SAIS: Full of Gifted Students?
How you can help leave a positive legacy at SAIS
By Chris Forster

There’s a bench in the Nitze courtyard. You may have seen it. It has a tiny brass plaque on it that whispers to the world how some class some year generously gave SAIS students some place to sit and smoke. Not to denigrate the time and effort that went into that gift, but we can do better.

Last year the Class of 2007 made a bold attempt to break the mold. They eyed our peer schools with both a hint of admiration and jealousy. SAIS, though generous, seems to assist its students so little through endowments compared to the presidential nomenclature of schools. The funds are in the millions; the fact that Kennedy and Woodrow Wilson out perform us seven fold is no mean feat – perhaps it should be something to stir our competitive side.

From the reverse side, alumni participation at these schools has historically been significantly better. Yes, we can be proud that alums who typically participated from SAIS (11%) were more numerous than those of Georgetown (5%) or even SIPA (6%). Yet, we can also be inspired by our intellectual cousins at Fletcher who annually reach a class participation rate of nearly a third. Again, I think we can do even better.

The Sisyphean task was perhaps too much for our esteemed Gift Committee predecessors to take on when they did: just three months before graduating. Kudos to them, though: they excelled in their task, blowing Fletcher out of the water with 50% of SAIS-ers getting involved.

Their efforts teach us one thing: don’t be fooled. It’s not the money that forms the most daunting task. The revered target of $100,000 is attainable over a period of some years and, once there, sustainable.

Human capital is much, much more difficult to come by. Asking students for money is easy. They are all around you. They sit next to you in the cafeteria; one hopes they must at some point walk through the Nitze entrance. Finding the people to do this, to entreat cash-strapped individuals to part ways with jealously-guarded sums of their already scarce spending money, is the problem. In other words, recruitment is the trick.

The Class Gift Committee will probably need around ten to twenty volunteers to help with direction, management, promotion and fundraising. Who will these fearless characters be? Once the class has graduated, the gift must be tended to like a fattening lamb. Who will be our humble shepherd, ready to continue the solicitation of more money from the government officials, academics, bankers and journalists that we will have become?

More importantly, it’s not just recruitment to the Class Gift Committee, but also recruitment to the cause. Inspiring our class to even care about the gift is an obvious pre-requisite. Yet how do you persuade people to contribute to a cause that verges on the abstract in their minds. What are we giving? A scholarship? A summer fellowship? With so many books to read and your own personal problems, why should you donate to a fund that will never affect you? Getting half the school to care about this last year proved that it is possible to engage the student body; but I think we can do better.

Ever the optimist, I think most people probably will donate. It has to do with empathy. We’re all human. We know what it’s like to be a poor student struggling with DC prices and tuition bills. Even an extra grand would ease the worry. So why not help alleviate the pain for someone else? Perform that most human of acts: altruism? One that in our day we would have appreciated?

Of course, a more energetic, direct and thus American way to get people involved is to have the debate start early. What do we want our Class Gift to be? If you ponder for even two minutes you will have invested time in it, so why not some money, too? If the gift ends up being a scholarship, to whom should it go? The financially constrained? The über-intelligent? To minorities or foreign students? Don’t tell me this doesn’t pique your curiosity, that you don’t want to have a say in where your money goes.

Our class should have a debate as to what our gift should be. My own inclination is toward a scholarship. The more money that students get, the more they can focus on the reason they’re at school in the first place. There’d be no brass plaque to boast of our success, but I’m happy living in relative anonymity amongst the smoking community. Are you?

Chris Forster is a 2nd year MA candidate in Strategic Studies. 

To get involved with the committee contact Chris at cforste1@jhu.edu