BiblioVault - Books about Buying

Aiding Students, Buying Students

Financial Aid in America

Rupert Wilkinson

Vanderbilt University Press, 2005

From the first scholarship donated to Harvard in 1643 to today's world of "enrollment management" and federal grants and loans, the author gives a lively social and economic history of the conflicting purposes of student aid and makes proposals for the future. His research for this book is based on archives and interviews at 131 public and private institutions across the United States.

In the words of Joe Paul Case, Dean and Director of Financial Aid, Amherst College, "Wilkinson has mined the archives of dozens of institutions to create a mosaic that details the progress of student assistance from the 17th century to the present. He gives particular attention to the origins of need-based assistance, from the charitable benevolence of early colleges to the regulation-laden policies of the federal government. He gives due consideration to institutional motive--he challenges the egalitarian platitudes of affluent colleges and questions the countervailing market and economic forces that may imperil need-based aid at less competitive institutions. By drawing on scores of personal interviews and exchanges of correspondence with aid practitioners, Wilkinson fleshes out recent decades, helping the reader to understand new trends in the provision of aid."

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Buying and Believing

Sri Lankan Advertising and Consumers in a Transnational World

Steven Kemper

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Advertising is a central part of the global system of commerce and culture. Every day it exposes consumers around the world to practices associated with the West, urban life, prosperity, and modernity. One consequence of this exposure is that it frees people's imaginations from time and place, and imposes a new and foreign reality. In this book Steven Kemper looks at a parallel trend, arguing that advertising firms in Nairobi, Caracas, and Colombo also domesticate the imagination, insinuating images into people's minds of the traditional as well as the modern, the local as much as the global.

Drawing upon fieldwork conducted over thirty years, Kemper examines the Sri Lankan advertising industry to show how executives draw on their skills as folk ethnographers to "Sri Lankanize" commodities and practices to make them locally desirable, essentially producing new forms of Sri Lankan culture. Addressing many of the most pressing agendas of contemporary anthropology, Buying and Becoming breaks new ground in studies of culture and globalization.

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Buying In or Selling Out?

The Commercialization of the American Research University

Stein, Donald G.

Rutgers University Press, 2004

Universities were once ivory towers where scholarship and teaching reigned supreme, or so we tell ourselves. Whether they were ever as pure as we think, it is certainly the case that they are pure no longer. Administrators look to patents as they seek money by commercializing faculty discoveries; they pour money into sports with the expectation that these spectacles will somehow bring in revenue; they sign contracts with soda and fast-food companies, legitimizing the dominance of a single brand on campus; and they charge for distance learning courses that they market widely. In this volume, edited by Donald G. Stein, university presidents and others in higher education leadership positions comment on the many connections between business and scholarship when intellectual property and learning is treated as a marketable commodity. Some contributors write about the benefits of these connections in providing much needed resources. Others emphasize that the thirst for profits may bias the type of research that is carried out and the quality of that research. They fear for the future of basic research if faculty are in search of immediate payoffs.

The majority of the contributors acknowledge that commercialization is the current reality and has progressed too far to return to the “good old days.” They propose guidelines for students and professors to govern commercial activities. Such guidelines can increase the likelihood that quality, openness, and collegiality will remain core academic values.

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Buying the Farm

Peace and War on a Sixties Commune

Tom Fels

University of Massachusetts Press, 2012

This book tells the story of Montague Farm, an early back-to-the land communal experiment in western Massachusetts, from its beginning in 1968 through the following thirty-five years of its surprisingly long life. Drawing on his own experience as a resident of the farm from 1969 to 1973 and decades of contact with the farm's extended family, Tom Fels provides an insightful account of the history of this iconic alternative community. He follows its trajectory from its heady early days as a pioneering outpost of the counterculture through many years of change, including a period of renewed political activism and, later, increasing episodes of conflict between opposing factions to determine what the farm represented and who would control its destiny.

With deft individual portraits, Fels reveals the social dynamics of the group and explores the ongoing difficulties faced by a commune that was founded in idealism and sought to operate on the model of a leaderless democracy. He draws on a large body of farm-family and 1960s-related writing and the notes of community members to present a variety of points of view. The result is an absorbing narrative that chronicles the positive aspects of Montague Farm while documenting the many challenges and disruptions that marked its history.

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Buying the Night Flight

The Autobiography of a Woman Foreign Correspondent

Georgie Anne Geyer

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Buying the Night Flight is Georgie Anne Geyer's retelling of her thrilling rise from cub reporter to foreign correspondent as she made her way into the male-dominated world of journalism. Geyer transports the reader to Guatemala, Cuba, Egypt, Russia, and Cambodia, recounting the history and politics, adventure and exhaustion of the time from a truly unique perspective. Told with brilliance and dead-on honesty, this book vividly captures the triumphs of a determined and talented young reporter.

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Buying the Wind

Regional Folklore in the United States

Richard M. Dorson

University of Chicago Press, 1964

This anthology of regional folklore displays the abundance, humor, and continuing vigor of the American oral tradition. The collection explores rich and distinctive lore of Maine Down-Easters, Pennsylvania Dutchmen, Southern mountaineers, Louisiana Cajuns, Illinois Egyptians, Southwest Mexicans, and Utah Mormons.

Their tales, songs, riddles, proverbs, games, superstitions, and customs provide a wealth of living folklore presented here as it was recorded in the field. And this unvarnished folklore fact—retains the spicy flavor of authentic narrative, told in the vernacular of the skillful folk storyteller.

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