Is Princeton the "World's Worst Charity"?

Hey Columbia! Congrats on the $100 million donation! 100,000,000 is a rather large number and you can probably build a lot of stuff, maybe even a 450,000 square feet expansion to your business school (to be precise). But not everyone's happy. In fact, some think this is all downright "loathsome." Gawker took this opportunity to decry the general phenomenon of the Big Fat Ivy League Donation, and they raised some worthy points along the way.

The point is, elite universities are terrible choices for huge donations. Supporting education in America is a worthy cause; but there are many, many more effective ways to help the masses than giving millions to Ivy League schools. No matter what those schools' endowment officers tell you, they do not really "need" that money, not in the same way that, for example, clinics in sub-Saharan Africa need it. Furthermore, most rich people do not give money to fancy schools out of a desire to improve education in America. According to academic research, hey [sic] give in order to make it easier for their own children to get into those schools. Or, in the case of people like Kravis, they give in order to have a building named for themselves at their alma mater, so that the legacy of their Gilded Age travails may be spread to generation upon generation of bored business school student.

It's an argument worth listening to. After all, we are sitting pretty at a cool $13,386,280,000 in endowment as of 2009 -- and there's no doubt a lot of that was received in colossal chunks just like this one. So are we just complacent witnesses to this "moral crime"?That's a pretty serious label to slap on, but the reasoning is basically this: people who are able to throw around staggering, world-changing sums of money ought to throw them at the "most pressing problems." Using that money to plump one's ego is a grave ethical offense, an offense only made worse by the sheer magnitude of the gift, all those 0's after that 1, all that $$$ at stake. And here, in a moment of gorgeous irony, Gawker cites the argument of Princeton's own philosophy professor Peter Singer.... which, in a sense, reminds us why all these donations are important in the first place: enablers of gross egotism though they may be, colleges like ours are still saying really important things and doing really important stuff. Ideally that money is headed towards need-blind admissions and research and solutions to those very same "most pressing problems." Some valid points are raised -- "Columbia will survive without Henry Kravis' money. So will Yale, and Harvard, and Princeton. For the poorest and unluckiest people in the world, the same can't necessarily be said" -- but the overall argument rings a little bitter and narrow-minded. Read it and see for yourself.UPDATE: And for a second helping of irony, note that the "academic research" that Gawker cited is a joint Columbia-Princeton economics paper. Maybe someone just needed to donate a hefty sum to these schools so that smart people at those schools could eventually figure out their intentions behind donating said hefty sum.