent itself towards charitable acts.
These narratives often shielded the worst moments in the history of American capitalism as an element in the larger history of the Cold War. American philanthropy could sanctify the sins of capitalism as a counter to socialist critiques. It is my hope that those currently leading foundations or in the nonprofit sector grapple with the often-unjust practices which earned the capital comprising their endowments and think through the forms of power they wield through the act of giving. I believe my research demonstrates that philanthropy in the United States is much more complex because it is a form of power that ought to be critically examined in a healthy democracy and at the same time has also deeply affected many systems in the nation like higher education, public health, and arts and cultural funding.
What do you want to focus on next, and why?
I have so many projects and ideas percolating in my mind! One project I hope to work on as a follow-up to my dissertation is to conduct research in support of a biography of Frank Walsh, the chairman of a federal commission that leveled a scathing critique against philanthropic foundations in the commission’s final report published in 1916. His life story is fascinating, and I’ve not been able to find a book-length biography detailing his life story. In addition to chairing the commission informing my dissertation research, he also participated in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 with President Wilson, supported the recognition of the Irish republic and chaired the American Commission on Irish Independence, and was a staunch defender of union and labor rights.
Who is someone else doing research at Marquette that you admire, and why?
There are so many wonderful researchers and scholars at Marquette that it is hard to pick one person! I have so much admiration for my colleague and mentor from the Graduate School, Dr. Theresa Tobin. Theresa’s commitment to justice through her work with the Education Preparedness Program (EPP) is an inspiration for those of us driven to reform higher education and society through collaborative humanities driven methods. She’s a professor, researcher, and activist who puts into action and practice her personal ethics; as a result, she empowers the communities with whom she works. Most importantly, Theresa models key elements in best collaborative research practices, including her ability to truly listen and learn from the perspectives of her collaborators. She has taught me what it means to live life led by personal ethics and radical empathy. She just makes the world a better place.
I believe this type of collaborative model that engages communities inside and beyond the academy, whether through projects like EPP, our career diversity work for graduate students with the Graduate School and the Humanities Without Walls consortium is the future of humanities research and higher education, in my humble opinion. All of this work recognizes that knowledge is created and exists in a number of spaces beyond the academy.
I am also inspired by my fellow graduate students on campus and the number of friends and colleagues I’ve made during my years at the university. To me, they represent the vanguard of academic research, the places where higher education will go into the future, and I think it is important for our community to recognize the value they bring to Marquette’s community whether it is with the undergraduate students they teach, the new knowledge they bring to the academy, or the innovative methods they develop through their research.
Finally, I deeply admire the staff members with whom I work in the Graduate School. They do so much every day to support the needs of students on campus and to help students and faculty navigate the bureaucratic features of the university. Their commitment to one another and the ways they came together as a group during the pandemic, while also welcoming me into their community, continues to inspire me professionally.
Psst! Know someone doing great things? Maybe it’s you!
To recommend yourself or someone you know to be profiled in this series, please send an email with the person’s/people’s name to IWL SHINES at iwlshines@marquette.edu. Please provide a very brief description about the research involved or why you think it should be highlighted. After consideration, IWL will contact you/your nominee to start the interview process, which will entail the person/team responding in writing briefly to different interview questions from a menu of choices.
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