Matthew W. Mahan ’05, an executive board member of Senior Gift Plus, said the group’s leaders would meet today to discuss the future of their movement, which had encouraged members of the Class of 2005 to withhold their graduation gift unless the University divested from PetroChina.
But Mahan said he did not expect the group to disband until the Corporation fully disclosed all of its foreign holdings in Sudan-related companies.
“If there’s no disclosure, if there’s no further action, it could be chalked up to a PR move,” Mahan said.
Senior Gift executive committee spokeswoman Jessica E. Vascellaro ’05 said she was confident that the movement to withhold Senior Gift donations would lose steam after the CCSR’s decision to divest.
“Despite the fact that Senior Gift Plus will almost certainly continue to exist, the issue that most seniors who were associated with Senior Gift Plus were concerned about has been resolved,” said Vascellaro, who is also a Crimson editor.
Professor of Psychology Patrick Cavanagh, who called on Harvard to sell its PetroChina shares more than a week before the student divestment movement emerged, said that student activists deserve the credit for swaying the CCSR.
But reaction from faculty wasn’t universally favorable. John Womack Jr. ’59, Bliss professor of Latin American history and economics, characterized the CCSR’s decision as “hypocrisy.”
“The University found something that it probably doesn’t have much of a stake in or that it’s ready to sell anyway for its own reasons and has ignored many, many other cases in the past which are on the face of it probably worse,” Womack said.
LONG-TERM IMPACT?
Yesterday’s announcement did not appear to deflate PetroChina’s share price, which closed down 50 cents at $64.26. But Eric Reeves, a Smith College professor and expert on Sudan, said he thinks the decision will have a “significant effect” on PetroChina’s share price in the long run.
“This is going to make PetroChina an exceedingly unattractive investment for institutional shareholders,” Reeves said.
Samantha Power, a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, said that divestment is an “unproven tool” in the effort to deter genocidal regimes, but that Harvard’s move could “unleash a contagion effect.”
“This alone is not going to change Darfur. But this sends a very important political signal to the government of China, to the government of Sudan, and to other institutions that are shareholders in Sudan and Sudanese oil investments,” Power said.
“It also sends an essential message back to all the activists who have given so many hours and so much heart to this initiative that something tangible can be achieved through advocacy,” Power added.
Harvard’s announcement comes less than a week after the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution giving the International Criminal Court authority to prosecute war crimes in Darfur.
“For all of the talk of Darfur, this is the first week that anything tangible has been done that would cause the Sudanese government to think twice about their genocidal campaign,” Power said.
—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.