Thursday, August 14, 2008

Academics thrive because of generosity

A couple of weeks before the academic year ended, an e-mail from the university's advancement office informed me that an alumnus had made a $100 donation with a specification that it was "for geography." This alone made the academic year a fantastic one for me.

The donation reminds me of the idea of "guru dakshana."

Centuries ago, when learning was restricted to a very few in India, the student left home to go live with the teacher — the guru — and his family. This system was referred to as "gurukula," where the student learned from the guru, and the guru's wife took care of the student with the same care and affection that she had for her own children.

After years of learning, upon graduation, the student would then make a "guru dakshana" — an offering to the guru. The offering did not have to be only gold or jewels and could also have taken the form of a scholarly treatise.

Of course, the gurukula concept does not exist anymore. Yet because of the specification that the donation was "for geography," I suppose I am tempted to interpret the contribution as a variation on the idea of guru dakshana.

On a larger picture, this donation is consistent with the giving nature of Americans. We often overlook the phenomenal amounts that are being contributed every year to organizations ranging from the United Way to churches to universities and hospitals. Charitable contributions made in 2007 amounted to a record high of $306.39 billion, according to the Association of Fundraising Professionals — a huge sum, indeed.

Sometimes donations to universities do indeed take the form of a guru dakshana, such as an endowment honoring a former professor. Other times, they might be for naming rights; a library or a medical school gets named after the donor.

When it comes to such donations, an argument can easily be made that donors do not have to give money at all, and yet they do. If the natural state of humans and societies is to be "nasty, brutish and short," as Thomas Hobbes described way back in 1651, then the generosity, sparked for whatever reasons, is an amazing contrast and is something to applaud.

It is not that I am looking at the world through any special rose-colored lenses, and neither am I in denial when it comes to the gross inequality in this country and in the world. But the unequal distribution of wealth is all the more reason why I find donations so special; after all, donors can easily continue to hold on to their wealth and widen the inequality.

I am immensely thankful to the anonymous $100 donor and to all those who donate. Without that generosity, academe and academics will not be what we have today. And without donations that provide for scholarships, quite a few students might not be able to attend college at all.

I hope that the class of 2008, all across Oregon, will take a moment to thank the donors over the generations, who have made their higher education possible. And then, perhaps a guru dakshana as well.

(published in the Statesman Journal, August 14, 2008)

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