For six years, Smith College Professor Eric Reeves has fought non-stop to draw the world’s attention towards atrocities committed by Sudan’s rulers. Even while undergoing chemotherapy for leukemia at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Reeves fielded calls from reporters on his cell phone, with tubes sticking into his veins.

Reeves’ one-man campaign against the Khartoum regime began in 1999, as a civil war ravaged the southern region of the African country.

As a Renaissance literature expert, Reeves might be an improbable figure to lead a broad-based human rights advocacy movement. And in recent months, Reeves has found even more unlikely allies in his quest: the three members of Harvard’s Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (CCSR).

New York attorney Conrad K. Harper ’62, glass company executive James R. Houghton ’58, and economist Robert D. Reischauer ’63 have the ultimate authority over the University’s divestiture decisions.

And on April 4, they made Harvard the first major institutional shareholder to alter its stock portfolio as a protest against the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

The University—which at one point held at least a $7.2 million stake in the oil company PetroChina—sold all of its shares in the Beijing-based firm, which is intimately linked to the Khartoum regime.

But two months later, Harvard’s divestment has had no discernible effect on PetroChina’s share price, says Morgan Stanley’s chief Asia/Pacific economist, Andy Xie.

“I didn’t even know Harvard had divested from PetroChina,” says Adrian Loh, a Singapore-based regional energy analyst for Merrill Lynch. “That’s new news to me.”

In the immediate wake of Harvard’s announcement, human rights activists may have overestimated the impact of the University’s divestment.

John Prendergast, the former African affairs director at the National Security Council, wrote in an e-mail in early April that Harvard’s move “will create a domino effect throughout the U.S.”

But the dominoes have yet to fall.

As of press time, no university endowment or state pension fund had publicly divested from a Sudan-related stock.

And Harvard still holds multimillion-dollar stakes in two oil firms that continue to conduct business with Khartoum.

“Clearly, the divestment movement has not taken off in the way we hoped it might,” says Matthew W. Mahan ’05, a co-founder of Senior Gift Plus, whose members had pledged to withhold their graduation donations from the Harvard College Fund until the University cut its ties with PetroChina.

“But the only appropriate response is to push harder,” Mahan says.