EVERY SPRING at Harvard for the past decade, a number of Harvard students--the exact number depends on the year--has taken to the streets in protest of Harvard's investments in American companies doing business in South Africa.

And every spring, Harvard administrators have repeated their arguments for why Harvard will not divest. This fall at a South House dinner, for example, President Bok clearly stated his position on the matter once again: that Harvard best serves its moral obligations by working within a company to change its policies, rather than by cutting all ties and thus moral persuasion with them.

While this yearly deadlock shows no signs of subsiding, campus attention has recently been thrust upon another aspect of the perennial debate over Harvard's more than $400 million worth of stock in companies operating in South Africa. The question that is being increasingly asked is whether Harvard really can use its influence to foster positive change in the apartheid state. The focus of this debate is on the so-called "Sullivan Principles," a set of equal opportunity and labor standards for companies operating in the country.

The ties of American companies to South Africa has been one of the most hotly debated topics on college campuses in the last decade. Students and activists have charged that American universities are tacitly supporting apartheid by investing in businesses having South African connections.

Harvard's policy has always been that it wants the companies it invests in to maintain reasonable ethical standards. The University has used the Sullilvan Principles as a standard for such behavior since 1978. Recently, however, this sort of reliance on the principles has come under fire from campus groups informed on the South African issue.

Part of this is because of nationwide trends. Currently, a bill has passed the House that would, among other things, force all American companies doing business in South Africa to sign and abide by the Sullivan Principles. At Harvard, the longstanding student-faculty-alumni committee that examines shareholder issues for the governing Corporation took the unprecedented step last spring of recommending that Harvard use the Sullivan Principles as a minimum standard for holding stock in corporations that do business in South Africa.

Harvard's governing Corporation has taken this advice of the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility--at least partially. It has said it will engage in an "intensive dialogue" with three of nine companies in Harvard's investment portfolio that have been found deficient according to the principles. During the next 18 months, Harvard will use its influence to try to persuade the companies to use their economic position in the South African economy to advance the interests of Black South Africans, a Corporation spokesman has said.

All these developments have brought to the fore controversy surrounding the principles, which were first developed in 1977 and since refined by the Rev. Leon Sullivan, a Philadelphia minister and board member of the GM company. The general intent behind the principles is to help Black South Africans economically by making sure companies follow certain fair-labor practices.

Supporters say the principles are an effective measure of the willingness of American companies to work for progressive change in South Africa, Critics--many of whom have been in the movement to force universities to divest their South Africa stock--charge that the principles have not produced any real change in the condition of Blacks, and they have instead served to deflect attacks on the South African state.

THE RELEASE last fall of the seventh annual report on the Sullivan Principles has intensified this long-standing debate. The Arthur D. Little Co., a Cambridge consulting firm, compiles a yearly survey on the compliance of companies who have signed the principles. The main tenets of the principles include: making sure all workplace areas are desegregated; providing medical, pension, and insurance plans for all employees; providing equal pay for equal work; contributing money for community development and training nonwhite workers for management-level positions.

The results of the monitoring program this year are fairly typical, according to D. Reid Weedon Jr., a senior vice president at the consulting firm. "Within the companies that have signed the principles, something less than one-third are making what we would call 'good progress,'" he says. "About one-third are making some progress and getting by. The ones in the bottom groups really aren't putting their shoulder to the wheel." About 100 signatory companies are included in the report; 11 did not report their figures, Weedon says. About 160 American companies in the country have not signed the principles at all. Among the companies in the bottom group are the three Harvard will be contacting in the next year.

Whether this progress actually means something depends on who you talk to. Weedon says that by and large American companies have proved strong on issues relating to the workplace. For instance, according to the new report, all of the companies have desegregated their facilities and their Black employees are found to be receiving higher average pay increases than their white counterparts. Still, Weedon admits that progress in other areas has been slower--especially in corporate involvement with community development. Most importantly, Weedon says, there has been a noticeable failure in companies' efforts to put Blacks in supervisory positions. Blacks, for instance, represent 63 percent of the signatory companies' workforces, but only .007 percent are in positions in which they supervise whites. It is these statistics that critics of the Sullivan Principles cite when they claim the principles have contributed little to fundamental change in South Africa.

"I think that they're really a cover-up for doing nothing at the levels where they really mean anything," says Bishop Trevor Huddleston, a leader of the anti-apartheid movement, director at the International Defense and Aid Fund (IDAF) and South African resident. The IDAF provides legal aid to South Africans challenging the legality of elements of the apartheid system. Timothy R. Smith, the executive director of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which coordinates $8 billion in investments held by a group of American churches, adds. "It is clear that over the past year the presence of American companies hasn't helped the South African situation. It has actually deteriorated. Blacks still do not have the vote and cannot criticize the government."

"All the charitable contributions the companies want to make don't address [these] real issues," Smith adds. "I think they [the Sullivan principles] are used in a manipulative way by corporations like Citibank, IBM, and Mobil to deflect the real criticisms about the way their presence in South Africa helps support apartheid."

Some Harvard observers agree. "The Sullivan Principles are not changing anything fundamental in South Africa. They affect only the small minority that work in American companies," Claude Convisser '84, the undergraduate representative to the ACSR, said this week. Convisser pointed to South African spending on education, which is 14 to 15 times higher for white children than for nonwhite, as indicative of the broad discrimination that he claims the principles do nothing to alleviate. "They provide a cover for continued tacit American support of the South African government," he added.