A Truly Global University

Saturday marks the end of the period in which Harvard will match up to $100 donations that students, staff, and faculty make to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. The end of the matching-funds drive comes exactly one week after a 7.6-magnitude earthquake rocked Kashmir, killing an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people. But although the earthquake has created a humanitarian crisis that dwarfs even the devastation that Katrina wrought along the Gulf Coast, Harvard has chosen to value lives in Louisiana and Mississippi above those in Pakistan and India.

This is not the University’s first attempt to play the role of freelance philanthropist. In September 2001, Harvard pledged $1 million to fund scholarships for the children of terror victims. It matched $245,877 in donations by Harvard affiliates after last December’s massive tsunami. But if Harvard wants to get the biggest bang for its charitable buck, the University should focus its philanthropic efforts on the oft-ignored humanitarian crises that pass in and out of the headlines, where donors’ dollars are needed the most.

Harvard’s Katrina matching-funds drive is expected to raise a total that tops last winter’s tsunami effort. Now imagine, for example, that instead of giving aid to hurricane relief groups here in the United States, Harvard had chosen to donate more than $250,000 to anti-hunger efforts in Malawi, where aid agencies estimate that 5 million people face potential death-by-famine in the coming months. According to statistics from Doctors Without Borders, that $250,000 would fund nearly 3 million high-energy meals for children who would otherwise go hungry. Instead, Harvard will donate its money to organizations performing an array of services for Katrina victims—from feeding them snacks to finding them shelter beds. But in very few (if any) cases will Harvard’s Katrina donations mean the difference between life and death. Although it’s difficult to quantify the impact of a charitable gift, we can be quite certain that Harvard’s money could save many more lives in Malawi than it will in Mississippi.

One might argue that, as Americans, we have a responsibility to our compatriots that trumps our obligation to the Third World. (Try telling that to the international students on campus.) If you adopt that nationalistic attitude in making your own charitable choices, well, that’s your decision. It doesn’t seem to be University President Lawrence H. Summers’ stance, however. In March 2004 he told alumni in Santiago, Chile that Harvard must “become a truly global university”—an admirable goal, but one contravened by Harvard’s choice to focus on domestic relief efforts while ignoring graver crises elsewhere.

Even with its $25.9 billion endowment, of course, Harvard can’t respond to every cataclysmic event. And it shouldn’t. Alumni donors never gave University administrators carte blanche to shell out cash whenever and wherever they see fit. Harvard’s comparative advantage is in education. Here in Cambridge, Kennedy School professors are training government officials in emergency-management techniques, and Design School students have drawn blueprints for tsunami-resistant houses. Clearly, it would not be in the global interest for Harvard to close up shop and dispatch its faculty to disaster sites.

But if Harvard does choose to participate in more direct charitable giving, then administrators should look beyond the stories that dominate the nightly news. If, for example, Harvard were to announce tomorrow that it will match affiliates’ donations to famine relief in Malawi, such a bold move would—at least briefly—redirect media attention to a forgotten crisis. And it would show that when administrators characterize Harvard as a “global university,” they’re willing to put their money where their collective mouth is.



Daniel J. Hemel ’07, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Lowell House.