Jean Grier and Mary Bownes, Private Giving, Public Good: The Impact of Philanthropy at the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), vi+218pp. ISBN: 9780748699575

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.