Harvard and the Hurricane
Larry Summers has announced that
Harvard is setting up a fund for contributions to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Harvard will match contributions of up to $100, even if members of the Harvard community gave the money before the fund was established. Meanwhile, Harvard College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will each be accepting up to 25 students—tuition-free—who can't go to the school they were supposed to go to because of the hurricane.
While it's hard to fault Summers' intentions, these moves reflect an interesting and noteworthy shift in the traditional conception of the purpose of a university: teaching, learning, and scholarship. By committing Harvard as an institution to acts of charity and social outreach, Summers is clearly stating that he wants the university to be firmly engaged with society—as opposed to just the university's students and graduates. That will surely have some benefits, but it will also lead, inevitably, to the further politicization of the university, which has already happened quite substantially during the Summers' years.
An example: Harvard is a 501-c/3, tax-exempt, non-profit organization. Its alumni and others give money to it because they want to support Harvard's educational mission. Yet now Harvard is saying that it will redirect money contributed to it to victims of Hurricane Katrina—which, however altruistic that may be, is not why the original donors gave the money. Imagine if, for example, the American Cancer Society suddenly announced that it was matching gifts to the Red Cross for hurricane relief...
After 9/11, Summers set up a program of scholarships for children of victims who were accepted to Harvard. And after the Asian tsunami, Summers established a similar fund to match contributions. Which is generous, but then, it's not his money, it's the institution's—and one wonders if, in a sense, he isn't using it to promote his own public rehabilitation.
It also raises the question of what disasters reach the level at which Harvard should start sending money. Why not the children of Iraqi war veterans? (Hell, why not the veterans themselves?) Why not African AIDS orphans? Why not the children of slain Iraqi civilians? It does get hard to draw the line, once you start injecting the university into world events in such a fashion. I'd be very curious to hear Summers' response if someone asked him what his guiding principle was about the circumstances under which the university should match contributions for victims of a natural disaster. Perhaps Harvard should simply match all contributions to all charities?
The idea of accepting students from hurricane-closed universities makes more sense to me...although it'll be interesting to see if they get kicked out once the term is up.
