The Giving Me?
Senior Gift is a worthy cause. I have seen the evidence.
Last year, as a junior loitering on campus during Commencement, I got to see the benefits of the annual fund drive firsthand. Mather, my house, had placed second in Senior Gift’s inter-house competition, with 83 percent of seniors participating. The Class of 2004 celebrated their win with a Beirut barbecue in the courtyard, financed by the cash prize they’d gotten in exchange for giving so much.
Beirut tournaments are just one of the many convincing rationales for giving the requested $10 contribution to Senior Gift—an annual drive that asks seniors to donate to the Harvard College Fund before they graduate. The most convincing is that the cause is good—donations both help students matriculate by channeling money into financial aid, and help improve their experience once they’re here by pouring money into unrestricted funds. I’ve gleaned a lot from my Harvard experience, and I don’t think it’s out of line to suggest I should give back. I should be easily convinced.
But I’m not. I still have not given my $10. I’m still not sure why.
I thought a good way to figure out why was to write it out. I e-mailed Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 with questions, telling him I was a senior conflicted about whether or not to give and that I was writing a story to work through the decision.
“That sounds like an interesting way to work through it,” he wrote. “Then again, it’s only 10 bucks...”
Another convincing rationale, but also one of my concerns. The thing is, while the College is trying to woo me with a Beirut tournament and the suggestion that by refusing to give “only 10 bucks” I am unappreciative, another side of the campus—students screened as potentially higher donors—are appealed to with a different lure: the promise of influence.
BIFURCATED
Senior Gift’s recruitment apparatus has two arms: one that pursues donations of a minimum $10, and another that asks for a minimum $250. Like any good fundraising program, Senior Gift grants higher-level donors an honorific—Associates.
Each arm is staffed by a separate team of four undergraduates who oversee a larger group of volunteers. According to the Senior Gift website, Associates chairs must “coordinate the identification, screening, and rating of Associates Gift Prospects,” making sure “that all prospects are assigned and solicited within established deadlines.” Participation chairs, responsible for the $10 set, have different responsibilities. According to the website, they must “Help determine effective solicitation strategies” and
“HAVE FUN!!!”
Gift representatives say the two arms are after the same thing.
“Everybody has basically the same goal: educating about Harvard, giving back to Harvard, [informing people] of how one’s money gets used,” says Nicholas F.M. Josefowitz ’05, one of four Associate Chairs, who is also a Crimson editor. The difference, he says, is just a matter of proportion. “Obviously, as in giving to any organization, some people are able to give more, because of family background or whatever,” he says. “One thinks one can ask those people in money terms for more but proportionally in a similar way, a way that could benefit Harvard and allow them to feel their contribution is more worthwhile.”
Students are first eligible to become Associates in their senior year at the college, and one remains an Associate by pledging an annual gift of $250, then $500, and—once 10 years removed from graduation—$1,000.
The Senior Gift website describes Associate-level donors as “a distinguished group of contributors who provide consistent annual leadership for the College—an alumni constituency who, year after year, help steer Harvard through each new challenge and help strengthen undergraduate education.”
I didn’t know what they meant by “steering Harvard,” so I asked the development office.
“[Associates’] contributions steer Harvard,” a spokesperson there told me in an e-mail, “by advancing its pursuit of new opportunities for academic excellence as teaching and research evolve.” The spokesperson, who asked not to be identified, described the program as a “community,” a group of donors who ensure the College receives “consistent leadership support.”
Though Senior Gift reps try to convince students to donate by emphasizing how supporting financial aid is altruistic, the development office was suggesting something else. Indirectly—though only via the website, never through a representative—the Gift dangles the prospect of influence.
LEVERAGING FOR A SAY
Unsatisfied with the prospect of college-sponsored Beirut, students who either were not screened as potential Associates or chose not to buy the honor—like Matt W. Mahan ’05 and Brandon M. Terry ’05—have tried to help “steer Harvard” their own way.
The pair started Senior Gift Plus when traditional avenues of protest—such as the “awareness-raising” vigils that followed the divestment petition in the fall—proved ineffective. It was the fourth alternative senior gift campaign to arise in the last ten years.
More so than happened with the previous two alternative campaigns, the campus mobilized behind Senior Gift Plus and its divestment goals. But rather than removing its investments in Petrochina and other companies, SEC reports showed that Harvard doubled them.
So, Mahan and Terry figured, money talks. They founded an escrow account—a fund that gathers money but does not dispense it until certain conditions are met—and began collecting donations.
The announcement that the University would divest from Petrochina arrived just as Senior Gift Plus had planned to begin its major fundraising push. The alternative gift disbanded, never having raised much money. But its goal had been realized.
“I don’t know if it had any tangible effect,” says Manav K. Bhatnagar ’06, who started the divestment petition in October with his roommate, Ben B. Collins ’06. Later, both joined Senior Gift Plus’s executive committee.
