In Tuesday’s (3/10) Washington Post, Neely Tucker reports, “Robert Gallucci will be the new president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Chicago-based organization announced today, in tapping the veteran Washington envoy and educator to head one of the nation’s most prestigious philanthropies. Gallucci, 63, has been Georgetown University’s dean of the School of Foreign Service for 13 years, after a career as a diplomat and negotiator working with North Korea, Russia, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. He will leave the university June 30 and begin his five-year term at the MacArthur Foundation the next day. … The foundation—perhaps best known for its annual Fellows Program (often called ‘genius grants,’ worth $500,000 each and given with no strings for original and groundbreaking work in the arts and sciences)—makes about 500 awards a year in dozens of countries, in areas ranging from the arts and media to global security to juvenile justice reform.” Neely notes that the foundation has taken hits to its endowment, but its budget for grants was up last year over the previous year.
Posted March 11, 2009
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