In sum, therefore, since the President is concerned with economic issues, and some are concerned with the moral issues. I will end with the theological.

I will say in the words of Psalm 19. "Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart reach you gentlemen in the house of the Lord."

Please, let us meditate on our action. And let us understand that we have given a great legacy to the world, but that we are in the process of losing that legacy because we are concerned with short-term goals. I will end by quoting Professor Perkins, you did it so beautifully, sir, and all my due respects to you:

"Please, let us withdraw that carrot tree before it begins to get seed on grow," because we are on the wrong course and we have a responsibility to the nation to say 'yes, we made some decisions, but we are wrong.' Perhaps we'd better do it another way.

I thank you.

PATRICE L.-R. HIGONNET

My speech will be short, although my indignation about this is considerable. The President's statement about the University's ethical responsibility can perhaps be paraphrased to say that we live in the real world, and that within limits we must take that into account. If we attempt to act upon the world, it may be tempted to act back on us in ways that we don't like. And his paper, I think, successfully addresses itself to our common sense, but it leaves aside another point which matters more to me than common sense--our sensibilities, and our image of what we are doing as individuals and as an humanistic institution.

It's been pointed out that the University very seldom speaks out on the countless atrocities that happen countlessly, and since 1936 there have been many. One reason is that most of these atrocities, fortunately, don't concern us in that they're carried out by people whom as a group we abhor and whose ideas repel us.

What makes South Africa more of a problem for me than Auschwitz or Cambodia is precisely that South Africans are very bourgeois; they're very much like ourselves. Their crimes are both our crimes. The evil that goes on in that nation is the kind that we find tolerable, perhaps at a different level. There are many sad parallels, I think, between the history of South Africa and that of our own country, and what happens there is of special concern to us because, I think, there but for the grace of God go we.

Now South Africa, of course, is not the most evil place in the world, but it does represent a distillation of middle-class meanness and egoism.

The President asked why South Africa deserves our special animosity, and the reply, I think, is easy to find; it's simply that South Africa is a deformed image of our own selves. Now how the world at large will judge us for speaking out on apartheid, and what the practical consequences of divestiture are, I don't know.

But it does seem to me fair that South Africa has become a crucial symbol for us. When we reflect about the morality of our own enterprise, and of ourselves as individuals, what we have to say about Auschwitz or Cambodia doesn't really matter, because those decisions are too easy; what will matter is the imagination that will be able to muster, in passing judgement, on those sins that we are most likely ourselves to commit.

PRESIDENT BOK

I hope the last speaker will allow me to point out that in my statement I asked why, what is special about South Africa, I hope the rest of the Faculty will recognize that what I tried to do in that paper was summarize the historical reasons that have led universities to be reluctant to make political decisions, a set of reasons that led this Faculty to declare in 1970 "If this Faculty or the University as a whole accomodates its work to, or shapes its goals to political purposes, however worthy, its functions will be jeopardized, it qualities eroded, and its existence ultimately brought into question."

I think that we recognize that those are historic concerns, that they may not apply to all cases, and that indeed the University has expressed its position on South Africa, has laid out certain steps which it thought should be taken, which are reflected in last year's report, and the issue here is whether those steps are adequate, not whether the situation has been recognized by the University but whether the steps that it has recommended are adequate, and I just felt in view of your characterization I wanted to make that point clear.