Patronizing the Public: American Philanthropy’s Transformation of Culture, Communication, and the Humanities. Buxton, William J. (ed.) (2009). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. pp. 350.
Communication scholars increasingly are interested in philanthropies and philanthropic activities. Scholar-ship, courses, and new programs are devoted to the study of philanthropies. Typically, the focus is on how the study of communication can contribute to philanthropies and philanthropic activities. The University of Northern Iowa, for instance, offers an M.A. degree in philanthropic development, and the Department of Communication Studies offers courses in support of this program. The courses focus on how an understanding of communication can assist in the design of philanthropic campaigns and how communication theory can inform the choices philanthropies make.
Patronizing the Public reverses this relationship. Rather than focusing on the contribution of the study of communication to philanthropic activities, the chapters in the volume examine how philanthropies have altered the practice and study of communication. This volume, edited by William J. Buxton, explores the various contributions, false starts, failures, and successes philanthropies made in attempting to direct the field of communication.
The volume is a collection of chapters that began as papers presented at a workshop titled, “American Philanthropic Support for Culture, Communication, and the Humanities” hosted at the Rockefeller Archive Center. In his Preface, Buxton notes that workshop attendees were invited to submit revised essays. All participants did so, and all of the essays are included in this volume. This results in several limitations of the book for a scholar of mass communication. First, the book reads much like a set of conference proceedings. As is often the case in such books, the quality of insight and writing varies greatly.
Second, while the subtitle claims the essays concern “American philanthropy’s transformation of culture, communication, and the humanities,” several essays lack a focus on this topic. In fact, the greatest commonality among the essays is the reliance on archival research. The result is a volume in which essays tend to focus on the detailed history of the Rockefeller Foundation efforts rather than on the impact of the foundation on communication and the humanities. While virtually every essay touches on some aspect of communication, the examinations typically fail to further an understanding of communication theory or practice. The introduction to the book recognizes this thread. “The contributors are critical and independent scholars, working in a variety of academic fields including education, history, communication studies, film studies, musicology, humanities, and cultural studies. What they share in common is a strong commitment to theoretically informed research grounded in the careful study of archival documents” (p. 2).
The book is not without merit, however. Several essays provide interesting insights into the ways foundations influence the study and practice of communication. Two chapters (“‘Sugarcoating the Educational Pill’” by Niquette and Buxton and “Inadvertent Architects of Twentieth-Century Media Convergence” by Wrenn) are particularly strong in this regard. Wrenn explores the role of the Rockefeller Foundation and Columbia University in providing training for journalists from foreign nations in the aftermath of World War II. Wrenn details the development of the seminars, which brought foreign journalists to the United States to study with U.S. journalists and academics. The impact on international journalism, Wrenn argues, was the Americanization of the international press. Niquette and Buxton explore the impact of the Rockefeller Foundation’s support for museums, which made “extensive use of the ‘storyline technique’” (p. 157) relying on the chronological structuring of museum exhibits. As Niquette and Buxton argue, such a structuring of the museum placed the communicative function of the museum at the fore. Niquette and Buxton then examine a number of museum exhibits based on the understanding that they tell stories. These two essays exemplify the strengths of the volume as both look at the funding practices of the Rockefeller Foundation and explore significant impacts on practices and scholarship resulting from that funding. Essays by Brison on the influence of the Rockefeller Foundation on the Canadian Foundation and by Acland on the role of film in adult education are useful for the same reasons.
Other essays in the volume provide interesting, if narrow, historical reading. Essays by Cramer on Pan American radio and Wasson on the film collection in the Museum of Modern Art typify this point. These essays explore projects funded by the Rockefeller Foundation that were interesting but failed to achieve the successes imagined. Wasson, for instance, concludes that the MoMA film collection never was distributed as widely as was envisioned. However, the film collection assisted in the MoMA aim of “disrupt[ing] some of the more staid and conventional aspects of traditional cultural institutions” (p. 115).
While many chapters are quite strong, it would be difficult to recommend the book for a graduate or undergraduate course. For classroom use, the book is overly narrow in its topic. Unless a course was being offered in the history of the Rockefeller Foundation, the book does not seem to offer enough breadth of topic. Even in a course devoted to philanthropies, the almost exclusive focus on the Rockefeller Foundation would make adoption difficult. The suggestion that the Rockefeller Foundation is typical of philanthropies would be a difficult one to maintain.
On the other hand, the book is simultaneously too diverse to recommend for a course in mass communication. Essays in the book focus on film, dance, international journalism seminars, and the role of music in film. The scholarly approaches to these topics vary greatly, as well. The lack of a coherent organizing structure connecting the chapters in the book is a result of this diversity in focus and approach. The product is a collection of papers that, while often interesting as individual papers, do not provide a coherent package for use in the classroom.
JOHN FRITCH
University of Northern Iowa