“But [for] mobilizing the campus, maybe even accelerating the divestment—it was vital,” Bhatnagar says. “For five months before this it was me and Ben in our bedrooms.”
He suggests caution against repeating this strategy.
“The freshmen and sophomores probably think withholding the senior gift is the way to go,” Bhatnagar says, suggesting that the Corporation announcing it would divest on April 4, the same day of the large protest to demonstrate student support for divestment, was probably a coincidence.
“I hope people understand you don’t just get 250 people and stand in front of Loeb House and they’ll act,” he says.
It remains unclear how exactly the Corporation came to the decision it did. Samantha Power told The Crimson that University President Lawrence H. Summers actively lobbied for divestment behind the scenes throughout his public silence.
In that case, it’s possible that campus activism—the petition, marches, vigils—did not influence the Corporation decision at all. Even if it did, the key was not money but mobilization.
But the money still had a crucial role. Talking to the press and staging protests were not effective until Senior Gift Plus gave the Class of 2005 a tangible way to show their discontent.
ATTENTION TALKS
To its credit, the University has improved in its willingness to hear concerns from the community. Within a month of opening their petition last October, Bhatnagar and Collins were meeting with high-ranking members of the administration. The Corporation may have doubled its investment during this time, but in the history of students and alumni trying to secure a voice, earning the administration’s ear was a notable achievement.
The Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard (CEWH), a group founded in 1988 by members of the Class of 1953 at their 35th reunion, lobbied for years before they solicited a response.
“We were having difficulty meeting with the administration to discuss our issues—we were sort of blown off,” says Acey Welch ’53, one of the committee’s co-chairs. “I think out of frustration we figured that the best way to get Harvard’s attention was either by money or by news coverage.”
In 1994 the group created an escrow account, promising to give the money to Harvard if it met several demands regarding the status of women at the university—prime among them an increase in the number of tenured female faculty. The fund grew to $100,000—not a lot in terms of Harvard fundraising, but enough to attract the national media.
Still, it took three years for the administration to meet with members of the committee.
Does money talk? The answer seems to be no. But, as was the experience of Senior Gift Plus this year, money attracts attention.
“The press coverage I think is what tipped the balance,” Welch says. The group closed the account in 2000 and gave the $100,000 to help establish the Radcliffe Alumnae Professorship, which was fully established in 2002.
PRESSURE AND INCENTIVES
I have no such demands of the University, so I did not actively participate in an alternative gift. I was not identified or screened or rated as a potential Associates-level donor, so I am not subject to that series of arguments. I am merely a target for the formidable peer pressure apparatus of the participation drive.
Over 100 of my classmates are volunteering their senior springs, spending many hours every week knocking on doors, writing e-mails, setting up tables during meals. They are diverse, hard-working, and genuinely committed to the cause.
Many volunteers and donors cite financial aid as a primary incentive. Still, the most Senior Gift has ever amassed, in 1999, was $68,446, and the average total is rarely enough to cover tuition for a single student for a single year.
It follows from this that the gift is largely symbolic, and no one argues otherwise. But if it’s symbolic, and if it’s really a personal choice, why is that choice so pressured? Why does the University care about my symbolic gesture?
One argument is that the gift gets people into a habit of giving, so that they continue to donate after graduating. Another is that a high participation rate projects a sense of satisfaction among the students, inspiring alumni to give more. Neither argument holds water.
“We don’t believe there is a correlation between Senior Gift and overall class giving in future years,” the Development Office spokesperson wrote, adding later, “We haven’t observed any direct correlation between senior giving and alumni giving, so we can’t say for sure how senior giving affects alumni giving, if at all.”
This really confused me. Then why do it?
“Why not?” Dean Gross wrote to me. “It’s a nice way to say thanks for many wonderful opportunities. To give it a cost/benefit analysis seems to me to miss the point. A lot of people like making a gift to the next generation of students.”
Perhaps, statistical correlation or no, there is something to be said for driving up the participation rate. You could argue that my $50 donation to John Kerry’s presidential campaign last fall was largely symbolic. It had no impact on the outcome of the election, nor did it guarantee me any say in the policy of an administration that never was. But I’d like to think my donation was a real contribution, helping demonstrate Kerry’s extensive popular support to the world.
Perhaps the College seeks a similar mandate, some kind of vague demonstration of the student body’s confidence. And maybe they’re right. Maybe their desire for support really does warrant a non-stop apparatus of peer pressure, incentives, and class division year after year. Maybe it does warrant turning friends into pitchmen, dangling influence, and telling me that another student’s symbolic donation means more than mine. And so maybe, when I graduate, I will not crumple the letters from the Alumni Association that will begin arriving Friday, June 10.