Getting Carried Away

At 1:00 p.m. today, members of the Darfur Action Group will meet with Harvard College administrators. On the agenda is a proposal that, if implemented, would give Harvard undergraduates the opportunity to donate their excess Board Plus and Crimson Cash balances to the Genocide Intervention Fund (GIF), a group that provides logistical support to the African Union peacekeeping mission in the Darfur region of Sudan. Government-supported militants have killed tens of thousands in the region, in what many have called a genocide.

While the Swipe for Darfur program will be implemented today at the John F. Kennedy School of Government (KSG), the Graduate School of Education (GSE), and Harvard Law School (HLS), it should not be implemented at the College without an understanding of its long-term implications and possibilities.

By implicitly picking favorite humanitarian causes, the Swipe for Darfur proposal will set a dangerous precedent for Harvard activist fundraising. In the Harvard consciousness, thanks to a successful divestment campaign, significant activist activity, and a whole lot of green bracelets,

Darfur is this years humanitarian cause celbre. But if University Hall grants the Darfur Action Group its request, and establishes Darfur as the single beneficiary of students year-end swiping, it paints itself into a corner; what happens next year, when an inevitable new cause emerges to compete for students attentionand their Crimson Cash? The College administration needs to be wary of picking favorites when it comes to supporting humanitarian causes.

The solution is a simple one. Instead of establishing a precedent of swiping for a single cause, students should be given a choice at the end of the year about the humanitarian destination of their surplus Crimson Cash. University Hall would establish a process whereby student activist groups (like the Darfur Action Group) could petition for their causes being included on the menu of options that would be available to students. The College administration would have to establish its own criteria for eligibility, but the process would make swipe-card based fundraising available to more groups than just those that have the initiative to sell bracelets and start divestment campaigns.

Naturally, the logistics involved in setting up this kind of process makes its implementation by the end of this year highly improbable. For that reason, the College should today grant the Darfur Action Group its request to let students donate their surplus Crimson Cash to GIF, with the understanding that a more permanent, more inclusive system of humanitarian swiping will be developed for the 2005-2006 school year.

The Swipe for Darfur can be a very useful jumping-off point for the establishment of a permanent system of facilitating student giving to humanitarian causes. In order to meet this potential, however, the program must not be approved by the College without scrutiny.

Adam Goldenberg 08, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Grays Hall.