Michael Joyce, who died Friday at 63,was the head of the Bradley Foundation, a Wisconsin-based philanthropy that funded major initiatives in welfare reform, school vouchers, and other areas at the top of the conservative social agenda for 15 years.

He was dubbed the “godfather of modern philanthropy,” by Irving Kristol, who hired him in 1978 to head the New York City-based Institute for Educational Affairs. He wore another sobriquet with pride: “Prince of Darkness,” which is what Wisconsin’s superintendent of public instruction called Joyce when the Bradley Foundation funded the nation’s largest school voucher program, in Milwaukee.

“It’s not beanbag to participate in this realm,” Joyce told the Chronicle of Philanthropy in 1998, recalling the aphorism about what politics ain’t. In the 1980s and 1990s Joyce was at the leading edge of conservative funding, distributing money to dozens of high profile projects. Among these was the influential book “Politics, Markets and America’s Schools” (1986) by John Chubb and Terry Moe, which helped mold the conservative agenda on school choice, and a $2 million grant to the Hudson Institute in the early 1990s that served as blueprint for Governor Thompson’s seminal welfare reform efforts in Wisconsin.

Other pugnacious projects included funds for the author of “The Bell Curve;” Charles Murray; for the nemesis of campus political correctness David Horowitz, and for David Brock’s attacks on Anita Hill in the American Spectator.

“My style was the style of the toddler and the adolescent: fight, fight, fight, rest, get up, fight, fight, fight,” Joyce said in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, in 2001, at the time of his retirement. “No one ever accused me of being pleasant. I made a difference. It was acknowledged by friend and foe. Maybe it’s time for a more pleasant approach, or at least a different tone.”

Joyce went on to lead Americans for Community and Faith-Centered Enterprises, an organization dedicated to advancing the Bush administration’s faith-based initiatives.

Joyce grew up in a working-class family in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father was a tugboat captain, and the politics were democratic. His father imparted to his son a deep religious faith which Joyce continued to draw on when looking for innovative philanthropic opportunities in later years.

Joyce attended Catholic schools, and earned a B.A. at Cleveland State University. He worked as a teacher and football coach at two Catholic high schools in the Cleveland area. In 1968, he took a post at the Educational Research Council of America, writing high school textbooks, and simultaneously worked on a Ph.D. degree in education at Walden University in Florida.

Joyce’s career in philanthropy began in 1975, when he was named founding president of the Goldseker Foundation in Baltimore. At age 33, he was among the youngest foundation executives in the nation. In 1978, he was selected by Mr. Kristol and the treasury secretary to presidents Nixon and Ford, William Simon, to head the institute for Educational Affairs in New York. The next year, he became executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation, also chaired by Simon.

In 1985, the heirs to the Allen-Bradley Company sold out to Rockwell International for $1.65 billion. In accordance with estate rules, $290 million went to fund the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Overnight, a small-time philanthropic player with interests mainly in civic Wisconsin charities was thrust onto the national stage. Joyce was hired as the first director of the reorganized foundation, and soon raised its sights to funding politically conservative causes – think tanks, advocacy groups, fellowships, and public policy experiments like welfare reform and school vouchers.

“Our overarching purpose was to use philanthropy to support a war of ideas to defend and help recover the political imagination of the [nation’s] founders, the self-evident truth that rights and worth are a legacy of the creator, not the result of some endless revaluing of values,” Joyce told the Newhouse News Service in 2003.

Under his leadership, Bradley distributed somewhere north of $300 million, while the foundation’s assets grew to $700 million, by far the largest in Wisconsin. Not all of the money went to partisan allies; millions went to innercity social programs, and there was even a $30 million low-interest loan to the Milwaukee Brewers that broke an impasse over the funding of the team’s new stadium.

Joyce came to call his philanthropic vision “The new citizenship.” In a 1993 interview with the Chicago Tribune he said, “There is a very real and perilous threat to the fabric of the community, the imputation of incompetence and passivity to citizens, the view that they are more victims than actors.” Through programs like vouchers and welfare reform, Joyce sought something very much like President Bush’s “ownership society” and faith-based initiative, so it did not come as a surprise when, after he retired from the Bradley Foundation in 2001, he went to work as an ally of the president.

Michael Stewart Joyce
Born July 5, 1942, in Cleveland, Ohio; died February 24 at his home in West Bend, Wis., after a lengthy illness; survived by his wife of 17 years, Mary Jo, three adopted children, Mary Therese Joyce, Martin Joyce, and Angela R. Joyce, and a sister and two brothers.