‘The ignorance of the uneducated’: Ford Foundation philanthropy, the IIE, and the geographies of educational exchange

• Philanthropy works in the interstices of state and private agencies.
• The Ford Foundation sought to shape the world through international programmes.
• The Ford Foundation used educational exchange as a form of productive power.
• Ford and the IIE developed technical programmes in strategic areas such as India.
• Educational exchange was exploited as a geopolitical technology.

During the early years of the Cold War, the Ford Foundation became one of the largest philanthropic foundations of the twentieth century, using its vast wealth to engineer a world according to its own ideas and principles. Educational exchange was crucial to the Foundation's plans for global modernisation and progress. As part of this grand vision, the Foundation contracted the Institute of International Education (IIE) to co-ordinate a series of international educational exchanges. The IIE had begun under the stewardship of private philanthropy in the interwar period, and by the end of the Second World War, its largest philanthropic supporter was the Ford Foundation. This paper examines how the Ford Foundation and the IIE used education to induce cultural, economic and social changes at a global scale. Educational exchange provided a productive technology of philanthropic power tying the development of human competencies to the administration of global society. The paper outlines how strategic exchanges were imagined and funded by the Foundation and co-ordinated by the IIE as part of a project of modernisation and exposition of geopolitical and transnational power. The paper considers a brief case study of exchange projects in India which served as a tool of development and social engineering. An exploration of the nature of philanthropic projects during the early years of the Cold War casts a significant light on the exercise of power by non-state, transnational bodies and the geographical vocabularies used to explain and justify international educational projects.