Advertisement

Banking on Change

Students demand divestment from South Africa

Just as the subject of divestment from Sudan has consumed the Harvard campus in the past year, the University’s investments in companies with financial ties to the South African apartheid regime was the preeminent topic of debate on campus in the late 1970s.

Even among those who felt that the moral implications of the University’s financial decisions should be considered, opinions varied on whether it was tatus and to vote on companies’ internal policies or whether it was better to make a statement and divest.

In the spring of 1980, the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR) recommended that the Harvard Corporation affirm two shareholder resolutions that prohibited the companies from selling products to the South African government.

This was the first time the ACSR suggested that the Corporation support such resolutions. However, the Corporation disagreed with the evaluation and abstained from voting on them.

GIVING ADVICE

Advertisement

After student activists protested the University’s investments in a company operating in Angola in 1972, the University created the ACSR to examine the ethical ramifications of the Corporation’s investments and recommend courses of action.

When students and faculty began voicing their opposition to the University’s investments in companies which did business with the South African government, the Corporation once again delegated the responsibility for deliberating these issues to the ACSR, a committee made up of alumni, students, faculty and an administrator.

The anti-apartheid movement grew on campus throughout the late 1970s, and its momentum increased due to the work of the Southern African Solidarity Committee (SASC), an undergraduate organization formed in the fall of 1977.

“We tried to bring all sorts of demands and pressures on the Harvard Corporation...and we did for a while there raise the consciousness of the campus,” says Matthew M. E. Rothschild ’80, who was an active member of SASC during college.

The circulation of student and faculty petitions and a demonstration in the spring of 1978 were directed toward the goal of divestment from “stocks, corporations and banks that were doing business with the apartheid regime in South Africa,” according to Rothschild.

“The feeling all along was that Harvard administration was not stepping up to the moral plate on this and was refusing for reasons that were not cogent to do what a moral institution should do, which was to wash its hands of the grime of apartheid,” says Rothschild, who is now editor of The Progressive, a magazine that advocates peace and social justice in the United States.

The Corporation decided against divestment, setting off a 3,500-person march through Cambridge three days after a smaller demonstration.

However, the Corporation specified that the ACSR would perform a case-by-case review of the companies in Harvard’s stock portfolio, aimed at evaluating their dealings with South Africa and recommending whether Harvard should continue to invest in related companies.

“The chief function of the ACSR was to advise corporations on how to vote on proxies of the shares that Harvard owned,” says Detlev F. Vagts ’49, Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and ACSR chairman in 1979-80, referring to the various shareholder resolutions that were being proposed to influence corporations’ practices in South Africa.

The Corporation “didn’t grapple with these problems…[it] just decided whether a company was a good investment,” says Vagts.

Advertisement