Website Satirizes Senior Gift Plus

A group of seniors launched a satirical website called seniorgiftplusplus.com last weekend, mocking the recent Senior Gift Plus campaign which Matthew W. Mahan ’05 and Brandon M. Terry ’05 launched almost two weeks ago.

Terry and Mahan started a site along with their campaign—seniorgiftplus.com—which asked students to withhold donations from the traditional Senior Gift Fund in light of the Harvard Corporation’s investments in PetroChina.

Senior Gift Plus says on their website that the money donated by seniors will be held in an account and donated to the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard on October 25, 2005—exactly one full year after The Crimson publicized the investment in PetroChina—unless the Management Corporation divests from PetroChina. If Harvard chooses to divest from PetroChina before that time, then the money will go into the regular senior gift fund.

Investments in PetroChina came under fire last October, when The Crimson publicized PetroChina’s close ties to the Sudanese government and the possibility that funds from PetroChina were serving to facilitate the recent genocide.

Professors and students alike have floated divestment petitions since then, but Mahan and Terry started to target seniors specifically in a letter two weeks ago, asking seniors not to give money to the Senior Gift Fund, but instead to the Senior Gift Plus campaign, which would give money to the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy if Harvard does not divest from PetroChina.

This Senior Gift Plus Campaign immediately generated controversy over house open lists and among seniors, with officers of Senior Gift Fund claiming that the PetroChina funds and Senior Gifts were totally unrelated.

But more recently, Daniel E. Kafie ’05 and others decided to take a more sardonic approach to the issue. Their website, adapting the format of Mahan and Terry’s site, replaced references to the Sudan with “[Insert claim against harvard],” and offered a link to: “[...FAQ—answers need not be accurate.]”

Kafie was the only student whose name appeared on the seniorgiftplusplus.com site, and while he said that more people were involved, none of the others have yet been named.

Kafie, who is also a Crimson editor, said that the purpose of the site was ultimately serious, though they used comedy to get that message across.

“We’re really disgusted with what Mahan and Terry have done with the gift,” Kafie said. “Our take on this is that the whole divestment issue is a very serious topic...what Mahan and Terry have done has simplified the issue.”

Kafie said that giving money to the Carr Center for Human Rights would not in fact help Sudanese refugees directly.

Instead, he has put a link on seniorgiftplusplus.com to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an international group which provides support and aid to refugees worldwide. The site also sells T-shirts, and states that profits will go to the IRC as well.

“We’re not trying to belittle the issue in the Darfur, quite the opposite,” Kafie said. “We’re really attacking the means of the gift plus campaign.”

For technical reasons, Kafie said that he took down the site yesterday, but as of late last night, the site was up and running. It had received 1,099 hits as of 11 p.m. last night. Seniorgiftplus.com had received 1,587 unique (different) visitors as of the same time.

Jessica E. Vascellaro ’05, spokesperson for the Senior Gift Fund, said that as far as she knows no one officially involved in the Senior Gift Fund worked on the site.

But Vascellaro, who is also a Crimson editor, said that she appreciated the fresh humor of the site.

“I think it’s funny, it’s meant to be a joke,” she said. “At the Senior Gift Fund we’re more interested in starting conversation and getting participation among the senior class as high as possible.”

But Terry and Mahan said yesterday that they were not amused by the website.

“I think the trivial tone of the website makes a mockery of the deaths of 340,000 dead human beings in Darfur, the gang rape of countless black women, and the displacement of over 2 million people who now are confronted with the threat of starvation by labeling it as the ‘left-wing cause of the week,’” Terry wrote in an e-mail.

He added that he felt the site had a “distasteful irreverence for human life,” and deserved only “minimal attention.”

—Staff writer Charles F. Pollak can be reached at cpollak@fas.harvard.edu.