Randy Cohen thinks you shouldn’t give to Harvard because they’ve got too much money already. Instead, give to a poorer institution where your donation will do more good.
Just a couple of observations. First, I think there’s a kind of instability in Cohen’s position. He suggests shifting your charity away from Harvard and toward a HBCU or a poor state school. It seems to me that the line of argument that pushes you to give money to SUNY rather than Harvard will also push you to sending the money to OXFAM instead of SUNY. If you’re trying to do the most good, you should save someone’s life rather than buy someone a college degree. Conversely, if you think morality lets you pick your causes, even though that involves doing less good than you could have done, you might think it also lets you pick Harvard over SUNY.
Second, this question of what morality demands, particularly when it comes to aiding others, and whether it leaves room for individual projects and parochial loyalties (beat Yale!*) is a big issue in moral theory. One version of the worry: if we follow the “do the most good” thought wherever it leads, we end up having really robust obligations that don’t leave room for our projects and commitments, e.g. friendships, hobbies, and so on. Or, in another version, the “do the most good” thought leaves us alienated or estranged from our projects because of the way it prompts us to think of their value from the impartial point of view. Once I start following Cohen’s reasoning here, in other words, there’s no way to indulge my love of dear old Alma Mater. Yet the reasoning is powerful insofar as it’s better to save someone from a horrible and unjust death rather than to endow a chalkboard.
*I went to State.
31 comments
October 14, 2009 at 7:05 am
David R
I understand the more complex moral argument you’re trying to make, but the truth is simpler. Cohen ignores the most important reason not to give to harvard: because besides the business school d-bags, and the straight-into-law-firm d-bags, it also produces more “humane” d-bags who end up working for Ford-Foundation-sponsored whitewash organizations, or diverting the energy of a whole generation who now think this is change.
You shouldn’t give to harvard because of the class positions it supports, not because it doesn’t need the money. Everybody needs the money.
October 14, 2009 at 7:06 am
Western Dave
Since when does Randy Cohen crib from Tuesday Morning Quarterback, who has been making this argument much more coherently over the last year or so, in between extolling the virtues of engineer/cheerleaders, high school-based offenses, and going for it on fourth down?
October 14, 2009 at 7:18 am
Tim Lacy
The problem with the moral theory you cite, and with philosophy in general, is that it doesn’t always deal well in specifics and case studies. In this case, Harvard has more money that most medium-sized and small countries. Second, per Dave R above, giving to Harvard, at least in a general way, seems to perpetuate certain kinds of class problems (e.g. neoliberalism in higher edu, questionable ethics, “non-profit” structure of the institution, myth of “best education” in all fields, etc.).
So if someone wants to *generally* divert attention and funds away from Harvard, well, who are we to complain about it? If you want to give to Harvard, well, go ahead. But don’t pretend the money will do more good there than it will at an HBCU or a struggling, small liberal arts college. – TL
October 14, 2009 at 7:19 am
Texas in Africa
Excellent arguments, but to me, it seemed that Cohen was only raising the question within the bounds of giving to higher education. In other words, if you are going to give to a college or university, that college or university should not be Harvard. I think he’d probably agree that overall, it’s always better to save someone from starvation and death than it is to endow a chair at a university.
Then again, there’s an argument to be made that some of us do research that could prevent a lot of war, starvation, poverty, and death in the first place, and that thus directing targeted resources to certain university departments is an act in service of the greater good. I’d be happy to take a check from anyone who follows my logic.
October 14, 2009 at 7:49 am
Mr Punch
Well, no. Here’s the thing — Harvard has a lot of money, and is (more or less) the best university in the world. So, if you’re giving money to a university (as opposed to, say Oxfam) that’s a perfectly reasonable place to give it. What’s harder to justify is giving money to institutions that are pretty well off but don’t seem to be doing much with their assets (I won’t mention any names).
October 14, 2009 at 7:58 am
Ben Alpers
On the other hand, David R, Harvard also produces a fair number of class traitors like myself (though I hope that some of the others are more effective at it than I am).
