Paved With Good Intentions

“Genocide is the ultimate crime against humanity—it is the systematic and planned killing of an entire racial, ethnic, religious, or national group.”

These words from Matthew W. Mahan ’05 and Brandon Terry ’05 could not be more true. The two former student organization presidents wrote the above denunciation in a Feb. 18 e-mail to the Class of 2005. In the e-mail, Mahan and Terry encouraged their peers to withhold their contributions to the Senior Gift, a traditional donation to the Harvard College Fund given by the graduating Senior Class, until Harvard agrees to divest from PetroChina. PetroChina’s parent company, an oil company almost wholly owned by the Chinese government, is participating in a joint venture with the Sudanese government, providing Sudan with cash spent on a brutal war being waged against its own people in the southern region of Darfur. While we strongly support calls for Harvard’s divestment from PetroChina, we cannot support Mahan and Terry’s boycott of the Senior Gift.

In their letter to their peers, Mahan and Terry claim, “that there is a clear moral imperative,” to withhold donations to the Senior Gift. We disagree, and see no reason that support for divestment and support for one’s Senior Gift should be considered mutually exclusive. To say that seniors who choose to donate are complicit in the horrifying situation in Darfur is ludicrous and forces an unfair and unnecessary choice on Harvard seniors. The Senior Gift’s mission is an intensely positive one, and its goals need not be jeopardized for the sake of attempting to achieve the positive end of Harvard’s divestment from Sudan.

The Senior Gift is donated to the Harvard College Fund, and much of it is used for financial aid—indeed, most seniors specify that their donation is to go towards that end. A healthy Harvard College Fund, which is dependant on strong alumni giving, has, in the past, enabled the College to lead its peer institutions in the development of new financial aid initiatives. The 2004 decision to waive tuition for families with annual incomes under $40,000 was made possible by the Harvard College Fund and, more importantly, by the practice of giving back to Harvard post-graduation—a practice which is engendered by the tradition of the Senior Gift. Mahan and Terry’s proposed boycott would hold hostage much of the potential impetus for such desirable changes in the future. Seniors should not withhold donations to financial aid initiatives to achieve a desirable change in Harvard’s investment policies. There are other, less detrimental ways to demand divestment from Sudan.

If Mahan and Terry are serious as they seem to be about their desire to have Harvard divest from Sudan, there are much more forceful, symbolic means of demanding that change. In the 1970s and 1980s, Harvard students campaigned for the University’s divestment from apartheid South Africa with more gusto than that involved in Mahan and Terry’s proposed boycott. On April 23, 1978, more than 1,000 people gathered outside Pusey Library to demand divestment during a closed-door meeting of the Harvard Corporation during which stock policy for the year was to be determined. During the same period, students took up a ‘round-the-clock vigil outside Massachusetts Hall. Mahan and Terry propose the passive, negative protest of withholding an extremely valuable donation to financial aid initiatives that some 20 percent of the senior class would fail to make anyway. Much more would be accomplished, both in terms of raising awareness of the crisis in Darfur among Harvard undergraduates and in terms of encouraging divestment, by a stronger form of positive protest that requires real action on the part of those involved. We feel that, to be maximally effective, a protest must actively engage those involved in it—Mahan and Terry’s proposal fails this test.

We sincerely hope that the Class of 2005 is generous in its contributions to the Senior Gift—the College’s future leadership among peer institutions in changing financial aid programs depends on that generosity. Seniors who feel strongly about Harvard’s divestment from PetroChina ought to consider giving back in “honor” of that cause, or in “honor” of the victims of the genocide, rather than not giving back at all.

There can be a win-win strategy in the campaign for Harvard’s divestment from Sudan. Boycotting the Senior Gift, however, is not it.