The following text is a transcript of Monday's full Faculty meeting, where 11 Faculty members discussed University policy toward its South-African-related investments. The first part of the transcript appeared in yesterday's Crimson.

JOHN BOHSTEDT:

I would like to address similar themes. I would like the Faculty to consider for a moment what lessons Harvard is teaching its students by its policies on South Africa. It seems to me that the lessons we are teaching our students may have more lasting impact than even any effects we may be able to have on South Africa. I begin by assuming two principles which I think have been amply demonstrated. The first of these is that the presence of United States corporations in South Africa does materially support and reinforce the regime and apartheid. The second premise is that there is no evidence that the Sullivan reforms have had any appreciable impact on apartheid, indeed, it is difficult to see how such reforms can have any impact. In light of these premises, the present policy of the Harvard Corporation seems to be one of empty and ineffective gestures towards reform, gestures which, however well-intentioned, cannot have any impact on apartheid. The crucial lesson that I think this policy teaches our students is that the Harvard Corporation will go hand-in-hand with other corporations, that the Harvard Corporation is so bound up with our economic system that it cannot deviate from the corporate consensus, that it cannot rock the boat, criticizing or by advocating change, that the Harvard Corporation is, in effect, continuing to join with other corporations in doing business as usual, with apartheid.

Now it has been said that Harvard is only a tiny investor. But in the sphere of public opinion. Harvard is a whale, capable of generating tremendous currents for change. Harvard is a leader in curricular reform, Harvard is a leader in investment policies. A whale trying to act like an ostrich looks silly at best, and at worst, evasive. And that is the lesson we are teaching our students.

Some say the University must preserve its neutrality, so as not to endanger its academic freedom, so as not to provoke political or economic retaliation. Now not only is it impossible for the University as an investor to be neutral, but also I do not think that academic freedom is best preserved if we shrink from exercising it. I do not think academic freedom is best preserved if we deny the social consequences of our investment policies. I would have thought that academic freedom meant finding and speaking and acting the truth regardless of the consequences. I would have thought that in this case. Harvard ought to act on the merits of the case, without fear of retaliation. I would have thought that academic freedom would mean that the University would throw its considerable weight as an investor, as a leader of public opinion, into the field against apartheid. That is the lesson I would like to give my students.

I would like personally to disassociate myself from the lessons the Corporation has been teaching these past 18 months. I would like the Faculty to reconsider what lessons you believe Harvard ought to teach our students. I hope you'll agree that Harvard ought to press the corporations in which it hold stocks to cease doing business in and with South Africa.

DOUGLAS HIBBES:

Mr. President, unlike my colleagues from Afro-American Studies, I plan to be here for the next 35 or 36 years, if I survive through the half-life period, so I feel I have a special stake in Harvard's posture on this issue. Now, let me refer to something my colleague Prof. Mansfield said. I don't think this is a question that necessarily should divide us along left-right lines. I think I feel very strongly about the Soviet Union as well, but I think the issue here is that because of the compostion and special character of the South African apartheid system, what goes on there resonates in a special way with American society and American values. And that's why I think we've recognized it as a special case. Harvard already enjoys, perhaps suffers, a reputation as a place largely populated by bleeding-hearts, or worse, perhaps among the uninformed, and this gives us the opportunity occasionally, to live up to the reputation.

Now I'll try not to repeat earlier arguments. Let me just say as I see it, the source of dissatisfaction among those who are very concerned about this issue is not that Harvard has not adopted a policy of immediate and blanket withdrawal, divestiture, excuse me. Indeed, many think that's probably unwise. I think what unites people is the concern that the direction of Harvard policy is pointed the wrong way. This I think is illustrated very clearly in the ACSR reports of last March and this January. I think what we're looking for is a more aggressive, forward posture on behalf of the University, toward this issue, one that makes it clear to the corporations that the burden of proof rests on them to show their activities actively promote, actively serve to undermine the South African apartheid system.

I think that in the long run most of us are concerned about the standing of Harvard in the sense of that word, and perhaps in the medium and short run as well, the standing of Harvard will be better served by taking an aggressive posture on the question.

HARVEY C. MANSFIELD Jr. '53:

Mr. President and colleagues, we are being asked this afternoon by our friends on the left to take a symbolic action or make a speech which is a kind of speaking out against an undoubted evil, the evil of apartheid. Apartheid, however, is not as evil as genocide, and we've had a recent instance of genocide in Cambodia. So our speaking out on the question of apartheid would be in the context of our silence on the question of genocide.

What could justify this? I do not think that the question of stock ownership can justify this, can justify our silence on Cambodia because the Harvard Corporation doesn't own stock in companies doing business in Cambodia. Sir, forgive me, it takes a high sense of personal drama for a person to look on the receipt of stock proxy as an inescapable moral intanglement. Such a person with such a fluttery heart should stay in bed at day and leave his mail in the mailbox. He should certainly stay away from Harvard Square, where he will be accosted by every kind of moral and material beggar.

If it isn't the question of stock ownership, what can justify this disproportion? I think there were two answers given in the debate last time given by Professors Walzer and Higonnet. Prof. Walzer said he would have emphasized rather more the particular cruelty and the particular degradation that was involved in singling out a nation or a religious group or a race for systematic oppression. Why did my friend say "nation, religious group, or race" and not say "class"? Isn't genocide also the genocide of a class? I beg leave of good Dean Bowersock to translate the word "genus" in genocide as the killing of a class as well as of a race. Isn't the oppression that we've see in the world since World War II been carried out by oppressors mostly on the basis of class?

Secondly, Prof. Higonnet said what made South Africa more of a problem than Auschwitz or Cambodia was precisely that South Africans were very bourgeois, were very much like ourselves. Their crimes were bourgeois crimes and the evil that went on in that nation was the kind that we found tolerable, perhaps at a different level. So Prof. Higonnet recognizes the problem of equating apartheid and genocide. But apply his doctrine to Prof. Cudjoe. Notice that he doesn't say we are like the South Africans because we are white, but because we are bourgeois. Prof. Cudjoe is undoubtedly a bourgeois, or at least a petit bourgeois, by virtue of his Harvard salary. Is he supposed to hate himself because he so much resembles an Afrikaner?