Universities, from Harvard on down to the most obscure of compass-point campus, produce the kind of d-bags that David R discusses. Neddy’s point about the logic of giving to the least well off applies to David R’s argument too: if morality demands that your giving maximize the possibility of real social change, you should probably donate to something other than higher ed (though David Horowitz might tell you otherwise ;-) ).
October 14, 2009 at 9:17 am
Tim Lacy
Ben: Good point about class traitors and the universality of douche-bagism. But can you produce some stats on that? ;)
But seriously, Mr. Punch, when Harvard starts accepting everyone in the world (you know, creating Harvard direction schools, e.g. Harvard Chicago, democratizing excellence), then I’ll start making reasonable arguments that everyone should donate to them. – TL
October 14, 2009 at 9:57 am
Tim Silverman
Of course, giving money to Oxfam will also save the lives of some d-bags, along with the rest. It’s one thing to consider pernicious social effects, not so straightforward to consider types of individuals.
October 14, 2009 at 10:42 am
ben
What gets lost in this impulse to theorize and generalize is the fact that Cohen is right.
October 14, 2009 at 10:51 am
Texas in Africa
We should start working on d-bag matrix. What are the indicators? Can you measure it on an ordinal scale?
October 14, 2009 at 11:09 am
Ahistoricality
Randy Cohen’s argument is almost enough to make me rethink my reluctance to donate to my wealthier alma maters: Since he’s always wrong on substantive and ethical issues, doing the opposite makes sense.
October 14, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Carl
The hidden premise here seems to be that people give money to universities in order to do good. If instead they give to universities in order to be seen doing good, or to get on a winning bandwagon, or to associate themselves with a community, or to create a floating obligation that can be made to pay off later, there won’t be much traction in this kind of argument.
Well, anyway. Re: giving your money to smaller state universities, I’d argue that their support is properly a matter for the moral and practical deliberation of the citizens of that state. Taking those citizens off the hook in the amount of your contribution doesn’t look like effective moral engineering to me. If one must give to higher education, small underendowed independents with some distinctive mission that is not merely iterative of higher education commonplaces look to me like the way to go.
October 14, 2009 at 1:32 pm
teofilo
Yglesias (a Harvard alum!) has been making this argument for years regarding Harvard specifically. It may be problematic in some ways, as the comments here are pointing out, but I’ve found it generally persuasive enough. I’m certainly never going to give Cornell any money, which is pretty easy for me to do since I don’t have any money to give and have no expectation of having any anytime soon.
If one must give to higher education, small underendowed independents with some distinctive mission that is not merely iterative of higher education commonplaces look to me like the way to go.
My mom went to a school like this, and she gives them money when she can. Seems reasonable enough.
October 14, 2009 at 1:34 pm
dana
Neddy, it occurs to me that if the defense of giving to Harvard is that it is a permissible luxury good (some people like cars, some people like endowed stairwells), then gifts to colleges shouldn’t be tax exempt.
October 14, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Vance
ben, Neddy’s point is that Cohen is right in a way that proves too much.
I think there are sound reasons for charitable giving that are a bit different from the mere greatest good. For example, if you feel you have been aided in a particular way, you may wish to help others the same way. (My wife, for example, benefited from a scholarship to just such a “small underendowed independent[] with some distinctive mission”.) There may be many such motives, and they don’t literally maximize the effect of the generosity — but if that’s the criterion, there’s no place to stop short of sainthood.
October 14, 2009 at 3:10 pm
essear
For a few years after graduating from Chicago, I donated small amounts of money on occasion. My thinking was that they had been exceedingly generous to me, and the least I could do was give them a tiny fraction of that back in return when they asked for it. But then I got tired of all the phone calls pleading for more, and decided I have better things to do with my money than giving some of it to a wealthy university.
October 14, 2009 at 3:25 pm
essear
In other words, I think I had to, to a certain extent, develop a sense of entitlement: a sense that, while I’m appreciative of the university’s generosity, I don’t feel indebted to them. That took a while.
October 14, 2009 at 5:44 pm
zunguzungu
Now that the UC system is using tuition to fund bond payments and Yudof’s lexus, there’s a significant gap to be made up. Here’s where you come in.
