Debunking the Senior Gift

I do not normally write about campus events or issues, preferring to leave those topics to others. However, there is an occasional campus issue that is relevant to business or money that I feel compelled to write about, and the Senior Gift is one of them. I am not a fan of the Senior Gift for reasons that I will outline below, and in protest I have recently written a check for $20 to the senior gift committee of Princeton University.

Charitable institutions like Harvard do not operate in a vacuum. In particular, they are susceptible to the same forces of competition and customer dissatisfaction as any other institution in a capitalist system. Charities compete for donations, resources and the talent to administer those resources. In the case of universities, they compete to entice the nation’s top students to enroll, and the intelligent administrators realize that they should also compete to offer the highest quality institutional experience as perceived by students. Put simply, a university administration that hopes to turn the undergrads of today into the alumni donors of tomorrow would do well to make sure that those undergrads get the best possible treatment in their interaction with the university administration and faculty. Harvard has not done this.

My litany of complaints, as it were, is neither new nor original. Like other students on campus, I am frustrated by the lack of space, the plight of junior faculty denied tenure, the incomparably bad advising system and the stringent restrictions the administration, led by Dean of the College Harry Lewis, has extended over the campus social scene in my four years at Harvard. In short, I feel alienated by an administration that recruited me and my peers on the basis of our intelligence and drive, only to make no good faith effort to understand our concerns about life at this university. I am not the first to complain about this; nor will I be the last.

As many of my friends on the Senior Gift Committee are keen on reminding me, the end of senior year is an appropriate time to reflect on the benefits of an Ivy League education. My complaining is not to say that I have not enjoyed my Harvard experience; on the contrary, my time at Harvard has been a hugely positive experience. Mostly, however, this has been because of a few outstanding professors, my peers, my involvement in the Boston business community, my extra-curricular commitments and Eliot House—all things outside the control or authority of the administration of Harvard. Because my Harvard experience has been positive, I will always be open to supporting parts of the university financially, but I will focus my giving away from the administration. Future masters of Eliot House and future editors of the Harvard Political Review will always have my ear when they need to fundraise, because those two institutions shaped the majority of my positive experiences while at Harvard.

Two counterarguments present themselves. Proponents of the Senior Gift would counter that I can earmark my donations to causes such as undergraduate financial aid, which is a laudable program. Still, the record of the financial aid office at Harvard has been less than stellar. Although aid has increased in recent years, these changes have been the result of competitive pressure, not a desire to meaningfully benefit the lives of students. Harvard, I feel confident in claiming, would never have made such changes had Princeton not taken the lead. If I am going to give money to support undergraduate financial aid, I will give to those institutions that extend aid out of an honest, clearly expressed desire to improve student access to a fine education. A proponent of the Senior Gift could further accuse me of blind ignorance—the Senior Gift surely does not endow some malevolent discretionary fund that Harry Lewis uses to enforce a lack of fun over Harvard students. I am not, of course, so naïve as to believe this; instead, I simply believe that the point must be made to the administration that we will not tolerate neglect for four years, only to give blindly as alumni.

Princeton, it seems clear, genuinely cares about its undergraduates. My friends at Princeton report much more contact with faculty and advisers, and the record of Princeton on financial aid and the social lives of the students is far superior to Harvard’s. More important, I am sending a check to Princeton and writing about it in my column to make clear two points that bear repeating. One, there is a correlation between undergraduates’ perception of the administration’s intentions and future financial support from those same undergraduates turned alumni. Two, giving to educational and other charitable causes is and should be a competitive market, like just about everything else in our society. These reasons compel me to support an administration like the one at Princeton far more than the people running Harvard.

Alex F. Rubalcava ’02 is a government concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.