"It's not in our jurisdiction as to whether Harvard should hold certain stocks," he says. "Unless somebody is asked, we just stand on the side of the dance floor....We tend to be wallflowers."

Ali Ahsan '99, the ACSR's student representative, says Harvard should be more active as a shareholder, analyzing whether or not the University should hold investments in companies like Playboy Enterprises.

Harvard has owned as many as 23,000 shares of the company, which led to student outcry last November.

"We really can't go up there and say we want to take up this issue when we haven't been asked to," Ahsan says. "There should be a forum to discuss whether or not we should have Playboy."

Badaracco says the ACSR's mandate "has been defined more narrowly than it needs to be."

"It needs some consideration," he says.

Fineberg says that there is nothing stopping the committee system from making larger ethical decisions and questioning holdings, but Badaracco says that when he became chair of the ACSR, he was told the ACSR only deals with proxy questions.

"As a practical matter, the CCSR, and probably the entire corporation, would have to decide they wanted to consider things more broadly," he says. "I don't think the ACSR could do it on its own."

Money Talks

Indeed, divestment from tobacco and South Africa show that the CCSR is empowered to dictate HMC policy.

But Charles P. Slichter '45, former Corporation member and former chair of the CCSR, says that such moves are "unusual."

Slichter says the committees were established to free HMC of handling proxies, allowing it to focus on one thing: making money. But the CCSR is not so single-minded, choosing to consider the monetary as well as the ethical consequences of investment.

D. Ronald Daniel, University treasurer and member of the CCSR, says the Corporation's committee is more conservative than the advisory committee.

"We take them very seriously," he says, but the advisory committee is "more concerned with what's right or wrong, period."

The Corporation, however, chooses to look beyond "what's right and wrong" to include what's fiscally prudent.

"We want to allow time for [the ACSR's]thinking to evolve," Daniel says.