The Senior Gift Sucks
By the Editorial Board

Yesterday morning the seniors among us received in our unassuming campus mailboxes an earnest, faux-jocular letter from some “student committee,” hitting us up for (yet more) money. Two points of clarification: we threw away our letters not thirty paces from the mail room, this is why we cannot offer you, the reader, much in the way of specifics in the editorial herein; and, we use “student committee” in quotes because it is obvious to any thinking person, with or without the famed Pomona “value added” that there is nothing organic (i.e. student-initiated) about this shameless, money grubbing, tool-of-the-establishment enterprise. The students on this “committee” have not contributed anything to the “committee” except for their youth credibility (commodified) and, similarly, their willingness as youth to follow orders and churn out vapid, cute letters begging for cash.

Since the actual students on this committee are irrelevant and are merely reproduced each year by whatever office in Alexander is charged with increasing our incredibly large endowment, we can use last year’s events as pretty much a blueprint for what is to come. We can expect phone calls from fellow seniors, again, begging for cash. We can expect increasingly hostile letters informing us how dissapointed they are that we have not contributed more. We can expect carrots, as a reward for donating some nominal fee ($20.02, adjusted for inflation, is right around $20.03 these days) and, accordingly, sticks as a gentle rebuke for not donating. We can expect an attempt on their part to make us feel guilty for not donating, to make us feel alienated from our peers because we will not vomit cash upon the college’s opulent doorstep.

Already, we have been informed that we traditionally donate less as a senior class than do our friends at Scripps and Claremont McKenna, a curious fact, we are told, since we pride ourselves as the happiest students in the United States. We are, frankly, disgusted by this direct equation of happiness with money. Parallels are not difficult to conjecture: the goddess-whore Pomona pleases us, so we will stuff twenty dollar bills down her g-string. Money can’t buy you love, our fellow seniors, and likewise, love can’t buy you money. Let’s not be so hasty with the equivalencies—after all, we are still young and idealistic.

Perhaps this year’s “senior gift” will not be as blantant as last year’s gift to the endowment, but nevertheless, the principle is the same. Pomona’s newest alumni begin a lifetime of donation and the percentage of alumni that donate to Pomona is increased, thereby pleasing US News ideological state apparatus. We have already, as a class, given an obscene amount of money to the college through tuition. Many of us have no idea how we will be able to afford our considerable student loans. If we were corpses, we suspect the college would be sifting through our mouths for gold. The prolific James A. Blaisdel once observed, wryly, that “they only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind.” We merely suggest that furthering wealth polarization is not in the spirit of Pomona’s founding. Give your money to an AIDS related charity. Please.