There was a terrible earthquake over the weekend in Chile, one of the biggest in the last century, with hundreds if not thousands dead and millions of Chileans displaced.

So naturally when I woke up this morning I turned to Drew Faust’s webpage to see what Harvard would be doing on behalf of those millions. I found several links on her main page to pages on Haiti…but strangely, there was nothing about Chile.

I turned to the Crimson, which had done substantial coverage on Haiti’s tragedy, to see what coverage it granted the Chile catastrophe.

But strangely, its only coverage was a short piece about whether Harvard students studying in Chile were safe. (They are, amen.)

So I checked my inbox. Because Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammonds had sent me several emails asking me to contribute money to Haiti relief. So naturally I thought…

Strangely, nothing.

Yes, I’m being sarcastic. But I do have a serious point: Harvard, and Drew Faust in particular, need to think harder about when to marshall the university’s resources on behalf of an important cause.

After the Haitian disaster, I wrote a post called “Should Harvard Help Haiti?”

I’m just not sure that it’s the university president’s role to host a web page for Haiti relief—not least because, once you do it for Haiti, where do you stop? New Orleans? Thailand? Appalachia? Darfur? Detroit? Iraq? There are lots of good causes. You can’t just pick the ones you feel affinity toward. Why should you throw Harvard’s brand behind fundraising for the really, really bad disasters, and not the quite bad ones?

I didn’t expect this question to be put to the test quite so quickly, and I’m sorry it has been. But here we are.

My Haiti post was not well received by most commenters. Pshaw, wrote Standing Eagle. An “Anonymous” wrote, Are you seriously making the claim that Harvard should not fundraise [for Haiti] because it has bigger things to think about?

Someone named Whimsy had the honesty to put it out there: Actually you can just pick the disasters you feel some affinity towards [to help].

Is that what’s going on with Chile—Harvard made a choice?

One of the few supportive comments was, I thought, quite smart, in part because it was less emotional than the negative comments:

…the Harvard reaction has gone far beyond normal caring reactions into something that looks suspiciously like P.R. or self-aggrandizement. Why are we giving extra sick days to people with missing relatives in Haiti, but not to people who lost relatives due to some random event that didn’t end up on the front page? It’s a reaction that’s full of good intentions but largely empty of thought.

“Full of good intentions but largely empty of thought“—I think that’s about right. Certainly there’s no evidence that anyone in the Harvard higher-ups has articulated a guiding philosophy, a principle, for the university in such circumstances.

(I suspect also that Haiti may have a larger constituency at Harvard than Chile does, and that, in some respects, the decision to throw the university’s support—particularly the college’s support— behind efforts to help Haiti was a political one.)

None of this is to suggest that Harvard shouldn’t play a part in trying to make the world a better place. If Drew Faust’s presidency has a theme so far—at least, one of her initiation—it is an attempt to restore a sense of liberal social consciousness to the university’s mission.

One’s instincts are sympathetic to that feel-good course. But it is a trickier endeavor than it at first seems.

If you discourage people from going to Wall Street, as Drew Faust has, are you offending Harvard’s biggest donors?

If you ask Harvard alums to give to Haiti, will they be contributing money that they might otherwise give to Harvard? Or will they feel odd if you ask them for Haiti money but not Chile (or whatever) aid?

And if you involve Harvard from the top down in international tragedy, do you risk getting the university involved in international politics and controversy?

Should a non-profit be asking its donors to contribute to other non-profits?

Where do you draw the line at which tragedies to support and which to, well, not? Do you help Haiti but not Chile because there are more students with Haitian connections at Harvard than there are with Chilean connections? Because there are more professors who study Haiti than who study Chile? Because the death toll in Chile did not cross some arbitrary plateau to reach the point where Chile merits Harvard’s help?

These are not easy questions, but Derek Bok did wrestle with them in his annual presidential letters.

That tradition of publicly thinking about the social role of the university (and other Harvard-related questions) faded under Neil Rudenstine, then disappeared entirely under Larry Summers.

Perhaps it is time for Drew Faust to revive it.

If nothing else, articulating a philosophy for Harvard’s role in national and international relief efforts would give her a good subject for a Commencement address.