Marshall A. Robinson

Marshall A. Robinson, former president of the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, died in 2006.

"After a career in academia and with the Ford Foundation, Dr. Robinson headed the Russell Sage Foundation, one of the nation's oldest private philanthropies, from 1979 to 1986...

"He sought to avoid either a liberal or conservative label for the foundation, with resident or visiting scholars drawn from both the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the liberal Brookings Institution...

"He started teaching at Ohio State and rose to assistant professor at Tulane University and Dartmouth College. He was a senior staff member and assistant to the president at Brookings in the late 1950's and then worked as a professor of economics and dean of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.

"In 1964 he joined the Ford Foundation, rising to vice president for resources and the environment before moving to the Russell Sage Foundation in 1979... From 1992 until last year he was vice president of the Daniele Agostino Foundation in of New York, which supports women and children's programs in Indian communities, primarily in Guatemala and Mexico."