Private giving, public good: the impact of philanthropy at the University of Edinburgh

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 144-145
Author(s):  
William Whyte
Author(s):  
Robert Anderson

This chapter reviews the book Private Giving, Public Good: The Impact of Philanthropy at the University of Edinburgh (2014), by Jean Grier and Mary Bownes. The book offers an account of ‘private giving’, focusing primarily on recent gifts and drawing on the case of the University of Edinburgh. It shows that Scottish universities lacked the inherited wealth of Oxford and Cambridge. In the nineteenth century they received significant support from the state, but from the 1860s also made serious efforts to appeal to private donors and build up endowments. There is a chapter devoted to ‘research and scholarship’, which illustrates some of the problems of relying on private philanthropy. Another chapter deals with ‘bursaries, scholarships, and prizes’—once a favourite field for individual legacies and donations, and for the Carnegie Trust.


Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins

Paris was the most important centre for evolutionary speculations in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Two of its most influential evolutionary thinkers, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire both worked there in the city’s Museum of Natural History. This chapter explores the impact of these French thinkers’ theories in Edinburgh and the close connections that existed between natural history circles in the two cities. It was common for students and graduates of the medical school of the University of Edinburgh to spend time studying in Paris, where they imbibed many of the exciting new ideas being discussed there. Two of the key figures discussed in this book, Robert Grant and Robert Knox, had both spent time in Paris and were deeply influenced by the theories they encountered there. The chapter also examines the impact of the key writings of Lamarck and Geoffroy in Edinburgh.


ABI-Technik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 346-356
Author(s):  
Kirsty Lingstadt ◽  
Dominic Tate

AbstractKirsty Lingstadt and Dominic Tate discuss approaches to change, cooperation and collaboration within the University of Edinburgh’s library service. We consider organisational context, strategy development, digital skills, equality, diversity & inclusion, the impact of COVID-19 and workforce planning. We discuss planned and organic change and provide short case studies reflecting on recent experiences of changes to the library’s organisation and services, and the importance of cooperation and collaboration with the aim of developing and improving library services.


2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 212-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Freshwater

Theatre de Complicite was founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden, and Marcello Magni, and has since established its reputation as one of Britain's leading experimental physical theatre companies. Here, Helen Freshwater discusses the construction, performance, and implications of one of their recent works, Mnemonic, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1999, and has since toured to London's National Theatre and the John Jay College Theatre in New York. The work questions our metaphorical conceptualization of memory, displacing the conventional model of retrieval with an understanding of memory based upon a performative paradigm. This is memory as an act of imagination: transient; grounded upon narrative; open to interpretation; intrinsically corporeal. Freshwater interrogates the impact of the performance's incompletion, addressing the ethical issues raised by recognzing the indeterminacy of the past. Under Simon McBurney's direction, the original cast comprised Catherine Schaub Abkarian, Katrin Cartlidge, Richard Katz, Simon McBurney, Tim McMullan, Kostas Philippoglou, and Daniel Wahl. Helen Freshwater is currently completing her PhD on performance and censorship in twentieth-century Britain at the University of Edinburgh and will shortly be taking up a post as Lecturer in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. She is a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and the forthcoming anthology Crossing Boundaries (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).


2018 ◽  
pp. 173-197
Author(s):  
Charlotte Lauder

This chapter reviews the history of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. The IASH, formally established in 1970, is the oldest Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Britain’s first, and Scotland’s only IAS. However, in its nearly fifty-year history, no effort has been made to tell IASH’s story. This can be partly attributed to a lack of understanding of IASs within the history of education, as well as a gap in the literature concerning IASs more generally. Investigating the history of IASH and its role in the development of postgraduate study not only adds to the scholarship on post-war Scottish higher education but also highlights the impact of academic research in Scotland since the 1960s.


1990 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Paul Rogers

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the role of Scots law in the development of the post-Revolutionary law and legal system of the United States. This neglect stems largely from the fact that Scots law has had little apparent permanent influence on American law. However, during the “formative era of American law” from the Revolution to the Civil War, a notable effort to introduce America to civil law concepts took place. Furthermore, the impact of the Scottish enlightenment on the fledgling United States in higher education, philosophy, and medicine is well documented. Scottish Enlightenment thought arguably had a significant impact on the Declaration of Independence, which was signed by at least two native-born Scots and an American who was a graduate of the University of Edinburgh.


1998 ◽  
Vol 14 (54) ◽  
pp. 146-150
Author(s):  
Klaus Ulrich Militz

It is the modernist wisdom that each art or medium should be defined in its own terms, so as to delimit it from other arts or media, while also arriving at certain conclusions as to the ‘message’ of the medium in question and its preferred subject-matters. This tradition has often been criticized for an inherent essentialism, and a less prescriptive approach is proposed in the following article – which, while taking the interaction between the different arts and media into account, also attempts to understand this in its historical perspective. The author, Klaus Ulrich Militz, concentrates mainly on the interrelations between the audio-visual performing arts of theatre, cinema, and television, and refers in particular to a number of artistic approaches to theatre which appear to be based on media interplay as a major source of aesthetic innovation. He also includes some crucial statements by theatre artists, suggesting different ways in which they came to locate their aesthetic positions. Klaus Ulrich Militz is a member of the media research group at the University of Edinburgh, and is currently completing his doctoral thesis on the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.


The university is considered one of the engines of growth in a local economy or its market area, since its direct contributions consist of 1) employment of faculty and staff, 2) services to students, and supply chain links vendors, all of which define the University’s Market area. Indirect contributions consist of those agents associated with the university in terms of community and civic events. Each of these activities represent economic benefits to their host communities and can be classified as the economic impact a university has on its local economy and whose spatial market area includes each of the above agents. In addition are the critical links to the University, which can be considered part of its Demand and Supply chain. This paper contributes to the field of Public/Private Impact Analysis, which is used to substantiate the social and economic benefits of cooperating for economic resources. We use Census data on Output of Goods and Services, Labor Income on Salaries, Wages and Benefits, Indirect State and Local Taxes, Property Tax Revenue, Population, and Inter-Industry to measure economic impact (Implan, 2016).


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-75
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore

John Robertson Henderson was born in Scotland and educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he qualified as a doctor. His interest in marine natural history was fostered at the Scottish Marine Station for Scientific Research at Granton (near Edinburgh) where his focus on anomuran crustaceans emerged, to the extent that he was eventually invited to compile the anomuran volume of the Challenger expedition reports. He left Scotland for India in autumn 1885 to take up the Chair of Zoology at Madras Christian College, shortly after its establishment. He continued working on crustacean taxonomy, producing substantial contributions to the field; returning to Scotland in retirement in 1919. The apparent absence of communication with Alfred William Alcock, a surgeon-naturalist with overlapping interests in India, is highlighted but not resolved.


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