American Philanthropy and African Education: Toward an Analysis

Abstract

Since the passage in 1969 of congressional legislation intended to regulate the activities of tax free philanthropic foundations, a spate of works dealing with the role of foundations in American life has been published (Cuninggim, 1972; Heimann, 1973; Nielsen, 1972; Peterson, 1972). Most of these works have dealt in a general way with the responsibilities of philanthropic organizations in a period of rapid change. Several were commissioned by the larger foundations themselves, perhaps to indicate to a potentially hostile legislative branch the foundations' willingness to evaluate their performances to date and to establish socially “responsible” goals for themselves. None of these studies has analyzed specific policy issues in which the foundations have been involved or themselves have helped to create. The central role played by foundations in the growth of American institutional life has been seriously neglected by scholars, more specifically by political scientists, whom, one would think, would have an especial interest in studying these institutional pillars of American society. If the role of American foundations in the evolution of institutions at home has been neglected, the significant role of American foundations as institution builders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and as implementors of American foreign policy is hardly even known. It is with the role of American foundations overseas, particularly in Africa, that I am concerned at this juncture.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.