For an institution whose ostensible goal for graduates is that we “depart to better serve our country and our kind,” Harvard has an awful lot of unnecessary expenditures. These excesses will never discount the amount of good that has come from Harvard (the college boasts legions of graduates who have left Cambridge to do incredible good for the world), but they make it easy to question the wisdom of alumni giving. When Kenneth Griffin ’89 gave $150 million to the university last week, many people reasonably asked if a donation to Harvard was really the best use of his philanthropic money.
But Kenneth Griffin is a numbers guy (you don’t make $3 billion in hedge funds otherwise), and this leads me to think that he cannot be so terrible at calculus as to think that giving $150 billion to Harvard is a good way of maximizing humanity’s utility function. If he wanted to do the most good with his extraordinary wealth, he’d be meeting with Bill Gates instead of Drew Faust.
I can’t read Kenneth Griffin’s mind, but I’ll hazard a guess: this gift is an expression of his values and identity. Kenneth Griffin loved being a Harvard undergrad, and he wants to share that gift with students whose parents aren’t hedge fund managers.
Framed that way, the criticism of Griffin’s gift could be easily applied to most charitable giving. The daughter of a breast cancer survivor who donates to the Komen Foundation isn’t donating because she thinks this will give her the biggest human welfare bang for her charitable buck; she’s doing it because she loves her mom. Philanthropy is as much about values as it is about dollar value: we all care about different things, and charity is expressing that care.
Of course, not everyone buys this approach to philanthropy. Inspired by Peter Singer and other utilitarian philosophers, the effective altruism movement maintains that the sole purpose of charity should be to promote human welfare in a maximally efficient manner. From that perspective, $150 million given to Harvard is $150 million not spent on vaccinations and malaria nets.
So hardcore consequentialists can have this one: grab a copy of Practical Ethics and have a field day at Kenneth Griffin’s expense. But are you willing to stop here? There’s a designer lawn chair in Kenneth Griffin’s eye, but look for the plank in your own: Komen and the United Way may not be as inefficient as Harvard, but they’re far from perfect.
For many of us, the difference between Harvard and the Komen Foundation or United Way isn’t one of efficiency. The faculty receptions and swanky facilities are expensive, but more importantly, they’re irritating: it’s easy to hate alumni giving simply because it’s easy to hate their alma mater. Even for recent graduates and current students, many aspects of this university are deeply discordant with our values.
The Griffin gift is a litmus test for how we feel about our Harvard, tugging the same associative strings as on-campus recruitment, divestment, the UC budget, mental health, and final clubs. Alumni gifts validate this institution and its claims on graduates, and they should provoke our reflection about the kind of Harvard we will someday be asked to support.
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