EHE News
Kimball receives rare Guggenheim fellowship
Bruce Kimball
4-13-11
Bruce Kimball has received a rare honor for education scholars, a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Kimball, a historian and philosopher of education, is among 180 fellows named by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for 2011, and only one of two education fellows. It has been 11 years since the last fellow was selected from a faculty of education.
His research project is "The Inception of 'Free Money' Ideology, Fundraising, and Endowments in Higher Education, 1870-1930."
Kimball will study how and why colleges and universities began to focus upon accumulating wealth and adopted the strategies of fundraising and building unrestricted endowments, which came to be called "free money."
Study of fundraising implications
"I will be traveling to Harvard University to study the records of the first major fundraising campaign conducted by a university in the United States (from 1916 to 1921) and the records of the first professional consulting firm for university fundraising," Kimball said. "Also, I will be traveling to Smith College and Wellesley College in Massachusetts to study the records of the first fundraising campaigns conducted by women's colleges (1919-1921)."
He explains, "These developments had long-term implications for the stratification of higher education, because institutions that got a head start in building their financial capital established a competitive advantage over other colleges and universities. I am trying to learn how and why certain institutions identified and adopted that new strategy between 1900 and 1930."
Guggenheim fellowships are awarded each year to men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. This year, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. Kimball is the only fellow from Ohio State.
Kimball, professor of educational policy and leadership in the College of Education and Human Ecology, has long studied the development and nature of liberal arts education and professional education.
He has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, Luce Foundation, Spencer Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies.
He is author or co-author of five books and editor of three more, and has written numerous journals and book chapters. His publications have received awards from the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the National Education Association, the American Society of Legal History, and the American Educational Research Association.
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