Woody Wickham
Coloring outside the lines

60In the early decades of TV, a must-watch on most people’s lists was “The Millionaire.” In the half-hour weekly series, a character named Michael Anthony would, on behalf of unseen benefactor John Beresford Tipton, present a $1 million check to transform the life of an unsuspecting recipient.
Woodward A. Wickham is a latter-day Michael Anthony. Though his real-life scenario involves transformative gifts not to random individuals, but to institutions that are fully involved in the award process, Wickham’s job is to give away money.

Woody Wickham is vice president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago, which awards $175 million in grants annually to projects and programs aimed at improving the human condition.

Making things better is an instinct he’s had since boyhood, when he saw his father, a surgeon in Jackson, Mich., advance people’s lives by correcting deformities caused by burns.

“I always understood,” he says, “that privilege has its responsibilities, and the role of an educated person in society is to act on behalf of the underdog.”

Not inclined to follow his dad into the medical profession, Wickham found an equally effective tool for social betterment at Andover, where he developed a passion for the written word.
As editor-in-chief of The Phillipian, he used language to forward community values, and he learned, as he puts it, to “take the Andover rhetoric about goodness and knowledge very seriously.” A protegee of English teacher Harford Powel, Wickham also learned to use satire as a way to challenge authority and question perceived wisdom. After spending a postgraduate year in Kent, England, as a participant in the English-Speaking Union Exchange, he attended Harvard and continued his literary moving and shaping as head of The Lampoon.

After college, Wickham passed what he wryly calls a “God-vs.-mammon fork in the road,” turning down a public relations job at Time-Life to teach English at an Episcopal boys’ school. At the Wooster School in Connecticut, he secured a grant from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, the “War on Poverty,” for an Upward Bound project providing enrichment experience and tutoring for talented but underachieving youth from disadvantaged backgrounds.

After taking a break to earn a master of art in teaching degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Wickham was named a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs. He spent five years in rural Mexico as what he calls “a participatory journalist,” publishing his observations about late 20th-century Native American life in institute newsletters and in Harper’s Weekly. Eventually he also found himself acceding to native requests to help provide medical care, which the local residents deemed more useful. After his fellowship ended, he taught at a Mexican university and wrote articles on development in Latin America and Asia for the Rockefeller Foundation.

When Wickham returned to the United States, it was as executive assistant to Adele Simmons, then president of Hampshire College in Massachusetts. In that job, he refined his ability to shape proposals that led to funding for key educational projects. He became Hampshire’s director of development and afterward put his verbal skills to work in New York with a consulting firm in international marketing and communications for non-profit institutions.

In 1989, Simmons was named president of the MacArthur Foundation, and in January 1990 Wickham joined her in Chicago as a vice president.

Although the MacArthur Fellow Program, which makes so-called “genius grants” to forward the work of creative individuals, is perhaps the foundation’s best-known initiative, Wickham says the fellowships represent only about 5 percent of MacArthur’s philanthropy. Significantly more dollars go to support a domestic program on Human and Community Development and an international program on Global Security and Sustainability. Under those two umbrellas, MacArthur makes grants to promote values ranging from world peace to biodiversity conservation to women’s reproductive health. In addition, the foundation’s General Program annually awards about $25 million in grants for initiatives outside of those two areas that seem to promise a better future for humankind. Wickham calls them projects that “color outside the lines.”

Specifically responsible for the General Program, Wickham has become particularly well-known for managing MacArthur’s aggressive support of documentary filmmaking, public radio and public television. He also handles communications for the foundation, issuing annual reports, serving as liaison to the media, the Congress and the public and making sure research findings from projects supported by the foundation get into the hands of those who need them. For example, he notes, foundation-supported findings on aging would not have helped to transform policy and practice if they had not been communicated to clinicians, policy-makers and researchers.

“My career may seem to have little narrative thread,” he says, “but, in fact, a large part of what I bring to each role I’ve had is the same; it’s the Andover-honed skills to think critically and to interpret, simplify and explain information.”

Thus it’s not surprising that Wickham has of late been looking at ways to ameliorate one potentially alarming consequence of the digital revolution, the shrinking of the public domain. While it may appear computers are making more information available to more people, he is concerned that in fact digitization has encouraged government, corporations and even educational institutions to privatize, patent and copyright information—in essence, to turn information into a money-making commodity.

What can MacArthur do about that? A strategy should be announced within the next year, Wickham says. What is clear already is that the head of MacArthur’s General Program sees the need for “deep thinking about the law, about questions of ethics and philosophy and the principles underlying the Constitution.” Perhaps, if such thinking prevails, artists, scientists, writers and others can continue building, as they have in the past, upon the accumulated wisdom and learning of those who came before them.