Harvard Employees Give More To Kerry

Harvard employees rank number seven on Sen. John F. Kerry’s, D-Mass., list of largest donors but have given relatively little to President Bush’s campaign, according to a report released last week by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Harvard employees gave a total of $53,100 to the Kerry campaign and $8,250 to the Bush campaign through Jan. 30.

The report from the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit, non-partisan research group based in Washington, D.C., highlighted the overlap between contributors to Kerry and Bush, which include UBS Americas, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, Inc. as top donors. In fact, nine of the top 20 Kerry contributors actually gave more money to Bush than to Kerry, according to the report.

But Harvard employees’ campaign contributions did not fallen into this pattern.

Director of Faculty Development at Harvard Medical School Dr. Janet P. Hafler, who recently donated $500 to the Kerry campaign, said she contributed to Kerry because she thinks “he’s an outstanding candidate.” Harvard employees, she said, tend to support Kerry because they prefer his platform to Bush’s.

“I think we truly know that Kerry can lead the country in a direction in which we believe we want to be moving,” Hafler said. “I think there’s an intellectual rigor when we look at their platforms and I think we carefully analyze them and we think that Kerry can lead the country.”

Teretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature Ruth R. Wisse, who gave $1,000 to the Bush campaign, is one of the Bush donors from Harvard. There are fewer than 15 Bush contributors at Harvard.

“I would do anything to see [Bush] reelected and making a financial contribution seems to be the most straightforward way of expressing that conviction,” Wisse said.

She attributed the disparity in contributions to Kerry over Bush to the predominance of liberals at Harvard.

“Something that’s obvious to anybody that knows the campus is that obviously the liberal point of view is more represented at Harvard than the conservative point of view, at least according to any surveys I’ve seen,” said Wisse.

She said that she acknowledges that political contributions are a matter of personal choice, but believes that the political parties should be represented more equally at Harvard.

“It is unfortunate that there isn’t an equal representation in the University of people who tend to be Democratic and people who tend to be Republican,” Wisse said. “It’s too bad that it isn’t the same division in the University as it is in the rest of the country, but that’s just the way it is.”

Hafler viewed the disparity in donations differently.

“Good for Harvard,” she quipped. “We definitely select the right faculty.”

According to the report, Kerry raised a total of $33 million and Bush raised a total of $145 million in the first 13 months of their campaigns.