Undergrads Allowed To Swipe For Darfur

The College joined Harvard Law School (HLS) and the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) this week in allowing students and affiliates to donate Crimson Cash to the Genocide Intervention Fund (GIF), a group which aims to provide support to peacekeepers in the Darfur region of Sudan.

College administrators decided Monday to allow students to donate Crimson Cash through swipe stations set up in the dining halls.

But students will not be able to donate unused BoardPlus, which also had been the aim of a recent online petition coordinated by the Harvard Darfur Action Group.

The petition, which called for the College and Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) to allow students to donated unused BoardPlus as well as Crimson Cash to GIF, garnered over 2,800 signatures last week.

BoardPlus, unlike Crimson Cash, is allocated to every student at the beginning of the semester, and cannot be maintained between academic years. Students and Harvard affiliates have to add Crimson Cash to their Harvard IDs voluntarily, either online or at Crimson Cash terminals throughout campus.

And graduating seniors can elect to refund their remaining Crimson Cash balance, while leftover BoardPlus gets rolled back into HUDS’s coffers in order to offset the next year’s costs.

Despite the fact that students will not be able to donate BoardPlus, Tom D. Hadfield ’08, who started the “Swipe for Darfur” petition, said that he still considered the implementation of Crimson Cash donations stations to be an enormous achievement.

“We are pleased that the College has met us halfway,” he said. “We are impressed with the speed that the College and Dining Services have moved to install the Swipe for Darfur terminals in every House, Annenberg and the Greenhouse.”

Rebecca J. Hamilton, a joint degree candidate at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) who helped organize the petition said that while she had hoped for BoardPlus donations, she understood the College’s decision.

“The frustrating thing from a student’s perspective is knowing that you or your friends go and buy 15 cans of coke you don’t really want in the last week of semester just to use up your BoardPlus,” Hamilton wrote in an e-mail.

Deputy Dean of the College Patricia O’Brien wrote in an e-mail yesterday that the College was pleased to continue efforts to aid the situation in Darfur.

“The College’s decision is aligned with the University’s decision to divest from PetroChina,” O’Brien wrote. “Crimson Cash is the simplest and most equitable method of doing this.”

As of last night, donation stations had been installed in all river house dining halls as well as in Annenberg. The Quad dining halls, the Greenhouse Cafe, and Harvard Business School are scheduled to receive donation stations today.

“I know the HLS machine got $100 of donations yesterday, which seems to bode well for the time ahead,” Hamilton wrote in an e-mail yesterday.

Hadfield said that allowing students to use Crimson Cash to donate instead of credit cards is still an advantage, and will make it more convenient for students to donate.

“Credit cards or even debit cards would require a staff person to process the donation,” Hamilton said. “Whereas with the Crimson Cash machines, students can quickly and easily punch the amount they want to donate, swipe their card and be on their way, without any staffing needs.”

Hadfield said that the machines will remain in dining halls until the conclusion of the semester.

“My target for the College is thousands and obviously I hope that the college undergraduates will exceed the huge commitment that the other schools are making,” he said.

HDAG plans to donate all revenue from this campaign to GIF, which provides logistical support to troops monitoring the cease-fire in Darfur, where government-supported militias have killed tens of thousands of residents.

—Staff writer Joshua P. Rogers can be reached at jprogers@fas.harvard.edu.