“The moment the gift, however generous it be, is infected with the slightest hint of calculation, the moment it takes account of knowledge or recognition, it falls within the ambit of an economy: it exchanges, in short it gives counterfeit money, since it gives in exchange for payment. Even if it gives ‘true’ money, the alteration of the gift into a form of calculation immediately destroys the value of the very thing that is given; it destroys it as if from the inside. … In order to avoid this negation or destruction at all costs, … [one must keep] in the gift only the giving, the act of giving and the intention to give, not the given which in the end doesn’t count. One must give without knowing, without knowledge or recognition, without thanks: without anything, or at least without any object.” (Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, p.112)
Derrida pushes the conceptual coherency of the gift as such to the limits of comprehensibility in his important work The Gift of Death. Analogously, my aim in writing this Wespeak, though significantly more circumspect in scope, is to problematize the coherency and ethical tenability of the “Senior Gift”.
I say this to distinguish this Wespeak from a different kind of Wespeak that could be written about the shortcomings of the senior gift. This second kind of Wespeak would emphasize problems that might be generally characterized as issues of implementation. Broadly, one might point to the confusion and lack of understanding surrounding the way in which one’s senior gift donation is embedded within the senior pass. In particular, seniors aren’t informed ahead of time, in the many emails advertising when and where to purchase senior passes, about the fact that part of what they pay will constitute a senior gift donation. Instead they are only made aware of this fact in the inevitable chaos that comes with purchasing a senior pass, in the middle of Usdan, along with a large portion of the rest of the senior class. One might also point out that students often do not have a clear sense of where their donation will end up, and that they fail to realize that the proceeds of the senior gift go directly towards financial aid for incoming students.
Moreover, students are largely unaware of the fact that the very act of donating is nearly as important as the amount that one donates, since the percentage of alumni who donate each year is seen as a measure of alumni satisfaction and, in turn, as a relevant metric for judging the “success” of any given university, and that these percentages are consequently employed as criteria for university rankings and the distribution of grants. (Note: Senior gift donations count as alumni donations.) Perhaps most problematically, nowhere on the “Senior Event Rules and Regulations” are students made aware of the fact that they have the option of opting out of the presumed donation. Making this clear, seems to me like the minimum requirement for the embedded contribution to begin to approach anything like what could be genuinely described as a willful and intentional donation. In light of these problems, I find it troubling that the large majority of seniors who do donate to the senior gift do so by purchasing a senior pass. This is not to say that these students would not otherwise donate, but the context in which these donations are obtained is certainly something to consider.
As I mentioned at the onset, however, it is not my intention to dwell on these issues any longer than I already have. My reasons for not doing so are multiple. First, from my conversations with several of the people involved with the senior gift it is my impression that they are acutely aware of many of these problems and that they are working hard to fix them for future years. Similarly, I in no way believe that the Wesleyan Fund nor the students fundraising for the senior gift intend to be deliberately underhanded in the ways in which they obtain donations to the senior gift. (Though some students may have been left with this unfortunate impression as a result of poor implementation). Additionally, these seemingly less than honest methods for procuring donations are, I imagine, motivated by systemic structures wherein university rankings, partly predicated on the percentage of alumni who donate annually, constitute the reductive logic of statistically evaluating institutions of higher learning to the erasure of more robust narratives of what constitutes “giving back”, and “satisfaction with one’s education”. The fact remains, however, that, in spite of the extent to which Wesleyan wishes to buy into this logic out of a perceived necessity to align itself with numerically reductive forms of pedagogical evaluation (or else risk more severe damage to the institution), Wesleyan nevertheless has, to my mind, an obligation to always behave in an ethically tenable way that doesn’t undermine the agency and intelligence of the students for whom it purportedly exits. It is here that my larger critique begins.
The deeper problem with embedding senior gift donations within the purchase of senior passes is the confusingly entangled logics and narratives that this embeddedness produces. Most obviously perhaps, the logic of purchasing gets inextricably entangled with the logic of donating a gift within the single transaction of “purchasing” a senior pass. To say nothing of the way in which this uniquely undermines the agency of students (I wonder if there are any other instances of “presumed donations” in the university’s other alumni fundraising efforts), the ludicrous notion of a presumed gift perfectly, and rather trivially, instantiates the precise scenario that Derrida describes in the passage above. How can I even begin to say that I’ve donated a gift when I am firmly “within the ambit of an economy” and instantly receive something in return? More problematically perhaps, the practice of embedding senior donations within the purchase of senior passes confusingly entangles the distinct narratives of what it means to be a Wesleyan senior, and what it means to have donated to the senior gift. To say nothing of the ludicrous amount of money required to purchase a senior pass to begin with and to “count” in this way as a senior, in sloppily entangling itself with the process of purchasing a senior pass, and, in turn, with participation in senior events, and in being the condition for participation in Senior Night Out, donating to the senior gift becomes problematically entangled with what it means to be a senior. Donating to the senior gift should not be a prerequisite to participation in the events that are constitutive of being a Wesleyan senior and to building a community with your fellow seniors. And yet we have this entangled narrative wherein donating to the senior gift is endlessly intertwined with participation in senior events. This is again doubly undermining seeing as it undermines both the legitimacy of one’s donation and the inherent value and pride which comes with being a Wesleyan Senior.
In light of all this, it seems to me that we, as a senior class, we, as a student body, we, as a university need to forever disentangle senior gift donations from the purchase of senior passes. Perhaps we might begin this process with a suggestion from Derrida; perhaps “we can ask what to ‘give back’ or to ‘pay back’ means”. (Derrida, The Gift of Death, p.96)
Werneck is a member of the class of 2011.
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