Rewarding Philanthropy

On Monday, musician Lionel Richie was awarded the 2011 Harvard Foundation Peter J. Gomes award for his humanitarian work. Richie’s humanitarian achievements, including co-authoring a song to benefit earthquake victims in Haiti and hunger victims in Africa as well as advocating for breast cancer research, are laudable and deserving of recognition. Though Richie was certainly a worthy recipient of the Peter J. Gomes award, we nonetheless encourage Harvard organizations to honor non-celebrities, finding people who devote their entire lives to the betterment of society in order to acknowledge the unacknowledged and to more objectively select from among a multitude of deserving award recipients.

Harvard and Harvard-affiliated institutions very often grant awards to celebrities: for instance, Hasty Pudding Theatricals annually gives two outstanding entertainers the titles Man and Woman of the Year, and the Harvard Foundation names a performer that has demonstrated artistic and humanitarian excellence the Artist of the Year every spring.

There are certainly excellent reasons to grant awards to celebrities: because of their tremendous influence and visibility they are in an excellent position to use their platform to inspire others to perform acts of goodwill. Additionally, hosting celebrities on Harvard’s campus is an honor that is exciting to all members of the Harvard community and that contributes to our influence as an institution.

Nonetheless, celebrities should not make up the bulk of award recipients. Pop stars receive an enormous amount of recognition and influence as members of the American elite and Harvard, as an academic institution that serves the public, bears no obligation to contribute to their fame. Instead Harvard bears the responsibility of recognizing and rewarding those who have contributed to the public good to the greatest extent, regardless of the level of fame that they have achieved. An award from a prestigious institution like Harvard would benefit a recipient who has not achieved fame much more than it would a celebrity by significantly enhancing their public visibility and influence.

To this end, we encourage Harvard and its organizations to bestow awards on people other than celebrities whenever possible and to consider creating additional awards that do not preclude non-celebrities from recognition. It is rare for celebrities to contribute to humanitarian causes via any means other than their financial and personal support, and while this is extremely important to the survival of humanitarian work, there are many ways to contribute even more meaningfully to society without the financial resources of celebrities. For instance, donating money to an organization or activist movement is certainly not equivalent to being the visionary behind that movement and devoting one’s life to it. Harvard would do well to recognize such humanitarian leaders, whose work far outweighs the necessary but ultimately fungible contributions of wealthy donors.

There is much to be said for honoring the generous contributions of celebrities to causes that do not bear any immediate relevance to their careers. However, it is worth noting that Harvard, as a prominent university, a taxpayer-funded nonprofit, and an institution that urges its students to “serve better thy country and thy kind,” should seek to reward first and foremost those who have most faithfully exhibited its values.