Editors’ Note: This July, Inderjeet Parmar published a HistPhil post summarizing the “sharply critical [journal] article” on the Hewlett Foundation that he had written as part of a special section on “The Pathologies of Philanthropy,” edited by Arun Kumar, Sally Brooks, and Jessie Sklair, published in Economy and Society the prior month. In this Economy and Society piece, Parmar argued “that the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (HF) is a paradigmatic ‘liberal crisis machine’– an elite institution that diagnoses threats to U.S. democracy and hegemony but, in practice, moderates radical change, co-opts dissent, and ultimately shores up the corporate-liberal order that fuels the very crises it claims to combat.”

Parmar’s analysis of the Foundation spanned “the period of [Larry] Kramer’s leadership [at the Hewlett Foundation] but [went] beyond it into early 2025.”

In this virtual roundtable on October 19th, 2026, coordinated by the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences and HistPhil, Larry Kramer will be in dialogue with Inderjeet Parmar about the latter’s characterization of the Foundation during Kramer’s tenure as president (2012-2023).

Please register and join us for a rare opportunity to witness a shared public dialogue among a former foundation president and a critical scholar of that very same foundation.

This conversation between Larry Kramer and Inderjeet Parmar will be moderated by Maribel Morey, executive director at the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences and co-editor of HistPhil.

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Larry Kramer has been President and Vice Chancellor of the London School of Economics and Political Science 1 April 2024, previously serving as President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation from 2012 to 2024. Larry spent most of his career in the academy, most recently as the 15th Dean of Stanford Law School, a position he assumed in 2004. Before then, Larry researched and taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and New York University, where he served as Associate Dean for Research and Academics and Russell D. Niles Professor of Law. He clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Henry J. Friendly of the Second Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., following his education. Larry holds an A.B. in Psychology and Religious Studies from Brown University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics and Associate Dean of Research, City St George’s, University of London; fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, a columnist at The Wire, and author of several books including Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power. He is currently completing books on Ten Years That Shook the World:Trump and the World, 2016–2026, based on his columns for The Wire; and another entitled The Wilsonian Roots of Trumpism: A History of the US Foreign Policy Establishment, from 1917 to the present.

Maribel Morey serves as executive director at the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences and co-editor of HistPhil. A historian of U.S. philanthropy and the social sciences, Maribel also has served as a consultant historian on the history of philanthropy for several leading foundations in the U.S. Maribel is the author of White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order (UNC Press, 2021). She has a PhD in History from Princeton University; a JD from NYU Law School; and a BA in Political Science and Romance Languages & Literatures from the University of Notre Dame.