Michael Joyce

While I often disagreed with him, Michael Joyce made Milwaukee more interesting. I think we would be better off if some of the more liberal foundations made the same attempt to develop a strategy of funding. Too often, however, they either support squishy ideas or status quo researchers. One has the sense the left has been drifting since Vietnam, often better on specific issues but lacking a clear vision. Under Joyce, the Bradley Foundation helps shift the idea advantage to the conservative side.

That said, I think Joyce could have been more effective:

1. Because the Bradley Foundation was so closely tied to the conservative movement, ideas that might be inherently appealing to liberals, such as school choice, could be dismissed simply as part of a plan to destroy public institutions. So this concept is still struggling to get into the mainstream.
   
2. As Bruce Murphy points out this week, Joyce tended to limit his support to a select group of scholars and think tanks, whose results were often easy to predict in advance. Full disclosure: shortly after leaving the MPS board, I received a Bradley Foundation grant through MSOE to look at alternative ways of evaluating schools (abstract here). I was disappointed, however, that the foundation did not seem very interested in the results.