Amid this turmoil over Harvard’s South African investments, the Kennedy School announced it would name its library after Charles W. Engelhard, an industrialist whose political and financial participation in South Africa reputedly supported the apartheid regime. In their protests for divestment, some students denounced the naming of the library after Engelhard.

The controversy reached a national scale when seven members of Congress wrote a letter to Bok on Dec. 15, made public on Jan. 3, expressing their concern over the library’s name.

“We fear that the recognition of Engelhard at this particular time may be interpreted by the South African government and its supporters as an indication of official acceptance—or at least tolerance—of apartheid by major American institutions,” the legislators wrote.

University officials eventually compromised with protesters by putting a plaque saying that the funds were given in Engelhard’s memory rather than naming the library after Engelhard.

The fight over the dedication of the Engelhard library was not the only development in the protests of the 1978-1979 school year.

In 1979, some students coupled rumors circulating of a possible demotion of the Af-Am department to an interdisciplinary committee with calls for divestment as grounds for protest.

In the 10 years after the Af-Am department was formed in 1969, the University and the department conflicted over its budget and tenuring of its professors. In early April, representatives from the Black Students Association (BSA), the SASC and several other student groups bound together and called for a boycott of classes to bolster the Af-Am department.

The boycott on April 23, 1979 succeeded in cutting class attendance about 50 to 60 percent. About 450 students walked in protest past the river Houses, and about 700 students gathered in front of Pusey Library, where Elizabeth Sibeko, a United Nations representative to the Pan-Africanist Congress, spoke in praise of the protesters.

In a protest earlier that month, on April 11, 1979, over 400 students participated in a SASC-sponsored rally. The students marched to Bok’s office and displayed petitions favoring divestment signed by students and Faculty. Chris Nteta, a member of the African National Congress, Donald Woods, an exiled South African editor and Neiman Fellow, and Dennis Brutus, a South African poet and organizer of the international sports boycott against South Africa, all spoke at the protest, urging Harvard to divest from its holdings in corporations operating in South Africa.

“It has become a popular pastime to say apartheid is immoral and then do nothing else,” Nteta said to a crowd of students in front of Memorial Chapel. “You are comrades, comrades in the struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

FACULTY FAULT LINES

But discontent over Harvard’s investments in South Africa was not confined to student-led protests.

In two open discussions and an open letter, signed by 140 professors, the Faculty pressured the Corporation to divest from South Africa.

In the full Faculty meeting in March 1979, Professor of Government Michael L. Walzer said that Harvard should use resolutions and proxy votes to push for corporations to withdraw their operations from South Africa.

Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies Selwyn R. Cudjoe added that “the carrot should be pulled out before it even begins to grow.” Cudjoe argued that capital from countries like the United States allowed South Africa to develop the technology to systematically implement the system of apartheid.