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Money never came up at dinner
The silent plan
The plan was to say nothing about the gift. The president and Steven Pinker sat at a remote table in an expensive restaurant and agreed to build rapport, conviviality, and intimacy while they waited for their guest. The professor was there as the entertainment: founders who traded writing or academia for building companies often miss the banter and ideas of a university, and joining one lets them belong to a community they long for.
The conversation covered the Human Genome Project, how the brain develops, issues facing the university, and economics. The financial transaction was left to the my-people-will-call-your-people stage, out of the professor's earshot.
Why money stayed unspoken
Both sides knew what the evening was about, and each knew the other knew. Picture the president offering to name a program after the guest for $150 million and promising time with Michael Sandel and other faculty whenever he wanted. It would have saved everyone time. It would also have put a pall over the evening, like asking a date whether the night ends in sex.
The gift came in smaller than hoped. The donor also skipped having anything at Harvard named after him, since the buildings with his own name on them came first.
Why do major gifts start with a dinner?
University fundraising offices describe a cycle of identifying a prospect, cultivating the relationship, making a request, and then thanking the donor. Dinners belong to the cultivation stage, where the aim is trust before any ask. Harvard's most recent capital campaign, which ended in 2018, raised 9.6 billion dollars, a total built on thousands of such relationships.
Why does pay make people less willing to help?
Psychologists James Heyman and Dan Ariely published a series of experiments in 2004 on this question. Volunteers were asked to help drag a sofa, and those offered small payments worked less hard than those offered nothing, or those offered a gift. The payment moved the task from a social exchange to a market exchange, where effort is matched to price. The researchers reported the effect in the journal Psychological Science.
Why do donors get buildings named after them?
The practice is as old as the university itself. Harvard College took its name in 1639 from John Harvard, a minister who left it half his estate and a library of roughly four hundred books. Naming a building or program gives the donor a lasting public record of the gift. Many universities now publish price lists for naming opportunities.
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