October 14, 2009 at 6:01 pm
ben
ben, Neddy’s point is that Cohen is right in a way that proves too much.
The statement “one shouldn’t give money to Harvard because they already have too much” doesn’t, on its own, prove too much.
I take it that the way Cohen is right is that he has said something true.
October 14, 2009 at 7:37 pm
ben
(Even if you add ” and your charitable money would go further or do more good elsewhere”, you still don’t, I think, prove too much.)
October 14, 2009 at 7:37 pm
nick
from the moral perspective, a very small # of institutions of higher education do not actually fall in the category of “university” but instead ought to be classed as “hedge fund”; this fact should suffice to guide one’s decisions…
October 14, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Vance
Well, I’m no philosopher, but it seems to me that (echoing Neddy) if we’re admitting arguments of the form “x would go further or do more good than y”, even if we only mean them to help us decide between Harvard and Kenyon, then we’re well on the way to showing that we should spend on hunger or malaria bed nets and not college.
October 14, 2009 at 8:51 pm
ben
Well, that’s why I mentioned the theorizing/generalizing instinct. Why should I believe that the fact that one shouldn’t give money to harvard but rather to some other place because it would do more good means that I’m committed to the principle that one should give money to the entity whose receipt of the money would do the most good, or that I’m committed to the cogency of “do x rather than y if doing x would do more good than doing y” for any x and y? If you assume that it’s that general principle that gives Cohen’s specific advice its force, then sure, you’ll need to say some other things to explain why we shouldn’t all be duh-utilitarians. (If that’s what you think.)
October 14, 2009 at 9:00 pm
ben
… and as you’ve framed it just now I think the Cohen position is on stronger ground. If I’m trying to decide whether to give money to Harvard or to Kenyon, and decide to give it to Kenyon because it’ll do more good there, and you come along and say, “well, why not mosquito nets, then?”, the answer is that I wasn’t trying to decide whether to give money to Harvard, Kenyon, or an entity that distributes mosquito nets. Maybe you think I ought to have been doing that, but I wasn’t.
(The wile of the ethicist of course is to come along and attempt to make the previously nonsalient possibility into a salient one precisely by asking questions like that. It would be nice if I could here produce a clever reason to think that this is only sometimes legitimate, but instead I’ll just mention that the previous sentence made me think of the relevant alternatives view in epistemology.)
October 14, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Vance
Right, and now I see Cohen frames it the same way:
…if you wish to promote education as a force for social justice, there are better and worse ways to do it.
He’s explicit (at least here) about the range of choice and the criteria, and it’s implicit that others are possible. One could ask, “I want to give $X; how should I allocate it to best benefit humanity?”, but one usually doesn’t.
October 15, 2009 at 3:27 am
kid bitzer
the greatest good is done by spending money on this sort of thing:
http://www.cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1438565&sub=1438572
(via teresa nielsen hayden).
October 15, 2009 at 8:51 am
Chris
We should start working on d-bag matrix. What are the indicators? Can you measure it on an ordinal scale?
I think the Social Dominance Orientation scale is probably a good starting point for the relevant aspects of douchebaggery. We can refine it later if desired.
It would be interesting to see if Harvard grads actually do score higher on SDO than grads of small schools. I would guess yes — that’s probably one reason they went to Harvard, and also they might have absorbed it from their filthy rich parents, who are likely to be filthy rich *because* they were successful SDOs.
But maybe I’m wrong, and Harvard is actually a garden of freewheeling academic speculation and unbridled curiosity, rather than How To Take Over The World School.
October 15, 2009 at 8:59 am
N. Merrill
Ben, the last chapter of Peter Unger’s book Living high and letting die develops a contextualist view where Unger/Singer style arguments change the conversational score in ways that make our obligations more stringent.
October 15, 2009 at 10:16 am
ben
See? Wily!
October 16, 2009 at 9:35 am
Deborah
I have never read one bit of “advice” from this guy that I though was sound.
October 23, 2009 at 4:32 am
driver99
Good to know Huston was popular. ,