The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Harvard writes to my grandmother pretty regularly. She isn't a star academic, although she did attend Temple University and managed to raise seven daughters who all hold University degrees. She's not a celebrity, although when she points out the history of her house in Roxborough, a house my great-grandparents built, it feels like a monument. But it isn't, because Grammy is not a millionaire. Neither is my grandfather, although for some reason Harvard pursues them both with enough vigor for her to remark to me about how sorry she is she can't give. Then we laugh.

Where does Harvard get off making my grandmother feel small? If she didn't have such a well-developed sense of humor, those letters might make her feel inadequate, less intelligent and successful than those other grandparents, the ones fundraisers must have found responsive to the letters, or else why in the world would they send them?

A few weeks ago I found a similar letter in my mailbox. Yet another prong of Harvard's fundraising campaign, this time the joke was on me, rather than my grandparents or even my parents slaving away to put two daughters, a smaller family than many undergraduates I know, through college. It was fundraising time for seniors, and I was about to enter the pool of possible philanthropists. Working at the Radcliffe College Fund during my first year at the College, I learned the fundraising lingo, learned about the prizes for those who raised the most and how to carefully ease alums toward a larger donation. But somewhere in the process of phone calls and free ice cream at Herrells I started thinking: "Someday I'll be one of those alums on the other end of the phone. Someday a student is going to be calling me and asking for a cash settlement for four years of easy living on campus." What would I decide? And more important, what would I say to justify that choice?

Somewhere out there is a set of grandparents ready to give a million dollars through their granddaughter to Senior Gift (let's face it, no students are making enough now by themselves to give hundreds of dollars of their own money earned without any major fiscal support from their family). I say wonderful--let them give, let them fund students like myself (Class of 1954 scholarship recipient). Theirs is a gift that keeps on giving, however, and lest we forget it gives to me and them. Many gifts contribute to reputations and bring great personal satisfaction to benefactor (I didn't write all those letters of gratitude to members of the Class of 1954 for nothing). Giving your $10 to senior gift is great, but don't try telling me it's in the sprit of Ghandhi-like altruism, or that every gift matters as much as the next in terms of the payoff for those giving.

Harvard has given me an education, a lot of research money, and above all, an attitude. I have car loans to pay, a down payment on an apartment due soon and, without health insurance for the near future, a safety net to maintain. I have a job, but perhaps the most useful piece of advice I gleaned from Harvard's meat-and-potatoes, Ec10, was the importance of savings, and for soon-to-be impoverished students like myself, every penny counts. So I decide to take that $10 senior gift officers so often refer to and invest it at Cambridge Saving Bank.

This decision has prompted a mixture of anxiety and disdain from friends with Senior Gift posts. Maybe they feel the way I did when an alum refused to give to Radcliff College Fund: no special prizes, and above all, no score for me. But the fact that they construe my choice as selfish or unthinking makes me suspect there's something more behind the need to make everyone give. Sort of like Secret Santa, where everyone is assigned a gift and recipient but ends up giving boring little gifts to the sole satisfaction of the person coordinating the affair in the first place. No one really considers Secret Santa chotchkes gift, and the person in control feels they did all the giving.

It all makes sense, then, except that senior gift isn't like Radcliffe Phonathon or even letters to Grammy: it gets personal. As a senior gift representative sat down next to me at launch the other day, I was suddenly face to face with the opposition and the worst part was he seemed nice. A relative stranger pitching a plan I couldn't cooperate with, to his credit the guy really made it sound appealing. When he finally looked up at me, expecting a little resistance but eventual capitulation, I was stuck. Did I ever say no to Secret Santa? Didn't I not happily accept miniature bodies of suspiciously perfumed bubble bath, oversized faux-gold earrings and Santa Clause candle-holders with a smile pasted across my face? As he pushed the form across the table, I could only think of my grandmother opening the mailbox and looking at a similar set of blanks, all with a dollar sign at the end. How did it feel? Pretty similar. What would she do?

By the time I stopped laughing, I think he got the point. Molly J. Hennessy-Fiske '99 a former Crimson executive, is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House.