The Ford Foundation has announced that Luis A. Ubiñas, a business consultant, will take over as its chief executive in 2008.
He will replace Susan V. Berresford, who announced in the fall that after 12 years as head of the institution, she plans to retire in 2008.
The foundation has been a longtime benefactor of higher education, among many other causes. Its grants have furthered international fellowship programs, studies of work-force issues in academe, state-by-state report cards on colleges’ performance, and the progress of higher education in Africa, among other projects.
Mr. Ubiñas — a director at McKinsey & Company, the management-consulting company where he has worked for the past 18 years — marks a departure for the foundation, which faced criticism in 1996 for hiring Ms. Berresford, a longtime foundation executive.
The Ford Foundation’s announcement signals a possible shift in the foundation world toward looking outside of the field for top talent, say some philanthropy observers, who note another recent hiring of foundation outsider, Steve Gunderson, to oversee the Council on Foundations.
“It runs counter to the idea that grant making is a closed profession, that you stay in this field and you simply move through the field,” says Peter J. Frumkin, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. “You have a lot of foundations that are saying we want our leaders to have a lot of broad experience.”
For Mr. Ubiñas, much of that experience has come in the consulting world. At McKinsey, he works in the San Francisco office to oversee efforts to aid media, telecommunications, and technology companies.
He serves on the board of Leadership Education and Development, a Philadelphia organization that provides educational opportunities nationwide to Latino and black students from low-income families. He is also trustee of the United Way in San Francisco.
“They’ve obviously gone with someone who has good management skills — and great skills overall,” Mr. Frumkin says. “You have to have a certain amount on the ball to succeed at McKinsey. That place chews people up and spits them out with some regularity.”
The Ford Foundation was ranked as the second wealthiest foundation in the United States, with more than $12-billion in assets, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s most-recent survey of big grant makers. —Peter Panepento
