Editorial ll
Kristol, William
Editorial 11 Uncharitable Students Students entering the Eliot House dining room at Harvard College pass by, before going through the cafeteria line, a table manned by a variety of students...
...They may feel they have already far surpassed their quota of righteous behavior, or at least righteous feeling...
...These students hurry past-sometimes mock-the small Salvation Army contingent in Harvard Square...
...Through these issues we hope to develop a real working-class political consciousness in the Cambridge area...
...Our main project to further this cause is a Coffee Shop-Grill...
...For the past three years, in a period when Harvard students have never been more genuinely if abstractly "concerned" about and aroused by social problems, there has been no Combined Charities at Harvard...
...United Farm Workers...
...But of course all have, at least im-plicity, mostly explicity, the "proper" political position...
...This Cambridge organization's activities include organizing tenants into unions and producing a "community newspaper...
...How did the CHUL choose which of many "active causes" Harvard students were to be encouraged to contribute to...
...Money is needed for "The farmworkers' efforts to gain self-determination...
...Editorial 11 Uncharitable Students Students entering the Eliot House dining room at Harvard College pass by, before going through the cafeteria line, a table manned by a variety of students passing out a variety of literature...
...But it is distressing...
...Hard Times "will provide leadership around community issues...
...There are many of us who will give if asked or prodded, but who are not likely to take the time to give on our own...
...E4A serves as a clearinghouse at Harvard for literature on "alternatives to education, women's consciousness, prison work, counter-professions, consumer's rights, Appalachia, ecology, vocations for social change, communes...
...This seems to have been a considerably more important criterion for selection for the Combined Charities than whether the organizations were in fact charities...
...It only helps people...
...The mimeographed and xeroxed sheets and occasional printed pamphlets available for the edification of Harvard students are usually either boring (house athletic schedules), quaint (political broadsides), or offensive (questionnaires for personality development courses...
...The pamphlet continued: "The coordinators of the Drive felt that it was difficult for one to discern between the mammoth national and international charities...
...The first page of the pamphlet began with the welcome information that "The Harvard-Radcliffe Combined Charities resumes this fall after a three-year hiatus...
...I am willing to wager that its name was never mentioned at the CHUL meeting that chose this year's Harvard-Radcliffe Combined Charities...
...The CHUL selected five such busy community organizations, each of which was given a few paragraphs in the pamphlet to describe itself and make its plea for money (the students could either have their money evenly distributed among the five, or could specify a recipient...
...Afro and E4A are organizations of Harvard students who deal mainly (in E4A's case, only) with other Harvard students...
...Now it should be evident that none of these organizations (excepting the Phillips Brooks House) is a charity-and in fact, none describes itself as a charity...
...Hard Times is a political organization...
...In any case, they are well-meaning people, and far closer to being preppies than Commies...
...One of the five organizations selected was predictable: Harvard's own social help organization, the Phillips Brooks House, which is involved in a variety of programs such as teaching prisoners, helping poor people renovate their apartments, and the like...
...It continued, in a reasonable fashion: "Under the auspices of the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life (the CHUL -An official Harvard student body), the Charity Drive has redirected its thrust from international and national charities to those more closely related to the Cambridge community...
...Now, when it returns, it comes back as a vehicle of facile ideological self-gratification...
...Hard Times...
...The other four organizations to receive money from the Combined Charities Drive were: The Harvard-Radcliffe Association of African and Afro-American Students...
...E4A's other main activity is "workshops": "This fall we have sponsored informal talks by the Law Commune and by a Radcliffe Institute Fellow on Franz Fanon, as well as a videotape of Dr...
...But since they can serve to take the student's mind off what he is eating, most of us are happy to receive almost any handout...
...Members of the Harvard community have long felt that they have been abusing the urban area which surrounds the University...
...Yet the CHUL, who wasted this opportunity, has not been "captured" by any radical minority...
...calling a Coffee Shop-Grill or grants for Harvard students charitable purposes, and implying that giving money to Afro or E4A would be "giv(ing) something back to the community" is a bit farfetched...
...As it happens at Harvard radicals boycott all official university committees...
...One does not know whether to laugh at, cry over, or be nauseated by all of this...
...Perhaps many Harvard students spend too much time trying to change the world or talking about changing the world to bother with charities...
...William Kristol...
...CHUL representatives (one from each of the thirteen Houses) are, as far as I can judge, relatively typical Harvard students (insofar as the types who run for a college committee that makes suggestions to the administration about such things as the correct male-female ratio in the houses are typical...
...For if the better nature of many Harvard students were tapped, some genuine charities and needy people could benefit...
...The UFW is a union, perhaps a somewhat special one, but certainly having little to do with the Cambridge urban community Harvard is "exploiting...
...The Salvation Army does not develop consciousness, create unity, or work for social change...
...The whole thing is too trivial and silly to be an outrage, and too transparent to spend much time discussing...
...Moreover, the donations of students should not go for light bulbs, fancy stationery, and executive directors...
...a student-run organization which has been helping undergraduates involved in social change....We annually fund thirty to forty Harvard-Radcliffe undergratuates for an average of $350 each...
...Education for Action (E4A...
...It was this rather ordinary and typical group of Harvard students who selected the Combined Charities...
...When early in December I was handed a small pamphlet (one of those six-page pamphlets on one sheet of paper that unfolds) for the "Harvard-Radcliffe Combined Charities," it made my day (such are days, or at least my days, at Harvard in the winter): for this pamphlet was sufficiently long to occupy me for much of dinner, and sufficiently irritating to distract me from working for much of the rest of the evening (it doesn't take much...
...The Combined Charities Drive is one of the few ways that students at Harvard can give something back to the community...
...The CHUL chose to "solicit for those organizations which are too actively involved in their own cause to go out and raise funds themselves...
...People like to see their donations utilized in active causes...
...Joshua Horn on medical work in China...
...The Association's goal has been to promote mutual understanding and friendship among ourselves....The main theme of Afro this year is unity...
...An opportunity to coax a few dollars from hundreds of students for charity has been utterly wasted...
Vol. 6 • February 1973 • No. 5
