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This chapter offers a contemporary overview of philanthropy in education as an emerging research field. Although the education sector has traditionally been a popular recipient of philanthropic investment, the scale and scope of funding and policy involvement on the part of philanthropy are growing. In addition, and potentially amplified by COVID-19, big- and in particular tech-philanthropies are emerging as increasingly influential players in national, regional, and global educational contexts. This chapter describes how most existing education research on philanthropy is mainly US- and higher education-focused which has resulted in a narrow geographic and thematic scope whereby contemporary developments remain either overlooked or under-researched. It discusses venture philanthropy inside and outside of the United States, a greater diversity of geographic perspectives, and an increasing dependence of academia on philanthropic funding as emerging research areas that bear great potential to being explored further.

This chapter provides a review of the language, key examples, and an analysis of social justice practices in higher education philanthropy. By describing how American higher education is supported by philanthropy, the authors articulate the need to have collective approaches that create an equitable distribution of resources. The authors utilize research centered on equity, inclusion, and diversity to encourage leaders to consider applying additional perspectives when analyzing philanthropy in higher education. This combination of multidisciplinary scholarship offers a synthesis of research to show readers how social justice advances and improves philanthropy within higher education. Social justice in the age of philanthropy concludes with key recommendations for advancement offices across campuses and organizations.

Ponders on whether Abraham Flexner was responsible for the change in medical education in North America in the early 20th century, owing to his report of 1910. Tries to demonstrate that medical education in the USA was part of a greater whole of major changes at that time. Concludes, though there was a philanthropic influence, Flexner (who refused to accept credit for change) was not the father of the medical reform plan.

Exploring how racism continues to persist throughout public and nonprofit organizations is central to undoing persistent society-wide injustices in the United States and around the globe. The authors provide two cases for identifying and understanding the ways in which philanthropy’s whiteness does harm to K–12 students and communities of color.

In this article, the authors draw on critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, specifically Cheryl Harris' work to expose the whiteness of philanthropy, not as a racial identity, but in the way that philanthropy is performed. The authors characterize one of the property functions of whiteness, the right to exclude, as working through two mechanisms: neoliberal exclusion and overt exclusion. Drawing on this construction of the right to exclude, the authors present two cases: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the City Fund.

Whether intentional or not, the Gates Foundation and the City Fund each exclude communities of color in several ways: from changes to schools and districts, parents' experiences navigating school enrollment due to these changes, to academic assessments and political lobbying.

These cases provide a way for researchers and practitioners to see how organizations in real time reify the extant racial hierarchy so as to disrupt such organizational processes and practices for racial justice.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a reconceptualised view of public education, with specific reference to early twentieth-century Australia, and to revisit the significance of the Carnegie Corporation of New York in this period. Further, in this regard, the paper proposes a neo-Foucaultian notion of philanthropic power, as an explanatory and analytical principle, with possible implications for thinking anew about the role and influence of American philanthropic organisations in the twentieth century.

The paper draws on mainly secondary sources but also works with primary sources gathered from relevant archives, including that of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).

The paper concludes that the larger possibilities associated with the particular view of public education outlined here, referring to both public school and public libraries, were constrained by the emergence and consolidation of an increasingly professionalised view of education and schooling.

The influence of the Carnegie Corporation of New York on early twentieth-century Australian education has been increasingly acknowledged and documented in recent historical research. More recently, Carnegie has been drawn into an interdisciplinary perspective on philanthropy and public culture in Australia. This paper seeks to add to such work by looking at schools and libraries as interconnected yet loosely coupled aspects of what can be understood as, in effect, a re-conceived public education, to a significant degree sponsored by the Corporation.

The paper draws upon but seeks to extend and to some extent re-orient existing historical research on the relationship between Australian education and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Its originality lies in its exploration of a somewhat different view of public education and the linkage it suggests in this regard with a predominantly print-centric public culture in Australia, in the first half of the twentieth century.

This interorganizational discussion covers Astley and van de Ven's (1983) Organizational Analysis Matrix and key information to understand a broader, macro discussion including the purpose of organizations in society as well as overview the interorganizational relationships between the for-profit sector (i.e., businesses and corporations) and the specific sector of higher education. A consideration of motives, return on investment expectations, and interorganizational behavior is explored. This chapter highlights the complex nature of higher education and the for-profit realm, including inconsistent third-party support and intermingling from the government. Highlights from Sethi's (1975) seminal article serves as the basis for measurement and future expectations in a three-state schema for classifying corporate behavior.

It has long been understood that many higher education institutions have failed to create a level playing field in the realms of both access and achievement for marginalized communities. These failures are particularly evident when examining the disproportionately low numbers of African American men in STEM fields. While a great deal of scholarship, speculation, and policy recommendations have been afforded to this topic, very few have asked the question of whose job it is to fund initiatives to support African American men in STEM? In this chapter, the authors revisit W. E. B. Du Bois' Talented Tenth framework to understand and make a case for the role of philanthropy in supporting diversity in STEM initiatives for African American men and how philanthropic investments from successful African Americans and businesses can create the economic structure necessary to foster interest in STEM fields from African American men. Moreover, the authors believe that an increase in Black philanthropic behavior will be instrumental in making the aspirations of program implementation and policy change a reality in higher education.

This paper examines the growth of private corporate influence in American higher education. A key question is corporate philanthropy and privatization at what cost? The terms often used in these discussions are commodification of the academy, privatization of a public good, or the increasing corporatization of higher education. Today, American universities are responding to the demands of the marketplace, as knowledge is being used as a form of venture capital and where professors have become academic entrepreneurs and students have become consumers. The foregoing is made more complex as an increasingly diverse student pool seeks access to postsecondary education, in the face of federal policies that serve to restrict access and financial support. A discussion of the collateral costs of our corporate culture as we face challenges to access, equity, and opportunity in America in the twenty-first century concludes this paper.