Don't tell Annual Giving and the Aspire campaign, but...

The New York Times' Ethicist doesn't want you to give to Princeton. (Or at least we can infer that from their article about donating to Harvard, unless Randy Cohen has a particular animosity toward an inferior institution located in Cambridge, Mass.) He argues that to donate to the large endowment of Harvard, which at $26 billion is twice that of Princeton, "is to offer more pie to a portly fellow while the gaunt and hungry press their faces to the window (at some sort of metaphoric college cafeteria, anyway)."

Instead he suggests that until a point where higher education is funded by the federal government, as in some European nations, you should donate to more needy institutions, such as a community college. If your Tiger pride demands that your money end up somewhere on campus, you should face a tax whereby half of your donation is redirected from Princeton to a needier institution. For example, Peter Lewis '55, who has donated $233 million to Princeton to date, would have instead given $116.5 million to Princeton, and the remainder might have ended up funding Mercer County Community College instead.

Will this argument end Princeton's historically high alumni giving rates?