Serious work on education is never just a work of the moment. Some problems are the consequences of yesterday's solutions, and many of the most promising approaches to today's issues build on the efforts of earlier generations. In short, the work that is going on presently at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching must be understood as part of a larger context and history. Here, the author explores some of that context and history and looks ahead to the future of the Foundation's commitment towards teaching and learning. The year 2005 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In 1905, Andrew Carnegie, the world's richest man, was attempting to distribute his vast fortune to worthwhile causes. Guided by his "gospel of wealth," Carnegie he turned his attention to the problems of American higher education and its professoriate. His original vision for The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was simple and straightforward: College professors had pitiful retirement benefits, and something needed to be done to ameliorate the financial distress of aging faculty members. Carnegie's solution was a non-contributory pension fund for college teachers that would permit them to retire with dignity and that would thereby attract an even higher quality of men to the profession; thus, the Foundation was established on April 18, 1905, with a $10 million endowment made up of negotiable U.S. Steel bonds. And since then, alongside its many challenges, the Foundation had addressed an increasingly broad agenda, encompassing a wide variety of topics across the full spectrum of formal and informal education, from preschool to professional school.