A while back, I theorized that the inbred socializing of Ivy League graduates might lead to a reliable revenue stream for top schools, once alumni hit their golden years. Now, I will examine the converse: Establishing pride among alumni for generating a revenue stream might ensure their later socialization. I will make my subject plain: Should the Yale Class of 2010 pride itself on breaking every conceivable record for giving by a graduating senior class? And indeed it is every record—largest cash total, highest level of participation, and, not just one, but two residential colleges with every student donating.

In a way, that last statistic is the most surprising. If you are a senior in Calhoun or Jonathan Edwards, then the hungover misanthrope with the frayed Prada shoes sitting across from you in Photography and Memory donated alongside the burly football player in all blue and white. Socio-cultural self-identification, therefore, cannot be the dividing line here. Nine percent of 2010 graduates failed to donate, so one of your best friends is probably a traitor—a distinction that can conveniently apply to both donors and dissenters.

The argument for donating is that all graduates should, upon their passage into the dark uncertainty of a career with Goldman Sachs, give back to the school that gave them so much. However, unless an alum’s take-home pay tops 200,000 dollars in the first year, he has yet to break even on his investment in Yale.

On the other hand—and less strictly economically—the friends we have made; the knowledge we have gained; and the experiences we have had these past four years are priceless. It’s only fitting we should give just a little something back, correct?

But priceless is a tricky term. How much exactly is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason worth? Not the physical book on a Barnes & Noble shelf, but the idea. Maybe nothing; maybe, without Kant, modern society would still look the way it does. If so, then perhaps everything that the market does not assign a value to does not have one; all the features of a Yale education that make it “priceless” are not worth paying for.

But if it has changed society, then the Critique must command at least a few billion dollars, given the number of jobs for lesser philosophers it has brought about over the years. This figure might be calculable. The task becomes impossible if we try to compute the influence Kant has had upon the historians, political scientists, and sociologists whose ideas engage with his in some way. So now we must put a percentage on influence.

And after we construct that formula, we begin the impossible project of figuring out how often social institutions depend on the Critique without naming it explicitly. Then suddenly we force ourselves to generate a totalizing sociology of the effect of theory on practice—another idea that will prove to be either valueless or above value.

At the very least then, we are at a pragmatic advantage if we assume that anything that couldn’t be auctioned at Christie’s has no dollar value whatsoever; thus, we end up back at the original question: Why should the Class of 2010 have such pride in its accomplishment, and where could that self-admiration possibly come from?

The coordinators of the class gift effort supplied both answers by organizing social events featuring discounted alcohol. The experience of giving as a class contains within it the possibility of bringing together a physical collection of people in a small space for the commemoration of a ritual. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim famously suggested that the coming together of a group creates an “effervescence” that vests both the ritual practice and the objects around which it centers with a certain divinity.

For Durkheim, this represents the power that society writ large has upon the individual. In communication, the singular consciousnesses of individuals synergize to form a collective consciousness that forms and/or reaffirms the general norms of the group. These norms then help structure everyday lives after the community has split apart, though individuals often do not link that structure to the power of society.

The senior class gift operates on the same principle. By enticing students to gather together, it vests the practice of giving with social power in a way that makes both giving and the particular social interaction that accompanies it seem like second nature to the participants. The gift effort creates institutions that actualize the sociability of giving as essential features of the giving itself.

The Ivy Plus Society, in which alumni gather and ultimately choose to display their fiscal generosity, appears to be one of those actualized institutions. The seemingly expansive but philosophically restricted sort of conversation that takes place between TIPS club members is thus not a product of Yale’s teaching us an impracticable way of talking about the world, but in fact a result of our own willingness to come together without considering how the experience might change our modes of interaction beneath our consciousness.

We, by donating and then socializing over that contribution, are conditioned to sustain this behavior in the future. Commencement is, of course, another of these dangerous rituals, but all the members of the senior class assumed that risk the moment they accepted Yale’s offer of admission; contrariwise, the senior class gift is a more unexpected trap.