After one student's refusal to donate to the Senior Class Gift sparked controversy last Spring, Dartmouth has faced criticism from several national media outlets in recent weeks for allegedly encouraging student volunteers to directly pressure individual students to donate. Fund officials maintain, however, that they never publicly distributed a list of students who did or did not donate to the Senior Class Gift, and Sylvia Racca, executive director of the Dartmouth College Fund, said in an e-mail to The Dartmouth that she "deeply" regrets that the name of the lone student who refused to donate became public.
"[T]he intent of the administration and student volunteers was never to draw attention to anyone or to publicize the names of those who had not contributed to the Senior Class Gift," Racca wrote.
In June, the independent, student-run website, the Little Green Blog, published the name and photograph of the one student who chose not to donate Laura DeLorenzo '10. The Dartmouth's staff columnist Zachary Gottlieb '10 wrote a column addressed to a "holdout '10," arguing against DeLorenzo's decision not to donate, though she was not named in the column.
The pressure to donate in 2010 was especially strong because the Class of 1960 promised to donate an additional $1,000 toward financial aid for every 1 percent of students who donated to the Senior Class Gift, and to double its donation to $200,000 if the Class of 2010 achieved 100 percent participation.
The College began receiving nationwide attention for the brouhaha following an Oct. 24 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Critics challenged the College for "creating a sort of dishonor roll of peers who failed to donate to the class gift," in the words of one New York Times article. Student volunteers involved with the effort, however, continue to defend their tactics.
Seventy-one student volunteers from the Class of 2010 solicited donations via e-mail from 10 to 15 of their friends or acquaintances to achieve their goal of 100 percent participation. Volunteers also produced a YouTube video to encourage their peers to donate.
"Basically, it was working to encourage your friends to understand the point of the Senior Class Gift and why it's important to give back to Dartmouth," student volunteer Cory Cunningham '10 said. "Every day, we would get a list [of peers] that we had signed up to solicit and whether or not the had donated yet."
Cunningham is a former member of The Dartmouth Senior Business Staff.
The lists sent to the student volunteers were not intended to circulate around campus, Cunningham said. They were meant to help students recognize which peers had not donated.
Cunningham added that Dartmouth College Fund officials never encouraged him to "badger" his classmates for donations.
"We were so close to getting 100 percent [participation] and people just went nuts to get every single person they know to donate," he said.
At the end of the month-long donation period, student volunteers approached the residences of the 24 students who had not yet contributed to the Senior Class Gift, the Chronicle reported.
"There was a huge push," student volunteer Chelsea Kirk '10 told the Chronicle.
An unnamed student also widely distributed an e-mail that contained the names of the final 24 students who had not donated on the last day of the donation period.
When DeLorenzo remained the only student who had not contributed to the Senior Class Gift, a contributor to the Little Green Blog, who wrote under the pseudonym Arnold Tungsten, named her, posted a photo of her and criticized her for declining to contribute.
"It's a shame that attention from the [Senior Class Gift] has shifted from the fact that 99.9 percent of seniors gave to the fact that one space-cadet did not," Tungsten wrote.
Administrators at the Dartmouth College Fund did not endorse this behavior, Racca said in the e-mail.
"We deeply regret that in this instance the name was released, and one person was subjected to inappropriate behavior," Racca wrote. "Moving forward, we will ensure that a goal of 100 percent Class Gift participation does not occur again."
Students at Cornell University employed similar donation-seeking tactics, according to the Chronicle. Sorority members received e-mails containing the names of the members of their organizations who did not donate to their senior gift program.
Valerie Strauss a contributor to the Answer Sheet, a blog hosted by the Washingon Post condemned the "peer pressure" that seniors at Dartmouth and Cornell applied to their fellow students.
"Implicit in these money-raising operations is the notion that every student has something to give to help purchase a senior class gift," Strauss said. "That assumption is obnoxious all by itself."
In a statement that she circulated in June, DeLorenzo said she resented the pressure she faced to donate to the Senior Class Gift, a sentiment she echoed in a Letter to the Editor in The Dartmouth.
"My decision not to donate to Dartmouth reflects my personal conclusion that the negative aspects of Dartmouth outweigh the positive, and nothing more," DeLorenzo wrote. "I resent the pressure that was applied to me as an individual because the class of 1960 promised an additional gift if the SCG reached 100 percent participation."
The participation reached by the Class of 2010 99.9 percent is the highest student donation rate in the history of the College and the highest donation rate among Ivy League schools, The Dartmouth previously reported.
Representatives of the Class of 1960 ultimately agreed to double their donation, for a total of $200,000, despite the fact that not all members of the senior class donated, Class of 1960 representative James Adler '60 told The Dartmouth last spring.
"To get the Dartmouth student body, or any student body, to agree 100 percent on anything is impossible," Adler said. "You don't have to get every single student to get a huge success. It's great to ask for money for Dartmouth with great enthusiasm, but you don't want to take it too far."
