Flaw number one: On the South Africa issue, the University is unavoidably involved with outside forces, above all because it controls and invests very substantial financial resources. The use of these resources is exactly what is at issue in the South Africa debate. Will the University heed the call of those who ask it to use its leverage as an institutional investor to strengthen the alliance of groups working for political change in South Africa? Or will it continue its existing practice of cooperating with corporations whose presence in South Africa necessarily functions to reinforce the power of the existing government? The issue is not by any stretch of the imagination whether Harvard will be involved with "outside forces" on the South Africa question. It is which side Harvard will attempt to strengthen through the responsible use of the institutional means at its disposal. If Harvard chooses to take only the mildest measures, this will constitute, in effect, a choice to ally with forces supporting the status quo in South Africa.

The second major flaw in President Bok's portrayal of the University has to do with how he defines the University's inherent interests, and therefore how he assesses the relative costs of different possible courses of institutional action. President Bok writes as if the University's only fundamental interests lay in protecting existing academic functions and obtaining adequate funds from outside sources to pay for them. As a paid faculty employee of the University, I would not for a moment downplay the importance of these matters, or suggest that costs with respect to them should not be most carefully weighed. But the University has more than financial interests at stake in the South Africa matter. Official documents have already is fundamentally abhorrent to all those who espouse basic liberal and democratic values. Universities such as Harvard presuppose such values as one of the very conditions for their institutional functioning. The University cannot fail to do what it can to oppose South African apartheid without losing respect in the eyes of those students, faculty, alumni and people beyond the University who care deeply about the liberal and democratic values that are so blatantly violated by the South African regime. Harvard, moreover, is a University that claims international respect. In our troubled world, basic liberal and democratic values always have been--and increasingly will be-threatened. They must be aggressively defended and asserted, just as the Harvard endowment must be actively managed in changing economic circumstances.

If materially and symbolically powerful institutional such as Harvard University do not help to assert liberal and democratically inspired opposition to apartheid, who will? The historical record shows very clearly that profit-making corporations cannot be depended upon to further liberal and democratic values. Corporations will not necessarily oppose liberal-democratic institutions where these hold sway. But corporations are willing to coexist with any established political regime--provided only that order is ensured and profits can be made. Examples range across the political spectrum from the coexistence of Gulf Oil with the Cuban supported Angolan government to the symbiosis of the Krupp business interests with the Nazis. Logically enough, therefore, multinational corporations, many of them U.S. bases, are coexisting in a mutually beneficial way with the racist South African government. In return for order and opportunities for profit, these corporation provide the South African regime with taxes, technology, manufactured products, and foreign exchange advantages.

In my view, Harvard must in the direction of a policy of divestiture--at least selective divestiture--if it is to use its existing institutional power at all effectively to weaken rather than reinforce apartheid in South Africa. Because that racist system is politically entrenched and enforced, it cannot possibly be affected by marginal adjustments in the economic behavior of individual U.S. corporations. Instead, steps must be taken to weaken the capacities of the South African state. Repeatedly, divestiture has been portrayed in official Harvard documents as an empty moral gesture, a way of dissociating Harvard from the South Africa problem. On the contrary, divestiture is a strategy of active involvement in a political movement against apartheid. It is a strategy that makes sense for private U.S. institutions that must try to influence the situation from afar by economic and symbolic means. Divestiture as a strategy recognizes the basic fact that all existing regimes in the world depend upon economic and technological resources and upon recognition from other nations. If these resources and recognition can be, over time, partially withdrawn from the South African regime, it will weaken, hastening measurably the day of its demise.

At little cost--and considerable moral credit--to itself, Harvard could, after due deliberation, identify major U.S. corporations in which it is a substantial shareholder, corporations which are providing significant resources of taxes, technology, and essential products to the South African government. These corporations could be publicly named, with the University pledging to divest their stocks over an undisclosed period of time if, by a given date, those corporations do not withdraw from South Africa. By this policy of selective divestiture, Harvard would visibly ally with other groups and organizations in U.S. society (including other universities) in active opposition to apartheid. This effort, at the very least, would publicly dramatize the need for vigorous opposition by Americans to apartheid. And probably such an effort could do even more in the end. If major, prestigious institutional investors do begin to exert financial pressure, legislators (and even corporate managers concerned about intercorporate competition) will begin to work toward U.S. laws to regularize corporate withdrawal from South Africa. Harvard then could and should join in the process of what President Bok has called "reasoned debate essential to decision-making in a democracy" to spur the enactment of such laws. If Harvard could do this on the Bakke case? Harvard need not respond institutionally to every political issue that comes along. But South Africa raises questions of the same order as Nazi oppression of the Jews in the 1930s. No form of oppression is more repugnant to liberal-democratic values than institutionalized racism.

At present, the Harvard administration is tending to say that the University should prudently do almost nothing to reduce its indirect financial support for apartheid. I submit to all of my fellow faculty that this policy is alarming and misguided. Harvard's true institutional interest lies in actively opposing South African apartheid. In significant part, it is up to the Faculty to urge a more responsible course of action upon the University. I hope that each of you who dissents from the University's current posture will express your feelings to the ACSR and the President.