Inside Higher Ed summarizes and links to a devastating report on the Inkwell Foundation, created by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in ProPublica (“journalism in the public interest”). Inkwell, ProPublica reports,
[a]charity headed by star Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. [,] is filing an amended 2007 report to the Internal Revenue Service because $11,000 it paid to foundation officers as compensation was mischaracterized as being for research grants.
Actually, in my opinion the reality seems a bit worse than this summary. First, there’s the matter of “a $10,000 grant made to Joanne Kendall, the foundation’s treasurer, [who] is also Gates’ assistant at Harvard.” In addition, “Gates also said $1,000 paid to foundation secretary Abby Wolf was for secretarial work, not research.”
That’s the $11,000, but wait; there’s more.
Gates volunteered that the foundation’s second-largest grant, for $6,000, went to his fiancée, Angela DeLeon, who was also on Inkwell’s board from 2005 to 2006. Gates said he recused himself from the vote on DeLeon’s grant, which was for a project translating documents from Spanish and Dutch about the slave trade to Mexico.
A grant of $500 also went to Evelyn Higginbotham, chairwoman of Inkwell’s board. Higginbotham is the chairwoman of Harvard’s Department of African and African-American studies and, with Gates, edited the 2004 book “African American Lives.” Gates said that, as per the foundation’s bylaws, she did not vote on the grant.
Nice “work” if you can get it.
given the paltry amounts, this is may not seem very newsworthy, but it is. gates and his foundation will probably face some major penalties for trying to hide money (“hiding” money is basically what they tried to do here: by characterizing the disbursements as “research grants,” gates and the foundation basically kept the money away from the tax man). this situation is particularly bad because it looks like the moneys went to officers of the foundation, not disinterested individuals. yikes!
Gates won’t face any penalties at all, and will privately laugh at the notion that he will. As he has demonstrated, all he has to do is cry you know what, and no one, not one person, in the left dominated media or any govt. agency, will be willing to call him to account for his actions. “Victims” of the right color in contemporary America are immune from standards imposed on the rest of the country, whether being civil to a policeman doing his job, or complying with the Internal Revenue Code.