The SIF Scandal
by Jesse Lava, Opinions Columnist on March 9, 2010 in Heresies, Opinion
The auction held recently to support this summer’s Student Internship Fund (SIF) was a fun affair. Attendees competed for classy stuff, and first-year MPPs Casey Osterkamp and Meaghan Jennison did a great job as organizers. By all appearances, the auction went off without a hitch.
Except for one. A big one.
Almost every person bidding was a Kennedy School student. Not alumni. Not donors. Not faculty. Students.
Sure, a few professors and staff members wandered around the silent auction area to make small bids. But in the live auction, which featured the big-ticket items, students were doing most of the bidding. So the very people the SIF is supposed to help — you know, poor grad students who are knee-deep in debt and live off of bad pizza — were the ones putting money into their own assistance fund. As a result, virtually every item garnered significantly less than it should have.
Take, for instance, a weeklong stay for 15 at an Orcas Island vacation home in Washington State. The top bid was $1300. Retail value? $6000.
Or how about a Harvard commencement week stay for a whole family in executive education housing? That one got $575. You can’t get two nights in the Charles Hotel for that.
A nice lunch for 10 with three big city mayors? $225. That’s less money than 10 people would pay for a nice lunch without getting to chat up political bigwigs.
Et cetera, et cetera, ad infuriatum.
By the end, the auction had grossed just over $17,000. The cost of putting it on was $10,000. So all told, the net benefit was $7000 — not counting whatever costs donors are incurring to make their gifts. That was the end result of Casey and Meaghan putting in 20 hours a week of unpaid, quality work for months.
So what happened?
The answer seems to lie with the HKS administration, particularly the Alumni Relations Office. Casey and Meaghan wanted to contact alumni and donors, but the school’s top brass said no.
“We’d have meetings with the administration, and they’d come in and say they want us to succeed but we can’t contact the big ticket donors,” said Casey. No one ever told her why.
The KSSG tried to help. But it, too, was stymied. “They asked us not to contact alumni,” said one KSSG representative on the condition of anonymity. “They didn’t want to impair their own fundraising efforts.”
Casey, ever the gracious Midwesterner, speculates that the administration was trying to look out for the best interests of the school. “With the economic downturn, a decision was probably made to target donors in a different way. On the one hand, this makes sense: they want big donors giving $10,000-20,000, not coming to an auction and spending $3000.”
But then there’s the other hand. Asking Casey, Meaghan, and several other volunteers to do months of work — and then ask the student body and faculty to donate valuable items — is a big deal. People’s time and effort matter. Why should all of that energy have been expended for a four figure gain?
Perhaps administration officials didn’t realize the final tally would be so low. But what exactly did they think would happen when they excluded everyone with a bank account from the auction?
To be sure, HKS gave a $50,000 donation to the SIF. So there’s that. But if it had just given a little bit more it could have canceled the auction, saved everyone the time, and let the SIF fare better anyway.
The real losers, of course, are HKS students. At a public policy school, not everyone does fancy schmancy internships at consulting firms that pay thousands of dollars. Many of us want to invest time in nonprofits that offer a great experience but can’t pay interns. Financial assistance from HKS is sometimes the only thing that allows us to participate in such internships. And this year, there won’t be very much assistance to go around.
Some of the auction’s most competitive bidding was over a Venezuelan brunch for six with Professor Dan Levy and his family. Levy, the most popular professor in the history of the universe, raised $350 with this one. But the brunch could have raised more.
“Imagine if we’d been able to invite alumni who love Dan Levy and get them back here to bid on that,” Casey said. “That would have gone for big bucks.”
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