Word: cohenable
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This past Sunday, Randy Cohen, The New York Times “Ethicist,” wrote that to give to Harvard is to “offer more pie to a portly fellow while the gaunt and hungry press their faces to the window.” Rather, he argues, if donors truly want to “promote education as a form of social justice,” they should give their money to community colleges, all-black colleges, smaller Catholic schools, and the like...
...course, Cohen is right to point out that many other institutions of higher learning across the country need donations in order to provide their students with the basic components of a stimulating education. And we echo his call for donors to consider the potential impacts of their gifts before they actually make a donation: All too often, it seems, individuals with the best intentions give to certain causes or institutions only to realize that their donations could have made more of a difference elsewhere...
...Harvard is certainly an institution that deserves and effectively utilizes the gifts it receives from its supporters. And while we take issue with the minimal impact Cohen believes that donations to Harvard inevitably have, we most object to what is perhaps the crux of his argument, which is that America’s oldest university has less of a “moral claim” on donations than do other colleges and universities with fewer resources...
First of all, any act of philanthropy, in the sense that an individual parts with personal resources for a positive cause in which he or she believes, ought to be equally called “moral.” That Cohen has conceived of a certain schema on which to rank the morality of these identical actions is highly problematic. After all, who is really to judge negatively a person choosing to make a charitable donation? In a dismal economic climate like this one, when charitable giving has reached one of its lowest levels in recent history, it is misguided...
...very hard to have sections do what sections should do at larger than 18,” Cohen said. “I’d hate to see them get larger...